Thanksgiving Progress

I haven't done quite as much sewing this holiday weekend as I'd thought I might. My sister has been here for a week, and we like to spend as much time together as we can, while she's here. I did get the Nikko jacket together, facings understitched, and about half the topstitching done. The topstitching is extremely unhandy to do on this, as you really can't do it until you have the entire jacket together, and of course it would be much easier while it was still flat. One good thing about using the grass stitch rather than a straight stitch is that it's very easy, and quite undetectable to start and stop as necessary, even with the variegated thread.

I bought some glass buttons from the Czech Republic to use on the Nikko. They're hand made in molds that are around 100 years old, and the metal shanks are hand-placed before the glass cools. They look like carnival glass to me, and I tried to scan them, but they just look like blobs. They are very reflective; pink and green, but the pink really is beautiful with this fabric. I'm planning to use 2, with a tie of some sort to loop around them. I bought them at Sew Creative here. I know they're trying to post photos of them on their site, but I think they're having as much trouble as I did trying to photograph them. They hadn't given up though, so they may have them up at any time.

I also did some tricky mending this evening of a very fine-gauge machine knit skirt and top, also for my sister. They're a silk/rayon/nylon blend, and knit with a very interesting ribbed pattern. The skirt is quite long, and basically straight, except the top has much narrower ribbing, and more of it, than the bottom, where the ribs are quite widely spaced, and a little wider themselves. On this, the thread/yarn at the very bottom was failing in several spots. I think I did some fairly invisible darning, and I hope it will hold up for quite a while yet. The top is a more standard plain ribbed pattern, but perfect with the skirt rib graduation. It had just one place to fix. She leaves Tuesday, so I wanted to get them done, as the skirt especially is rather integral to her wardrobe. It's always a real problem when one of your major "foundation" pieces bites the dust. It throws all your clothing plans off the track, so I wanted to get them done before she went home.

The local Bernina store had a 25% off before 10am sale on Friday, so I went and bought some YLI silk thread. I've used Tire before, but there's no local dealer for it anymore, so thought I'd try the YLI before I order Tire from Things Japanese. Since taking the class from Linda Lee, I've become somewhat more convinced that sewing with silk thread is something I want to do more of.