Goals for 2014 and a skirt from 1999

Poor blog, left to languish all through November and December. I have in fact been sewing, just not posting. There are a few things to show once I manage a photo session or two. In the meantime, I've been thinking about my sewing goals for 2014.

Some of the goals are kind of general:

-Improve my technique. This is a perennial goal, and I am slowly improving, but I could work a little harder on this. How about zippers, invisible and otherwise? Why do they still make me nervous? If I just buckle down and do a whole bunch of them, surely they will lose their scary power. Welt pockets? I tried to follow instructions for them once and had a hard time -- but I've done a lot harder things in my life, time to try again.

-Sew more to my personal style. My usual scattershot approach -- what a great fabric, oooh this pattern looks interesting -- too often leads to a kind of mishmash of garments that can't be worn with anything else and don't even look like me. I'd like to be more thoughtful about making clothes that will fit well into my closet and that I will pull out to wear because they just feel right.

-But at the same time that I'm being more thoughtful about my choices, I'd like to sometimes have more fun sewing. Experiment more, let loose, try lots of things knowing that some of them won't work and not worrying about it too much. It's just fabric, and time. For example, I've had the Pattern Magic books for over a year now and haven't tried anything. What have I got to lose? It might be fun.

So all of the above are things I have worked on and will keep working on. But there are two areas in particular that I want to focus on this year, ones that I think are essential in order to improve my (sewing) life, not to be overly dramatic about it.

-Get more comfortable with blogging, which is to say, get more comfortable with taking and looking at photos of myself. I love the fact that there is this sewing community out there and I want to be a part of it. I am inspired and uplifted by the blog posts I read and the interactions I see. Aargh, why let silly self-consciousness get in the way?

-Learn how to fit my clothes better. I so often find that the fit of what I sew is off; my body is no longer the youthful, out-of-the-envelope shape that I like to think it once was. It's time to learn what needs to be done. Somehow this has stymied me, with all the different approaches out there. I have bought the Craftsy class Fast-Track Fitting with Joi Mahon and will start that soon. The book Fitting and Pattern Alteration is in my library; my first glances at it have left me with more questions than answers, but I will make a project of working through it this year. I would welcome some hands-on help, but I haven't found anything closer than Boston, and driving down there regularly will have to wait until winter ends.

In the meantime, to get some photos into this post, I've found some old pictures of an even older Burda skirt pattern I've made up twice. Yeah, it's from 1999. I loooooove this pattern. Here is my review of it from a few years ago. It has a nonbulky, no-waistband waist, and the O shape, as Burda calls it, works for me.






I may yet turn this into a TNT by making it up in some of the many skirt-suitable fabrics in my stash. The shape is even more outdated now than when I first made it, but by my reckoning it's due to come around again as a trend any time now. And then I'll be ahead of the game, right?

Fun things to do in the northeastern U.S.:
Quick, go see the exhibit Future Beauty: Avant-Garde Japanese Fashion before it closes on January 26. It's at the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, Mass. Really, it's very interesting, and much more extensive than I expected. No photography was allowed, sadly, so I can't show you anything here. Some of the clothes are just plain . . . weird. But some of them feel like epiphanies. The very best part is that there is a rack of clothes by various designers for museum visitors to try on.

Happy new year to all!