You did ask...

Thank you for all your lovely compliments on my latest projects.  Like about 100% of bloggers, The Sewing Lawyer loves comments, so keep them coming!

DIGS slyly asked me how my dress is coming along.  Well, as you can probably guess, my dress is still in flat folds on my sewing table!  However, I've been doing some mental sewing which is all part of the project prep, don't you agree?  

In this case, part of the mental prep is coming to terms with the fact that if the evidence is confronted, by the time I can finish the dress, the just-finished bouclé jacket will be far too heavy to actually wear with it.  So I dug into stash to see if I had a lighter-weight jackety fabric to go with the turquoise wool crepe, and I do.  Surprise!   It's a nubbly, multicolour raw silk tweed.  Not only that, the china silk fabric I had earmarked for lining the bodice of the dress looks kind of nice with the tweed.  So the dress could be next in the sewing line-up.  I'll let you know. 

But in the meantime I started another pair of socks, toe up this time.  One down, one to go.  

Ahem.  I'll take another sewing question.  In response to the post about ripping out sleeves and matching plaid, Lena Merrin asked: "Just curious, your sleeve still has ease even though the fabric stripes are matching, right?"   I suspect you asked because of Kathleen Fasanella's famous post, Sleeve Cap Ease is Bogus.  It's a very thought provoking article but you can match the plaid in a sleeve cap to the jacket body, front and back, even if the sleeve cap seam line is longer than the seam line of the armscye (i.e. even if there is some ease in the sleeve cap).  My jacket is the living proof, but here's my take on the geometry.

This is a quick and dirty draft from PMB with some pretend plaid drawn on top.  The program drafted a total of 2cm of ease in the front of the sleeve cap.  Because the armscye seam is more vertical than the sleeve cap seams, the distance between the plaid lines where they hit the seam line on the sleeve cap is greater than the distance between the same lines where they hit the seam line of the armscye.  When you ease in that extra distance the plaid lines can be made to match (more or less).

Clear as mud?