In Progress

Note: I can’t get the pictures to stay. I don’t know where they’re going, they just don’t feel like sticking around. Sorry.

I do believe it might finally be fall. I’m not certain, but I haven’t gotten in my car in the evening to find that it’s 106 F lately, so I’m very hopeful. I think that by November, I may be able to stay outdoors for extended periods of time without becoming extremely grumpy. We will see.  Meanwhile, I have been nuttering about some with the needles lately. I have exactly zero things done, but that’s because I can’t seem to stay on topic for longer than 3 nights in a row.

You already know about the dress-fitting difficulties I’ve been having.

After I figured out that off-the-rack sizes don’t match pattern sizes, I got a new pattern. A lot of pattern-fitting remains, however my new theory is that it’s easier to take away inches rather than try to add them. Do you know pattern sizes haven’t changed since the fifties? So when people say “Well, you can tell our standards of beauty and being thin have changed because Marilyn Monroe was a size 16,” (someone did say this to me) you can say, yeah, but then size 16 was a size 8 today. Which is true.

I picked out a lovely rust colored linen to make that dress out of, by the way, a linen which is poorly presented by this photo, but I can’t find my camera. The other is a floral that Jeff’s mom got me that I’m going to try out. I think I may have to make a slip dress for that one, and I imagine that will be a whole other kettle of fish to fry, if you’ll pardon the metaphor mixing.

The first thing crafty thing I tried to do while I was still not feeling like crafting was to attempt some simple jewelry. I made the earrings there to the left. Again, crappy picture, but I assure you the glass circles are quite pretty. I just added ear wires and jump rings to attach everything.

I will say that correct tools are a prerequisite of jewelry-making, because I think that my single pair of needle-nose pliers and my fingers did a very poor job of trying to negotiate those jump rings. They flew all over the place before I was done, just POP! and they flew off the pliers and into neverland.

The next photo is of a necklace I made.  It is constructed of a piece of purple floral silk I had, a kimono remnant. I sewed it into a long length and then did some research on chinese knotting. This necklace is a comprised of three knots. I’m still adjusting the necklace length.  They are simple knots, but interesting. I was fascinated by the intricacy of the knots I read about.

As you may have guessed, the earrings go with the necklace, and they do match. The pictures are just bad.

This deliberately unclear picture on the left is of something someone asked me to make for them. I did that, and then I decided I’d go ahead and make a couple more things, just because I can. It’s  a surprise, so that’s all I can say about it.

I couldn’t find a pattern I liked for one of the things I’m making, though, so I’m making up a pattern as I go along. I’m on the third try, and this one’s the charm. I predict it will be quite cute when it’s done.

Last but not least is another crazy project I’m constructing from scraps of kimono silk. It’s actually a quilted decoration for a jacket, but I’d have to show you what I’m doing for it to make more sense than that.

When I’d just started the project, I took this picture here because I was amused that I’d turned all the scraps into banners. I just keep sewing between the different pieces instead of tying off, cutting and starting again each time, so at the end of a round of strip cutting you get this. I ended up with about 15 feet of the quilting piece before I was done sewing all the scraps I’d made together.

I will say one thing about silk: it’s enormously strong.  There are two particular pieces out of the ones you see that my sewing needle actually just didn’t want to sew through. It was just this thin piece of fabric, yet it sounded as if I were sewing through 3 layers of denim! Many kinds of silk aren’t woven, but are actually felted, so I suppose that’s why it’s so hard to sew through.

So THAT is what I’ve been up to. I’m hoping I can soon concentrate well enough to get a couple of these things actually finished!

I Have Sized You Up

I have had a dress pattern hanging on my wall for some time. I got the pattern as a result of shopping despair, because I don’t fit into almost any off-the-rack dress. I hoped I could learn to make myself dresses that would fit me properly, and be nice and comfortable. I got a simple pattern, a McCall’s A-line dress with no waist, cap sleeves and a bust dart. I chose one called a “one hour pattern” because I figured simple was better for a completely novice dressmaker.

I’ve made little progress on the pattern because of the clear difference between its measurements and proportions and mine.  I knew it would never fit me as is, and I wasn’t entirely sure what to do about it. Yesterday my mom and I spent time scratching our heads over it, trying to alter it to fit me. We made progress, but there’s a ways to go.  I think that one-hour pattern is going to turn into 15 hours before I get the alterations right.

It would be okay if I were just a little bit off-pattern, but I’m nowhere flipping near standard pattern measurements. I wear a 12 or 14 in misses’ off-the-rack clothing, which I now realize has little to do with pattern sizes. For those I appear to be an odd combination of measurements from pattern sizes 16 – 26. Not kidding. Is it just me? I really hope it’s not just me this happens to.

I found the size variation enormously problematic when I was trying to pick a pattern size. I’m outside the range of sizes they give you with a single pattern packet (for example, a pattern package might come with sizes 18 – 22). I picked a median number.

It was also hard to choose a pattern to begin with because of the ridiculously unlikely pictures and sketches that accompany them. The women are twigs! It leads me to believe that pattern manufacturers hope we are all bony, curve-less hangers on which to drape cunningly tailored fabric constructions that don’t allow for comfort or possibly even breathing. This is not an uncommon idea, as we all know so well from being bombarded with pictures of inappropriately clothed women in Cosmo while we’re innocently trying to escape with food at the grocery store.

The pattern measurements themselves, on the other hand, appear to me to reveal other terrible assumptions. I’m quite sure there are more assumptions not listed here, I am being snarky in a self-absorbed fashion about my own considerable pattern-fitting difficulties. I spent three hours trying to figure out how I could be a size Y compared with a size X, and I got a tad bit testy about it.

1. You’re a B cup. If not that, they hope you’re an A. Cleavage of any kind is clearly verboten.
2. D cups and larger don’t exist. If such a calamity occurs, it must mean that either you’re incredibly obese or you work in Hefner’s mansion, and those women don’t sew.
3. You’re smaller on top than on bottom. By 2-4 inches at least. Perhaps you’re pear-shaped?
4. Nope, clearly it’s not about being pear-shaped, because you also have a long, thin neck and wide shoulders. Congratulations, you’re a swan-quarterback hybrid! But in an elegant way.
5. You have a well-defined waist, but not small, preferably in the range of 28-34 inches, and it’s toned like an Olympic athlete’s. Except once you get below your waist you likely have a potbelly. Yeah, I don’t understand that one either.
6. Your butt and hips are pretty big. Probably your thighs, too. In fact, go ahead and assume these measurements are oddly exaggerated in proportion to your waist. Maybe it has to do with that potbelly you apparently have.
7. You are 5′6″ to 5′8″, maybe even 5′9″ (well above women’s average 5′4″ height) and are perfectly proportioned in length on top and bottom. Petite people, take note! Your selection of merchandise remains tiny.
8. You do not have curves. At least not ones that you’d notice casually. You should only create those sometimes, when they’re in fashion, with artful tailoring or a belt.
9. Did I mention that if your arms aren’t super skinny you may run into difficulties?
10. Last but not least, you are perfectly symmetrical and everything on both halves is exactly alike. None of us would ever be (gasp!) irregular, would we?

If you are this person, congratulations! You can wear anything you want. On the other hand, I will be doing a considerable amount of pattern-wrangling, because I am, in so many tiny, fiddly, irritating ways, the antithesis of this ideal pattern person.

Next step? The internet, for help. Next step after that? Muslin. I’m making a cheap test dress so I can figure out this dress alteration thingy, and how much I’m really going to have to do. Wish me luck, the patience of a saint, and an extra pattern so I can rip this one up when I’m too frustrated with it.

Rainbow Thread

About a week and a half ago I decided I really needed, somehow or other, to get back in the crafting groove. My energy has been elsewhere for almost two months, which is understandable. I wanted to find some way to get back to it, even if it wasn’t much, even if it didn’t make so much. So …

Yes indeed. I organized. That’s standard 6-strand embroidery floss. Wound neatly onto little plastic bobbins with all the kinks worked out and the really stubborn knots cut off. Stored in rainbow order in a nice little clear box like a box of sunshine and flowers. Guaranteed to make me happy just looking at it. I love rainbows and color, and I’m somewhat OCD, so lots of things get arranged by color in my house: my sewing thread, the clothing in my closet, Sharpie pens, notebooks, fabric stash, yarn stash. If there’s color and I’m nearby, it’s probably in rainbow shades.

Did I actually buy all of that floss? Nope. I’m not that crazy, I don’t embroider enough to use several miles of thread, and there wouldn’t be any pink there if it were up to me. The majority came from my inheritance of Jeff’s grandmother’s crafting supplies and is marked with an asterisk. I would describe her style of floss organization as “Giant Ball of Stringy Chaos.” There were a very few faded and “crunchy” specimens over thirty years old that weren’t salvageable, but most were fine. I rewound those and Jeff was patient enough to unknot the really nasty ones.

Oh, and any of you who embroider, you might be happy to know that your humble standard DMC embroidery floss will probably still be in good shape in 2040. Only the pink faded a bit.

I took pictures of it all because of how GLOWY and nice and shiny and ORDERLY and pretty these were. Where’s my next project?  ‘CAUSE I HAVE THREAD.