Dissection and reconstruction of a Charles Tyrwhitt grenadine

If you've ordered a CT grenadine recently, you may have noticed how much like a half-frozen sheet of puff pastry they resemble. Lightweight, with no drape whatsoever. Here's a little illustrated narrative demonstrating how to cut a CT grenadine's first life short, and give it a second life.


You see that lump in the middle of the blade? Like playdough.



At this point, having got the tie open, I realise why the tie's drape is so poor. The interlining is very lightweight, and half synthetic (the white warp that doesn't take the black dye). The silk itself is very scroopy compared to other grenadines that I have dissected, cleaned, and relined.



I could give the silk a bath in some sodium bicarbonate to get rid of some of the serecin, but I'd have to unpick and resew the tipping to avoid colours bleeding, which is a fair bit of work on a grenadine (and hard to do without snagging the reppe tipping). I'm also not confident of the quality of the silk - it could be very thin and light with the serecin removed. So instead, I opt to reline; new wool canvas, and bias lining to add some weight and a dark background (cross stitched at the tip to keep it in place while sewing the rest up).



Pin and sew closed.



The CT bartacks are also pretty clumsy looking, so I redo them in nice contrasting yellow-gold silk.



And voilà, much better drape. Shame about the sleeve length



Closeup (Click to show)

[URL=http://en.wikipedia.org%2Fwiki%2FSericin]http://en.wikipedia.org%2Fwiki%2FSericin[/URL]

Bartack is just a buttonhole stitch. The CT ones are the same, they just aren't taking the time to get a decent stitch density so the knots all line up nicely in a row. A bartack only takes three minutes or so anyway. I have another tie to do, so I'll post a photo showing the knot it a few days when I do it. Milanèses take far longer, and I do them in a manner similar to how jefferyd shows on his blog - unfortunately, that's one of the few things that went right with that jacket (and only half-right at that). Chris Despos provides a good critique in the tailors' fit thread.

Update with pictures of the other one I had to reline. This silk wasn't as nice when I got it off the interlining - very very scroopy, and no possibility of removing serecin because of the different coloured yarn in the weaving (black and navy warp/weft would look a bit "duller", and the white dots would become blue-grey dots). So I really wouldn't recommend buying any of the CT polka dots garza finas. Buttonhole stitch for bartack shown too.