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!