Scandal Challenge & TMS November - McCall's 6209

Welcome back! I've squeezed in the mini available corner of my dining room to actually make something! lol Can't wait to be done with all of our house renovations so I can have some space to sew! lol But enough about my #sewingroomwoes. 

Last month, PrettyGirlsSew decided that October would be The Scandal Challenge *shutter clicks* lol. You had to pick one of five categories to make a garment for.  "9-5 on Capital Hill", "Date Night with Jake", "Inaguration After Party", "Lunch date with the Gladiators" or "Stakeout with Huck". 

I chose "9-5 on Capitol Hill". Now that I think about it though, this look for many would be a "Lunch date with the Gladiators". But this is actually something that I'd wear to work on any given day. And I work in DC at a "good gubment job" lol

With coffee in hand and my badge around my neck, I can see Olivia walking into the White House about to go fuss at Cyrus about another person he's threatening to kill lol.

This is McCalls 6209 View A. I thought View A looked the most Olivia-Pope-ish lol

 So I'm posing for the pics and my CRAZY photographer is like "Work it! Work it!... "Work it like your about to go sleep with the President!"

ME:

loool But I want to shoutout my friend Alejandra! These pics came out great! :-*
She's in the DMV area so if you want her contact info, let me know :-)

I'm also counting this as my TMS Outerwear Challenge for November. Can we say "perfect timing"?

ANYWAY. So this fabric I bought from The Smuggler's Daughter with a gift card I won from a giveaway! Actually, this fabric cost more than what I won... but it was in the same cart. lol It is described as Espresso Coffee Wool. It was an end cut piece. I THINK it was 3.5 yards. I can't remember and it doesn't tell me on my confirmation email so, yea. It's VERY soft and the wrong side is black. AND the selvage has some type of black trim that wasn't on the pic on the website so it was a pleasant surprise when I got it in the mail!

While I was sewing this wool together, I noticed that the fabric had started to unravel straight up my arm a little next to the shoulder seam.  It basically ruined my night and I went to sleep. When I came back to it. I realized there was nothing really I could do besides putting some interfacing on the inside of it. But I knew that wasn't a guaranteed fix and that it would look ugly so I decided against it. I, instead, decided to go with the flow. I pulled on the string that started unraveling that line of wool all the way up to the neckline. It was actually kind of interesting looking and gave the cape a nice design element. It was looking kind of boring anyway... go figure smh.

After doing it on one side, I had to do it on the other but apparently all threads of this wool aren't created equal. I tried to clip and pull the thread just like I though it had started to unravel on the right side and it would not budge. I can't even tell you how I found one that would work, but I did. I started to pull all the way up to the neckline and it stopped about 80% of the way up. The rest of that particular line of thread was encased in the shoulder seam! I looked weird not being symmetrical so I ended up cutting the wool in a way that would make it match to an un-examining eye lol. I'm fine with it :-)

The pattern was super easy. It said "One-hour pattern" on the envelope BUT with the complications I was having, yea no lol.  Oh! The buttonholes for this pattern are huge! Well too big for MY machine anyway. I ended up just sewing the largest buttonhole possible for my machine and squeezing the ties through lol I have no idea how to manually sew a buttonhole.

I serged all of the long edges as well as the back facing. I did a 1" hem on the "sleeves" and used the selvage in place of a hem on the bottom edges. ... as you can see lol I really liked this pattern. I think the fabric made it more appealing as well.

This cape will be PERFECT for nights where I don't want to carry a coat but it'd be too cold to walk from the car to an event without one lol It is VERY warm. I'm hoping it will be around for a long time :-)

Let me know what you think!! and enjoy the rest of these pics that my friend took. She had to take some photos for her photography class and I got to reap the benefits ;-)

xoxo, Tasha