Admiral Daala flighsuit

When I had the pattern I cut it out in my fabric. It's an olive green stretch twill. After I had cut it out I started to work on the piping. I had bought an olive green piping, but it was too light, so I put it in a teabath to see if I could darken it. Not much happened, but then on a whim I decided to test a scrap of my flightsuit fabric in the teabath, and it did change colour. Not much but it definitely added a darker tone and took away some of the green sheen of the fabric. Even if it's not good to do something like that after you have cut out the pieces I threw them in a giant teabath anyway. It did fray the edges and probably distort the pieces a bit, but it was worth it for the colour change. 

As for the piping. Well that was a failure. I put the olive green piping in a brown dye bath, and I got a perfect dark olive green, but it totally destroyed the edges of the piping. I've never seen anything fray that bad. I tried to save it by sewing several rows of zigzag- stitches on what was left, but in the end I simply didn't have any edge that I could sew on. Well then I decided to do the same thing, but with an olive green bias tape that I had bought from the same store. Unlike the piping the bias tape must have been polyester though, because it hardly took the dye at all. After that it was just to throw out around 30 m of piping and bias tape and I decided to go for black piping instead.

This was the first time I worked with piping, and except for the lines over the clavicles it was fairly easy to sew it on, by sandwiching it between the piping and then using my zipper foot so that I could get really close to the cord of the piping.

The clavicle pattern was a bit of a night mare though.

I just couldn't get it symmetric. After I had sewn it and ripped up one of the sides three times I decided to sew it on by hand. By doing that I could simply shape the piping where I wanted it to be, and then I sewed the fabric to the shape of the piping, instead of letting the fabric decide where it should go. I couldn't get it totally symmetrical, but at least it was better. This is one point where I think that the pieces had been a bit distorted by the dye bath so that the left and right sides weren't totally alike.

This is the main part of the flightsuit. I now need to add the sleeves, the collar and the pockets. The inseam is pinned together so that I will be able to add the pockets before sewing it all together.

One thing I'm really happy with is my silhouette. I have a stomach sticking out in one direction, and then my butt is a bit lower, this easily makes me look even bigger when wearing tight clothes. For the flightsuit I made sure that tehre was extra fabric uner the biggest part of my stomach, so that the fabric continued straight down instead of following the body. It might seem a bit contradictory, but by making the waist-hip area bigger it actually looks slimmer.