Challenges - The fun kind

 I have sewn a couple garments in the last month, both for Garment Designer software challenges.  The first one was the Ruffle Challenge. The challenge was to create a pattern in Garment Designer that used the Ruffle feature.  Garment Designer software will quickly create the pattern for a circular ruffle for a  hem length, to a user specified width and flare.  In my inspiration file, there were three versions of  garments that had a ruffle starting in a front yoke and spiraling down the sleeve. That was the pattern I chose to make.

I drafted the blouse  pattern in Garment Designer and manipulated the sleeve hem  to  be a diagonal seam from armhole to hem in order to generated the ruffle pattern of the correct length.  To keep the blouse from being too frou frou, I made it from a pink cotton chambray fabric.  It looks good with blue or white jeans. 

My blouse won the Challenge!  A small nominal prize, but it brightened my day. 

  The next challenge was the Creativity with Stripes Challenge,  I am ineligible to win any other challenges this year, but I can still participate.  I had a lot of  weird shaped scraps of black and white stripe cotton lycra fabric left over from the body suit I made back in Jan 2019.

  I threw half of them in an apple green  Rit Dye bath. I drafted a  basic T shirt pattern in Garment Designer (replicated a favorite Burda T Shirt)  and did some create piecing with the green and black stripe fabric.  My mother called the result a "shadow effect". 

 The back was looking a bit boring with black and white stripes and one green sleeve. So I pieced the  letters "Au", which  are the first two letters of my name and the Periodic Table abbreviation for gold, on the back.

 To wear with my rather different T shirt, I decided I  needed a different pair of pants. I collected up all the pants patterns I have with the  popular Art to Wear "lantern" shaped leg. Patterns like the Trio pants from Sewing Workshop, Vogue - both Sandra Betzina 1355 and Marcy Tilton 9035, and The Cutting Line - Discover Something Novel pants

From these patterns I chose the  Tilton Vogue 9035. Because it was the only one with a fitted waist. All the other patterns had elastic waists.  

Gathered fabric filling in what little waist indentation I have makes me look block shaped. I avoid gathered waist garments. Of course I didn't think it through and realize that a fitted waist meant basting and fitting and resewing. Sigh. Not a fast sew, but  it did result in a a cute pair of pants. Fabric is machine washed, lightweight, wool gabardine that has been topstitched using beige thread.