Still alive, still kicking

I got quite the surprise yesterday to receive not one but two queries about my blog absence. Fancy that! People read my blog!

A whole kaleidoscope of events have got between me and my sewing machine and me and the computer. It's pretty simple, actually, time and energy - never enough of either. Oh and a difficult project that I am a little lost in.

I am working on the Ottobre sheath dress from the 05/2012 - appropriately named "old school teacher" dress. You have got to hand it to Ottobre, they know their market well.

It relies on perfect fit to achieve any kind of class. The plan was to make a quick test garment and adjust only I got stymied by my fabric which turned out not to be a "Nick dog" (that's what Nick calls the worst of the detritus in his shop) but a Nick pure breed. Pure wool gabardine. Suddenly it had to be unpicked and resewn with respect. Gabardine is not the easiest fabric either - it's easy to under or over press. The dress oscillates between darts that hardy hold their crispness to steam puckers around the zip. Hardly any of the seams are 'just so.'

Still I persist and I hope my diligence shall be rewarded with a beautifully fitted sheath dress that looks more 'school mam chic' than 'old teacher.'

In the meantime, I have some more unpicking on it to do, so it won't be until well after Easter.

I did make a pair of corduroy trousers (Burda 7738). They are a little pajama like in their appearance and in their comfort level, so I feel very on trend. (am I the only person out there to mock the current fashion for night wear as day wear?)



I do also want to share with you some fabric purchases, which I hope you will enjoy. I went to Dunedin last week for a family celebration and popped into the Caroll St branch of the Presbyterian Support Services charity shop. They collect all fabric donated to them over the year and have a big sale one Saturday in June. They kindly let me browse out the back of the shop in storage those fabrics yet to be sent to the warehouse. I found these 4 lovely fabrics.



1 piece of NZ milled wool, complete with label for you to sew into your garment (how thoughtful), in Granny lavender
2 dress length pieces of wool crepe
1 piece of Irish tweed.

Aren't they lovely? The great thing about Dunedin is that vintage wool is perfectly preserved, not even a hint of moth damage. I never once growing up had to worry about weevils in my rice, moths in my cupboards or ants in my sugar. The cold climate sure has its advantages, even bugs like to eat their meals in comfort.

It started with a tooled leather bag

La Mia Boutique pattern number 733, 2011




Now you may be wondering why it occurred to me to start making cowgirl shirts. When I bought my tooled leather bag I did a google search to find out about their pedigree and discovered they were part of the western genre. Now tell me, my north American sewing friends, does it seem strange to you to see someone on the other side of the world in a temperate climate wearing a cowgirl shirt? Do I look ridiculous to you? I'm just curious.

The whole look:



The culprit:



At any rate, I love this look. It's so fun and so comfortable! My goodness me, why isn't the world in western shirts?

I am using "the complete photo guide to perfect fitting" to refine the fit. After making this shirt, I contoured the waist and hip in a little more, made a high round back alteration and narrowed the shoulder, raised the underarm curve on the side piece and raised the front neckline, so now I have to make it again to see the effects of those adjustments.

In the book she makes multiple muslins to get that perfect fit - I prefer to make wearable muslins because I need the sewing practice, I like to have something to show for my efforts and I can't bear to throw away fabric. I can see the sense of multiple muslins I just can't quite bring myself to do it.

svBev, please send me your address - my email address is in my profile and I'll send you the Jilly Jean - I can't wait to see how you tame it into fitting submission.

Kbenco, the La Mia Boutique was my "subscription of shame" - a whole year's worth of magazines and so far, only a few muslins to show for it...

Circles of completion.

Hello again, everyone. I am still sewing, but it must be fit around a myriad of other activities and so I work at a snail's pace.

Many thanks to all those who chipped in for advice about how to fix my jeans. The wedgie impression was so strong that when I took the jeans off to have a shower that night, I could still feel the abrasion lingering on my flesh. A ghost wedgie!

And indeed the solution was - as everyone said - to lower the back crotch length. Lower, not scoop.

My goal at the moment is to incorporate more "circles of completion" into my life. This is a concept that is used to de-stress the complexity of modern living. It's a very simple idea: finish what you start.

Here's a small example - when you get up in the morning, make your bed as soon as you leave it. When you have breakfast, rinse your plates and cups, put them away and wipe down the bench. In other words, every small activity has a completed cycle.

A completed sewing cycle might look like this. Choose pattern and fabric. Check Pattern Review to see how it looks on a real person. Revise plan or go ahead. Fit, sew a test garment. Wear. Adjust pattern. Sew again in final fabric. Tidy sewing room. Archive pattern. Blog about it. Write PR reveiw.

Now I have to confess that I exit many many times before that cycle of completion. My two main exits are after the test garment has been sewn and worn, and before writing a PR review. Thinking about it, I even sometimes exit before putting the pattern away and tidying the sewing room!

The main reason for my exit is that I get a new and exciting piece of fabric or sewing magazine and my focus shifts onto newer more exciting territory.

In order to complete the cycle with my jeans, I need to respond to some of the comments and share a little about what I learned.

Yes, the silver top stitching on the back was a mistake. I knew it as soon as I did it, but after unpicking those jeans twice I did not have the stamina to fix it!

The full lower abdomen adjustment can be found here. It adds width and length - room for the fabric to go up and over.

Yes anyone is welcome to use/adapt my back pocket design. I'm flattered you would consider it.

How jeans fit is a matter of taste and preference. I laughed out loud when I came across an article that said jeans should fit like bras and brows - lift and separate that butt! I shudder at the thought - living in a very humid climate, to wear jeans so close to the body would create all manner of hygiene issues.

I did come across a very interesting blog post on crotch shape. Basically the Jilly Jean has a "shallow C" - and what I need is a deep "j" or the "fish hook" - Burda fit me so well because of the deeper back crotch shape. That was good to learn. You will know the shallow "c" is wrong for you if you get diagonal drag lines pointing to the inseam. (think Elephant butt).

At any rate, no pattern company is ever going to produce a patten that fits me perfectly. I do not have an average body in any part - so I have no expectations that a pattern fit me out of the packet, although it's a nice fantasy.

At any rate, I would now like to bring the Jilly Jean pattern experiment to a close - I traced and altered my pieces on separate pieces of paper, so I have a complete unaltered pattern here if anyone would like it. It is a size 12. Hip 103 cms (40.6 inches) waist 80cms (31.5). I have to warn you that if you are bigger than those measurements it would be a lot of difficult work to make it fit. Also, it requires a reasonable amount of stretch in the denim 4% elastane or above - so if you are leary about your body in stretch denim this may not be the pattern for you. Leave a comment if you would like the pattern, and if more than one person shows an interest I'll do a draw. This pattern cost me $40 to import, so I'm happy to post anywhere - what's a few more bucks on top of that!

In the meantime, here I am mid cycle on my next project: I've finished my first test garment for La Mia Boutique pattern number 733, 2011, a cowboy shirt. It's looking very promising. I'm sorry to deprive you of weeds today, but it's raining outside.

Jilly Jean's not my lover

Have you ever taken on a project that has just felt dead in your hands? That's me and the Jilly Jean from Style Arc patterns. I made a muslin ages ago, but the fabric I choose was so unreliable it told me nothing (it kept stretching and stretching).

So I made it up in a better quality denim and made some tentative adjustments. I realised I had bought one, maybe two sizes too small. In case you don't know, Style Arc patterns are traced from a sloper, so you only get to choose one size. I based my choice on the hip measurement - but I should have used my waist, which is much the larger (comparatively) of the two.

I decided my initial adjustments had been all wrong, so I unpicked the jean (because I liked the denim) and resewed it, using the Style Arc original pattern. It looked even worse!

I threw them in the bin.

A day later, I pulled them out of the bin and unpicked them again, recutting them according a pair of jeans that fit me well. Then to make up for the lack of width, I attached a 2 cm "galloon" (as Burda charmingly calls them) to the side seams on the front.

The 2 cm galloon extends the whole of the front:



Much better, wearable in fact, but still, there's a wedgie: a whisper of denim that tries to sneak its way up into the crevasse.



I'm not above unpicking and redoing the back but I don't know what to do - let fabric out, take fabric in, scoop out more, scoop out less - pants fitting is such a nightmare.

Any suggestions very welcome, if no-one knows, I'll post on Pattern Review. Those ladies know everything.

The front, after a full lower abdomen adjustment (seriously that's the official label for 'big fat tum') top tucked in for your viewing pleasure:



I am happy with the back pockets though - this is a motif I'd like to explore more.



I like the shape of this leg, the pocket bags and the way the whole thing is drafted is such a pleasure to put together. I am not in love with the fit, but then, I bought the wrong size and my denim probably isn't stretchy enough to sew as drafted.

Let's call it a draw.

.. now in shiny.

Burda 10-2011-129, now in silk dupioni, the grandmother of silks.

This silk was for sale in Nick's - and it being cheap and silk I couldn't resist, even though I find silk dupioni tremendously difficult to use, it being so closely linked in my mind to mother-of-the-bride outfits. (especially this shade and fuchsia).



"When the student is ready, the teacher appears" so the expression goes. I was totally ready to take on the advice of the Collette sewing book which is to reduce your failure rate by working with a pattern that has proven to be successful for you and incrementally modifying it to produce a variety of garments.

This is contrary to my usual practice, which is to make a test garment, identify potential, and become distracted. This is the danger of having so much exposure to so much variety - without clarity of vision, and commitment to producing a cohesive look, it's really easy to rush on.

It's funny, that was something that was identified in my year 2 school reports - I've been doing it since I was 6!

It has taken a long time for this student to be ready.

For this variation, I added bows to the pockets. They are just lined strips with a band in the middle.




The band is constructed by zig zagging the raw edges together and then turning out.



I would like to try one more version of this skirt before retiring it. I have 2 goals for this year: to sew more of the same pattern (TNT's), and to sew more outfits (tops and bottoms specifically planned to go together.)

Although I sew things nicely, they don't always look that nice on me. At the moment, I suspect I look quite frumpy a lot of the time. Now there is something a little endearing about that aesthetic but I want to take it up a notch, so this year I'm aiming for "elegant frump."

..something a little more sedate

Well hello again! Off the starting blocks nice and early with this number from Burdastyle magazine (10-2011-119) hot off the ship in this little part of the world.




The fabric is vintage corduroy, and I'm afraid the lovely details are lost in the whirl and swirl of activity but there is a pocket and a lovely button in there, I swear:



But here's the technical view so you can see what you are missing:



Aren't those pockets just adorable? At any rate I realised early in that I would probably be more likely to wear this skirt with boots and tights for the other 8 months of the year when things are a little cool, so I popped in a lining.



For those of you who need to see the scale of the thing altogether, the fool nerdy monty:



and a little photo of our Hebe in bloom. I am a shocking gardener, neglect and death roam our garden unchecked, so it's nice to see something survive, even thrive.



What happened to the Pastille dress, you might be asking? Well I had bad dreams about it all night, living a 41 year old's life trapped with a 21 year old's life experience and maturity. I woke up relieved to be living the life I have, despite its big challenges. I then neatly folded the pattern and put it away, at peace with my "inner mutton," quite content to be wearing less nubile garb and looking the age I am.

Awards for 2011

Well people, I simply love roundup posts and so should you because you can get a year's worth of blog reading in a single viewing. Now that's economy.

So here they are, the awards for 2011.

The "this goes straight to the pool room" award for most sophisticated item goes to this Burda sheath in Zambesi fabric



The "we're going to the circus and here's your costume" flop of the year sewing award goes to this Simplicity coat:



The "life's a bitch and so is this to sew" award goes to the Amy Butler Weekender bag:



Visible panty line (VPL) took on a whole new meaning with these jeans from Burda, bringing us the "most interesting detail" award:



The "flog the working horse" award for most worn item goes to this Ottobre top:



Award for the least satisfying to sew but most enjoyable to wear goes to this Ottobre tee "shirt".



The "most expensive never sewn from subscription award" went to La Mia Boutique for 2 muslins in 12 issues:



The "you are only as old as your fabric" award for vintage sewing went to this number from Collette patterns:



Fabric score of the year could well have gone to these $1 a metre vintage finds from a deceased estate,



...but how can you beat free! Yes, Valerie gave me some beautiful Liberty tana lawn, simply because I wanted it. So, the "if only the rest of my life could be this easy" award goes to blogger Valerie for her generosity.

Best wishes to everyone for a satisfying sewing New Year.