A Problem of Fit

In the evenings, I’ve been sitting in the fading light, watching Bones on my computer and working on my sweater. Which will be done long before October, and therefore long before I can wear it. But I ran into a problem that might make it take longer than expected.

The Fit Part

I like this project, but remember how I said I was going to try to make this sweater more fitted?  Yeah, well, that part is testing my patience with making clothing.

Fit is the reason I don’t make clothing. It’s hard. It’s not easy to wrestle with your particular body type and its oddities. And the truth is that ready-made clothing is wonderful, but it leads to most people making do with a fit that is less than desirable. In my case, I discovered just how it is that I’m making up for the fact that most clothing is meant for women who are rather less generously endowed than I in the bust region.

So what really I meant by “making the sweater more fitted” was in reality my code for trying to give myself an adequate amount of bust room. The blue sweater that I made last year was great, mostly, but there wasn’t enough bust room, and it made for a weird fit. I wanted to fix that this time around.

I figured that I simply needed to add some stitches toward the top of the front.  I even added them in a clever manner that spaced them out.  I figured it was better to give myself extra room where, anatomically, I seem to need it most.  The red triangles are my increases from just under the bust to the top.

So far so good.  I held it up to myself and behold!  The edges came just to where they should!  It worked!

Then I pinned the front to the back and discovered a problem I had not expected. When I add room specially for the bust, it means the rest of the garment doesn’t have to try to make up for a lack of room.  It turns out I am not actually an extra large. I’m more like a medium.  I am just used to whatever extra fabric I have on the back of the shirts I buy making up for the fabric the manufacturer didn’t put on the front of the shirt. So when I made the back piece my “usual” (and wrong!) size it was just plain too wide.  I’ve got nearly three inches of room I don’t need.

But … how in the world do I do that without re-crocheting the whole thing?  Can I?  ::sigh::

I have decided, for the moment, to persevere with what I have.  I spent too much time crocheting the back to just frog it right now.  If it’s too awful, I will re-crochet the back, although the prospect does not delight me.  One thing I know, though, is that I will crochet my clothing projects differently in the future.

Done (well, almost)

All the stitching is done on the birch/aspen quilt now. And I have judged it finished. Except for the binding, of course, which I need to address soon. It’s really hard to show what this thing actually looks like in pictures. It never looks like it does in real life.

So in the final analysis, the way I made it is supposed to divide the piece’s aspects in two.  The applique and piecing depicts the objects within the scene (hills, the patches of flowers, sky, lake, 2 kinds of trees) and the embroidery depicts the movement of the scene - the breeze, the leaves twirling down, the motion of waves on the shore.

The problem with the last part, the binding, is that I don’t know what fabric to use. The front and back pieces were sample pieces, I don’t have any more. I’m pretty sure that using fabric from the trees is a bad idea, and even the other solid cottons probably won’t work well because the backing fabric is a looser and thicker weave than the cotton. I think it would come out all wrong.  This is one of those times where I wonder where my forethought was, but that’s kind of the problem with this work.  It’s intended to be spontaneous, to foster that sort of creativity, and indeed if it weren’t I wouldn’t bother.  But then I run into a problem like this binding thing.

That’s the sky embroidery, it’s supposed to be a lazy breeze.

Anyway, if any of you have ideas about what will look appropriate, tell me!  I’m up for all sorts of suggestions.  I will make some sort of decision within the week. All that’s left really is to iron it, and bind it off, and add a hanging strip. And that will be that!  Seems funny the end is so near, after working on it off an on over these last months.

The final look of the waves on the shore of the lake. You did know that was a lake below the hill of trees?

I have two more quilting projects in the works when this is done. One is a jacket and the other one is based on a fairy tale.  The former is pretty planned out, the second is in its initial sketch details.  Meanwhile, I’ll leave you with a couple of photos of the crochet jewelry piece I’m experimenting on. It’s made of three colors of thread and the base is sport-weight yarn. It makes nifty shapes. It also takes forever to do this and is fairly hard on the fingers.  But no matter.  It’s definitely interesting.

Quilt Update, Other Stuff

My quilt is proceeding well.  I’m now quilting the water in semi-circles below the land, and when that’s done I’ll do a bit of sky - haven’t decided how exactly that’s going to look yet.  You can see a bit of the water in the picture below, and you can see the leaf stitch work I’ve been doing over the past few weeks.  Remember back whenever, when I said that the stitching I was planning would take just a week? I am completely full of nonsense about that.  Totally. I get maybe 2 hours a night at most to work on this, so getting things done fast is really unlikely.  I never estimate time correctly!

Stitching and a bit of cooking have been my salvation lately. This quilt is a sea of calm, a reminder of a place I once was that was beautiful and soothing, which I’ve needed.  So this “thing” - I’m normally pretty stoic and uncommunicative about things like “this,” but it’s not a state secret, and it’s affected my life quite a bit, like blogging less, and making my dream of backpacking pretty hard, and using so much sick time I can hardly take a vacation, that sort of thing. For the last several months I’ve been dealing with a medical issue that I flippantly refer to as “irritating” but when I’m feeling less flippant I refer to it as painful, scary, and gets in the way of life a whole heck of a lot. For months, since last summer, I was getting only small pieces of what was going on, and the problem continued while I saw doctors, and had uncomfortable and anxiety-provoking tests for things like seizure and stroke and blood pressure.

So I worry, but what can I do?  Well, I have finally gotten a clue - narrowed down the doctors to a headache neurologist, who  thinks basilar migraine is the culprit, a less common type with a peculiar, worrisome aura, one that that results from problems with reduced blood flow to the brain stem. It’s not fun. It lasts too long a lot of the time, and it has scared me half to death sometimes. I get dizzy and faint, my eyesight goes funny, I can’t speak well and get confused, and I get clumsy. And indeed, if untreated or treated wrong, those stroke-like symptoms can become stroke. Plus, it can’t use many of the typical treatments. And so there I was today, listening to this, and then getting an injection in my head, and I’m thinking, what in the world is going on with me?

This is treatable, it is. It’s not quick, but it’s possible. I’m feeling scared right now, as I start treatment that’s more specifically directed toward this, and I’m tired because naturally there will be more tests involving needles and claustrophobia.  Ironically, this is when I need my sewing needle and crochet hook and my cooking spoons more than usual, at least these are things I can create and have some control over, soothing things I can do when I need to think, or when I just want to watch TV and zone out, or just something else to concentrate on when my head doesn’t feel like it’s on straight.  Everyone has their own things that they do; this is mine. This is what I do when it feels bad, or I just need to unwind.

Thanks for bearing with me. It’s not my usual thing to share, but if I can’t talk about it here, where can I talk about it? I hope in the next few months I can find some peace from getting 2 or 3 or 4 headaches a week, some more permanent resolution, some sort of break from feeling like this, and get back to feeling more like typical energetic and overly creative self. It’s taken a fair piece of that away since last July.

I hope all of you in blog land have places to share what you’re going through. I’ve found a good bit of comfort in reading others’ struggles - not that they’re struggling, I wish they weren’t, but that I’m not the only one who goes through things that disrupt their life like this even though they have to keep getting up and doing what they do every day. I feel weird, having problems that don’t go away; most days it’s fine, but some days like today, it’s just a little harder to wrap myself around.

Ta for now, M