Thwarted

I thought it would be fun to take part in a sew/craft-a-long this month and my eyes alighted on the one hosted by Africakelli and Finny Knits. Following the Craft zine blog the months task are to either making some lemon drop cookies and/or making a hoodie sweatshirt. I found the tutorial for the hoodie over at CraftStylish and thought "hmmm, a good project to try out on my overlocker". So with M in mind I bought some fleece from the local sewing shop*:
I drew up my pattern. I decided to make a paper pattern instead of cutting directly as indicated in the tutorials - who knows if this is successful I could make more! Or remake if M doesn't like the fabric or the fit needs adjusting slightly.

I even applied the pocket (using a twin needle on my regular sewing machine). The effect is okay but the rest of the sewing I wanted to acheive using my overlocker and the coverstitch function.
So, I then set up my overlocker with some black thread and to check the stitching used scrap fabric to check that I had everything set up right. I tried this lots of times and still came up with the same horrible effect:

Yuk! Despite checking and rechecking I couldn't stop the trimmed fleece bouncing back and that nasty loopy overhang on the edge of the seam. I managed fine with the baby fleece wrap top I made before Christmas - what was I doing wrong? Nothing. The only difference was that I used woolly nylon thread in the upper looper. So I tinkered about and found that it all sorted itself out:

Looks fine doesn't it? Well, yes, unfortunately thats the view from the lower looper side. The other side looks like this:

Bleurgh! Whilst the shortcut sprite is saying in my head "it doesn't matter if its baby blue" the perfectionist pixie is saying "it can only be done in black". I know I could just do the whole thing on my sewing machine but I feel it would be missing the point - this was meant to be an overlocker project. So I could just go back to the sewing shop and get some black woolly nylon thread. Well, yes, but I discovered I needed it at 6pm Saturday evening - after the shop has shut for the weekend. So I will be (im)patiently waiting for my order from Empress Mills to get to me and I am hoping that I can get this done before the end of the month. At the moment I am feeling a little thwarted, I will just have to put the overlocker away and fold the cut out project up (and have an iron will to get this finished - there are enough UFOs round here). Hmmmm UFOs maybe I could be getting on with one of those.....


*note the omission...