Alicia Makes...: Nicole's Modern Skinny Tie

Does anyone else want to sew something so badly (because as we all know, it's an addiction), but you feel really guilty about how much you spend on fabric and patterns for themselves, so you decide you want to make a nice gesture and create something for your husband, but then find men's patterns really limiting and so you decide to make him a tie even though he primarily works from home and doesn't need to wear them but you're going to encourage him to anyway even if that means watching baseball games on the couch at night in a shirt and shorts and a tie?

Yeah, me either. I was just asking, you know, for a friend.

When I, err, I mean, my friend... decided to sew a tie recently, I she was not impressed with the patterns available. So I -errr she--- ah, screw it - I turned to my friend Nicole, the owner of Finch Sewing Studio for help. At one point she had created a modern skinny tie pattern after not having success with others being too wide, short, or otherwise oddly shaped. I popped into the studio over the weekend to get started on the tie making process with this aviation printed fabric that I bought on Amazon. I bought it knowing that I wanted to make something for my husband (who works in the aviation industry doing big important things for the FAA and NASA), but unsure of what. He's very simple (not like, Forrest Gump simple, but you know. Not needy simple.), so I needed to make sure whatever I made for him was useful in some way. So I settled on a tie. Sometimes he has meetings in Washington, so I figured he could wear his awesome airplane tie to one for good luck and a little bit of whimsy. Because everyone needs a little whimsy in their lives, even men.

I traced Nicole's pattern onto my tracing paper and then cut the pieces out on the bias. From what I gather, cutting on the bias creates a more elastic (for lack of a better term) or stretchy piece, as opposed to laying a pattern out along the grainline. There's plenty of people who have explained this a lot better than I could, so just use the magic of Google to find out more if you're interested.

Once finished with all the cutting, Jon and I headed home from the studio and over the past few evenings, I followed the instructions in this Purl Bee tutorial to complete the construction of the tie. The part I kind of loved about this tie is that it is hand-sewn. I know that some of you are going to read that and have visions of grandmas and cross-stitch samplers, but I promise you that it's not as bad as it seems. I found it actually quite relaxing to sit on the couch at the end of a long day and do a little hand stitching. And really, it didn't take all that long to do. The entire tie came together pretty quickly: I think I spent about an hour tracing and cutting at Finch, and then stitching the pieces together, creating the lining, and pressing the edges took maybe another two hours on Monday night, and finally hand stitching the back center seam of the tie was about two episodes of It's Always Sunny on Netflix last night. This morning I asked him to grab a matching button up and toss it on so I could get photos of the tie. So no, he doesn't typically wear wrinkled shirts with shorts and a tie, in case you were wondering.

Given that our anniversary is tomorrow, I I consider this a small gift to Jon to celebrate three years of marriage. :)