Stashbusting: the olive crinkle top

Oops, the camera caught me cheating . . .

. . . trying to arrange the folds of the front pleat to hang just so, and maybe if I hold very, very still, I'll be able to get at least one photo in which this doesn't look like a maternity top.

Oh, okay, maybe not.

This is view B of Vogue 1412, a loose-fitting pullover top with some nice details.

It's all right, really, as this was one of my stashbusting exercises. I take a pattern that I think is unlikely to work well for me (no fault with the pattern usually, just not a good match for my body), and I use a fabric that I would like to see disappear from my stash. The pressure is off, and I most often learn something.

What I see here is that I could use a different fabric (I've been disenchanted with crinkle rayon since the first time I used it but already had this in my stash)—something more drapey, with some slip, that won't get hung up on whatever I'm wearing on the bottom. And, crucially, I could remove all that pleat business in the front and just make a center front seam below the buttoned section.




The back has some nice gathers where it meets the collar band.






















Another thing I learned was how to insert a little placket in the sleeve opening. But if you look closely at the first photo of this post you will see that I somehow got it backwards; the cuff should wrap the other way, but I couldn't make it happen because of how I put the placket in. That's okay: I get the idea and will get it right next time.

A couple of ideas on things to watch:

Seeing the movie Boyhood recently (which I liked a lot, by the way) reminded me of a very different but also longitudinally filmed series of documentary pieces that my husband and I watched obsessively some years ago. It made us laugh, it made us tear up, it made us squirm, and I still think about it surprisingly often. If you have not seen the Seven Up series, which follows the lives of a set of British children of various backgrounds over the years, do yourself a favor and take a look.

Also British and also really interesting: Whoa, have you seen Black Mirror? It’s like a Twilight Zone about where technology might take us, with a new story and different characters every episode. We’re watching it on Netflix. It is superbly done and absolutely addictive. But it’s dark, and when I say dark, I mean it. The first episode in particular could be difficult to stomach: I will just say that it goes where TV in the U.S. would never dare to go.

And an update on my mother-in-law’s cave house, for anyone who saw that note in my last post:

Danielle has had exactly one potential buyer show up to take a look at her home. And that was . . . Kat Von D. Not to namedrop, but I couldn’t resist telling about it. Apparently the tattooist liked it a lot, but she is looking at a number of properties in southern Spain, so we’ll see. We think it would be kind of hilarious if she buys it.

Wiping away the cobwebs

. . . from the blog, that is. I'm still here, still sewing, and still aspiring to be a participating member of the wonderful online sewing community. I see that I took a long break from October to January last year as well, which makes me wonder a bit. Seasonal inertia?


Anyway, we had some snow yesterday.

(A potting table and a barbecue grill lurk somewhere deep beneath those humps.)

It looks impressive, but the truth is that the very cold temperatures made the snow so dry and light that it was not a disruptive storm here in seacoast New Hampshire. No trees or branches down, minimal power outages—just find a place to put all that snow and you're back in business.

So, in late fall I made a blouse and skirt that I am happy with.

The blouse is my second version of Vogue 8535, which has unusually shaped pieces that are quite gratifying to put together. Look at the line drawings, not the odd renderings on the front of the pattern package, to get the idea. Those curved seams along the bottom of the sleeves are even more extreme than in the line drawings, though, and had to be trimmed back.

My first version of this blouse is unblogged, but I did post a pattern review, and this photo featured in Me Made May last year.

The new version is in a scrumptiously soft black wool-and-Tencel blend from B&J Fabrics. The black doesn't show the details well in my photos, but I think this blouse is a good use of the fabric and will go with, um, pretty much everything I have that can be worn with a blouse.

The skirt is (another) Vogue 1247, but with something like 10 inches added to the length(!). As detailed in this post, I had to make a few changes to the skirt after I thought it was done, because of the thick, stretchy fabric I used, but eventually I got what I wanted.

Oh, I have been away too long! I can't wait to take a look at what all my many favorite bloggers have been doing . . .

A couple of notes today:

Internet: Check out scoutingny.com. This blog is a real treat for anyone who loves New York City half as much as I do.

Some family real estate for sale: My remarkable mother-in-law (or belle-mère, as she prefers, for obvious reasons), Danielle, wants to move on from her cave home in an isolated but beautiful part of Spain. A reporter from the International New York Times (formerly the International Herald Tribune) contacted her, wanting to do a feature on her home. She never asked how they found out about her, because that's just how she is. I wish they had included more photos of her really very beautiful and unusual home, but here's the piece.

Backlog and hop blog

Hmmm, it has been a while. I can't show my latest project because my progress on it is going in a negative direction. Literally. The waistband has come off, pockets have been taken apart, and I'm considering redoing the bottom of the invisible zipper to get rid of that nasty bump. Sooo . . . it's not the finished object I briefly thought it was.

But wait: Let's look a little deeper in the closet, where some unblogged pieces still lurk, for a weather-appropriate outfit that I can show. The top is Vogue 8248, a Very Easy pattern. I did post a review on Pattern Review quite a while ago. Doesn't it look like the exact same shirt as the one I'm wearing today? It's not. The fabric I used for that first version was too stiff, so I remade the top in a nice soft wool that happened to be the very same shade of deep red.

The skirt is Simplicity 9825, a set of slim and A-line skirts with yoke and front center seam. Below you can almost see, behind the unexpectedly well defined tree shadows and in front of the disaster that is our yard at this time of year, the pocket flaps that I lifted from Version B for my A-line skirt. They are fake. No actual pockets here. Not only did I choose this version of the skirt my own personal self, but I also substituted some pieces of black twill tape I had lying around for the suggested (and somewhat classier) leather strips. Fortunately, all the tops I would wear with this skirt are long enough to cover up my cheap trick.

Sue of Fadanista has kindly invited me to join the blog hop. I very much enjoy seeing Sue's elegant and oh-so-wearable makes, reading her posts that are full of insight and touches of humor, and getting to make virtual visits to other parts of the world through her photo-filled travelogues. I'm flattered that she has passed the baton to me.

Why do you write?

Honestly, I started to feel strange about how often I was lurking on other people's sewing blogs without actually interacting with them. I'm sure I could have commented bloglessly, but I somehow felt that having a blog would give me a more legitimate base from which to engage with other sewists. As in "I, too, spend some time trying to make clothing. May I be part of this community?" Looking back, this seems an awfully humble motivation, but I am an introvert who verges on downright social awkwardness, and my humble blog has been working well for me.

Of course, my posts also give me a way to keep track of what I'm sewing, reflect on which of my makes work for me and which don't, and figure out where to go next.

How is your blog different from others of the same genre?

I don't think my blog has any unusual features (except maybe that my posts are so few and far between). My usual format is quite basic: make a piece of clothing, take photos of it, and think of something to say about it. I do try to add one or two notes at the end of each post about something not related to sewing that interests me. This might be a museum exhibit I've seen, something I've cooked recently, or just an animal that has turned up in our yard here in the woods of New Hampshire.

What are you working on now?

The project mentioned above that's not going so smoothly is a midi version of Vogue 1247. I've made this skirt up before, as have many others, and aside from being excruciatingly short, my first version fit and looked pretty great, I thought. I did wonder whether adding an extra ten inches to bring the skirt well below my knees would look wrong, but I think that part works. My fabric, though--an otherwise lovely stretch wool tweed in a soft brick color from Gorgeous Fabrics--does pose a couple of problems. The extra length of the skirt combined with the stretch and the springy thickness of the fabric results in a saggy-baggy look that is not at all what I had envisioned. I'm taking it in all over the place, replacing the pocket facings with a thinner fabric, and adding a lining.

What is your writing process?

The photo taking is the hardest part of blogging for me, so once that's done I don't agonize too much over the writing. This is not to say that sparkling text comes flowing out with no effort(!) but rather that I'm content with cataloguing what I've made, describing any particular problems or insight I had, and throwing in anything else that seems appropriate.


I'd like to see how Maggie of Stitch-n-Thyme would answer these questions, so I invite her to join the blog hop. Maggie happens to live right down the road from me (in U.S. terms, anyway), and I appreciate her vintage/classic aesthetic.

The other person I'd like to invite to continue the blog hop is Cecili of Sewing and so on. Far from just down the road, she lives pretty much on the opposite side of the planet from me. I enjoy following Cecili's quirky, youthful, tropics-friendly makes.



Yet another note on food:

Are these not adorable? I should have put something in the picture for scale. The man I buy eggs from also sells these little quail eggs, and I finally caved and bought some. A big part of their charm for me is the spotted shells, so I just boiled them for us to peel at the table and eat with flavored salt.

Stashbusting: the blue ponte pants

Sometimes I get carried away and buy a length of fabric that I later realize is not what I had hoped. (Am I alone in this?) So it was with two yards of blue ponte knit, poly/rayon blend, bought from Fabric Mart almost three years ago. I had received a swatch in the mail, so I knew exactly how very blue it was, and how poly-blend looking, and yet I tumbled. Why? I cannot answer that question.

The best I could do was to decide finally to get that fabric out from clogging up my stash by making it into something. Using a fabric I do not appreciate, with a pattern that I suspect is not going to be ideal for me, may sound like a thoroughly unrewarding enterprise, and yet there is something about moving that fabric through the pipeline and trying out that unpromising pattern that pleases me and makes me feel more free to move forward with projects I do have high hopes for.

From now on, projects of this type (yeah, this is not the only one) will carry the label "stashbusting."

The pattern is Vogue 8712, Marcy Tilton pants, view C. Nothing wrong with the pattern––it's just something that might look better on a svelter person than I am. On me these pants look a little, um, wide.

This photo shows the color of the fabric better than the ones above, and in fact it's more what the pants look like in real life:

You may be wondering: Must I keep my hands in my pockets at all times while wearing these pants? Why, yes! Yes, I must. I used the remnants of a woven fabric that I had on hand for the contrast pockets, waist facing, fly, etc., just because it was the exact same shade of blue, and it made the edges of the pockets stand out a bit from my hips. Which I can disguise by jamming my hands in my pockets.

This pattern has a fly front, which does not seem strictly necessary with knit fabric, but I went ahead and included it for the practice. It came out just fine. However, I don't get how the waist facing is supposed to interact with the zipper. A couple of reviewers on Pattern Review had mentioned this, but I didn't quite know what they were referring to until I got there. As the instructions are written, the facing would fold down over the top of the zipper. I got around it by folding the facing at an angle above the zipper top, and then using a combination of topstitching and hand slipstitching to keep everything in place. Here's how it looks on the wrong side:

Rear view:

A note on something to do in the northeastern U.S.:

Last weekend after picking our son up from a robotics engineering camp in Connecticut, we made a spontaneous visit to Mystic Seaport. To be honest, I wasn't expecting much: rainy day, tired from driving, have seen other reenactment sites, blah blah. But it was great. If you have any interest in boats, seafaring, New England life in the olden days, go and visit. Don't miss the forge or the printer's shop.

Liebster and a little roundup

Back from Japan, and we had such a good time.

While we were gone, Nancy D, of Sewing in Surf City, very kindly nominated me for a Liebster award.

Thank you, Nancy! I grew up outside of Salinas, California, not too far from Nancy’s town of Santa Cruz, which my friends and I sometimes used to visit for a fun countercultural experience back in the day.

Nancy set a few questions for her nominees:

Do you have a current challenge you are hoping to master to improve your sewing?

Fitting. The method I use now, if it can be called that, is to make a muslin and then haphazardly tweak here and there, without really knowing what I’m doing, until the fit seems acceptable. I know there are systematic and effective ways of accomplishing good fit, but I have not yet managed to tap into any of these. My library includes Fitting and Pattern Alteration by Liechty and Pottberg, Pattern Fitting with Confidence by Nancy Zieman, and other fitting books, and I have considered getting Kenneth King’s DVD set on fitting. But somehow I get lost amidst what seems like a lot of confusing or even contradictory information. What I think I need to do is choose a class or book and commit to working through it. I’d love to hear what has worked for other people.

What is your motivation for sewing?

I love the doing part of sewing. Sometimes I get hung up in the planning stage (overthinking my pattern and fabric choices) and sometimes I don’t quite reach the wearing stage (many of the garments I’ve made hang in the closet—I’m happy to see them there but I don’t pull them out and put them on). But I always enjoy the craft of sewing itself: handling the fabric, cutting, stitching, pressing, handsewing . . .

What do you like to sew best?

Mostly tops, skirts, and dresses. I enjoy making patterns that include a little something different—maybe an unusual shape or construction technique.

Do you have a favorite pattern company?

I have had some good successes with patterns from Burda magazine. Vogue patterns work well for me, too, provided I take their large amount of ease into account. I especially like some of Vogue’s designer patterns for their interesting and unusual construction and techniques (Ralph Rucci!). I've made a couple of patterns from the Japanese pattern book Shape Shape by Natsuno Hiraiwa, and I look forward to trying more.

Do you have a favorite sewing trick that you think everyone should know?

Well, this is more of a general approach than a trick, and I suspect that everyone else already knows this, but it took me a while to discover. I used to think that getting better at sewing would mean I'd sew more quickly and with less effort, but it’s just the opposite. For example, hemming is usually a multi-step process now: put in two rows of machine basting, fold and press along those rows of basting, baste a third time to hold in place, topstitch or hem by hand, remove all basting. It takes longer than what I used to do—press folds in, stitch—but the result is so much better.

Me-Made-May 2014 is on! I only have two days’ worth on the Flickr page (my pledge was to wear something I’ve made five days a week, and we just started on Thursday), but I’m still going to do a mini roundup and evaluation.

Top, Vogue 8535: More wearable than I thought. I just finally posted a pattern review of this.

Dress, Burda special issue from 2000: The fit is not bad, but the length is off. I could shorten it, but there are five topstitched overlapped vents around the bottom hem and it would be a lot of work, for a dress that I probably still wouldn’t wear much. (The theme this day was cocktail hour.)

A black dress for spring

But first, let's get the obligatory winter photo out of the way, shall we.

I'm just grateful that, during this winter when my husband has connived to work long hours during practically every snowstorm, our son is old enough to handle the tractor himself and clear that snow. Our driveway is very long, and with luck I won't be out there again until said son leaves for college.

Spring will come eventually and I plan to be ready for it. The cozy, warm fabrics in my stash will just have to wait until next year at this point, because I've gotten wise to how it works: sewing the way I sew (slowly) for how I feel right now (cold) will only lead to poor sartorial timing.





However . . . this warm-weather dress was so quick and easy that it is done way ahead of time. Which is as it should be, since it's Very Easy Vogue 8985. I have somehow lost track of the envelope, but here's a link to the Vogue website. I see from the pattern stats on Pattern Review that this is not one of the more popular of the recent Vogue releases, but I had to get it because version B, the dress with sleeve bands, reminds me of a favorite navy silk dress I used to wear in the 1980s. Hmmm, perhaps that is where the problem lies . . .


The instructions are full of little mistakes. No mention of buttons in the list of notions, reference to nonexistent notches, steps like "Press under 5/8 inch on unnotched edge of sleeve band. Trim pressed edge to 5/8 inch." Not at all a big deal, but it seems a little sloppy. Do they want to hire me to proofread for them?

The pattern comes in sizes XS to XXL. I used the bodice length of the medium size but cut a small everywhere else, and there is clearly still plenty of room in there. If I make this again some day, I'll taper in at the waist for more definition. I thought it would work because the elastic is up around the ribcage, which happens to be my smallest part, but I'm afraid this dress does have some of that dreaded pillow-with-a-string-tied-around-the-middle look. I still like it well enough.

Oh, wait, that's a little low for bending over. I'll be right back.

Here's a grainy photo that shows the details better. It does have pockets! I forgot to put my hands in them for the photos.









In two days I'm off to Seattle and then California to help my mother celebrate a significant birthday. My next photos should be from foggy but lovely Monterey Bay.

Onward and upward

A friend asked me this morning how my sewing was going. And I heard myself answering with words like "horrible" and "fail." Luckily for me, putting it into words, especially to this sympathetic and upbeat friend who sees the humor in many things, gave me exactly what I needed: a reminder to just get out of my own way already.

What I had found so dispiriting was a run of false starts and poor fabric and pattern choices, but on reevaluation no harm was done and in fact I learned a few things.

First up, a slip dress that was intended to kill two birds with one stone. One of the birds was Vogue 1287: I bought it for the dress but decided that its pleats and loads of fabric were not likely to be flattering on me. Slight pang over having bought a pattern that wouldn't be used. But wait, wouldn't the included slip make a nice little dress for the boudoir? The second bird was some beautiful and beloved georgette in my stash that I was having trouble visualizing as a garment; it's the middle one here.

Unfortunately, working with this georgette on the bias turned out to be beyond me. Even after experimenting with settings and presser feet, redoing seams, etc., I still had wonky side seams and spaghetti straps that went thick-thin-thick-thin. No picture of this one. The good news is that the slip fits and flatters, or, you know, it will when I make it up in a fabric I can handle.




Next, the lovely draped-neck dress that is Vogue 1351. I made this in a blue cotton jersey, leaving out the zipper and cutting it a bit longer. It was a pleasure to make, I like the fabric, the size is right (12 at the bodice grading to 14 at the hip), but . . . it just does not look good on me. Really. I have noticed this before about draped and cowl necks on me, as much as I like them in theory and on other people. Lesson learned. Or relearned.

There have been a few other issues with makes that didn't get as far as these two, and a missing invisible zipper foot, and so forth, but you get the idea. I was starting to lose confidence in my ability to make a garment I can live with.

Is all this as dire as I thought? Far from it! I'm getting to handle fabric . . . having fun reading other people's blogs and tutorials . . . trying things out, learning as I go . . . above all, I'm lucky enough to have the time and leisure to sew. Now that some beautiful autumn days and a chat with a friend have restored my perspective, I am off, with renewed energy and optimism.

Cooking note: If you're interested in home-style Chinese cooking (i.e., not the elaborate banquet dishes and not what passes for Chinese food in too many restaurants, at least in my part of the U.S.), take a look at Fuchsia Dunlop's Every Grain of Rice: Simple Chinese Home Cooking. We have been eating some very good dinners around here. You do need a Chinese grocery for some of the ingredients, but above is an example of the very useful pages that help you find what you want once you get there.

Vogue 1310: So this is what they mean

. . . when they say working with silk charmeuse can be a challenge. It was tricky to cut out, and sewing a decent seam took total concentration. Most of all, though, as the judges love to point out on Project Runway, charmeuse highlights every imperfection in the final garment.

This is the top from Vogue 1310, a Chado Ralph Rucci design. The minimalist simplicity (or apparent simplicity anyway!) of this top pushed all my buttons.

A note on the fabric requirement: When I went fabric shopping in NYC a couple of weeks ago, my list said that this top needed 2 1/4 yards of 60" fabric, and I felt certain I had noted it down wrong. For a simple sleeveless top? I bought 2 yards of 45" fabric. Of course, it turns out that the top is cut on the bias and self-lined, and it does take that much fabric. I wanted to keep the self-lining, so I experimented and found that shortening the top by 2 inches made it so I could fit everything on the fabric I had. The shorter length seems fine in the finished top. The hem does flare out a little more than I would like, but I suspect this is from my inexperience with charmeuse and with fabric cut on the bias, so that I unintentionally stretched the fabric while hemming it. Here it is untucked:

Sewing on this fabric was especially difficult because the bottom of my presser foot looks like this:
Can you see that pieces of the finish have peeled off? No, no, no. Not the way to sew with charmeuse. I pushed on through, so to speak, but I also finally ordered a new #1 foot, along with an invisible zipper foot, which was not easy to find for my old-style mechanical Bernina.



Considering that the pattern has only two main pieces (plus two for interfacing), this top was surprisingly labor intensive. Basting sew-in interfacing (silk organza) in place, basting twill tape to the neckline and armhole edges to stabilize them, understitching the lining by hand, and basting the hems of the shell and lining, all on this very slippery fabric, meant that I spent more time than expected with needle and thread in hand. I actually like hand sewing -- just didn't realize there would be so much of it.



I'm not thrilled with the results I got with the stabilizing twill tape. I stitched the 1/4" tape right down its center over the seamline when stitching the shell and lining together at the neckline and armholes, as the instructions say to do. As I feared, though, this meant that when I turned the lining to the inside and pressed it, I had to either press the twill tape in half lengthwise (hard to do and looks bulky), or let the shell project 1/8" past the lining, which means there is an excess of lining fabric in the shoulders. Maybe it would work better to stitch along one edge of the tape rather than down its center? Also, curving the twill tape to fit the curve of the seam made the tape try to stand up on its edge, for lack of a better description. Just not at all convinced I did this part right. The armholes in particular came out a bit wonky. If I make this up again, I'll make the armholes bigger, too, since I don't have twig arms like the model on the pattern envelope.


















And there we are: another piece of clothing for my life in rural New Hampshire ;-)

Pattern review is here.




Book notes: Trying to read more novels that have come out recently, instead of lagging behind by at least 10 years as often happens. I'm well into A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan just now, and I'm finding it moving, surprising, and delightful.

The Tour de France edition

It's that time of year when we in this household put many things aside so we can sit in front of the television for several hours a day to watch a bunch of cyclists make their way around France. This is much more compatible with knitting than it is with sewing, but I remember that even when I used to knit a lot I never accomplished much while watching TV (a multitasker I am not). So sewing has taken a hit, along with housework, yardwork, etc., but I do still have a few projects in the works.





Vogue 2900. I've made this pattern up twice before, and I love it. Summery, light, and body-skimming. The fabric for this newest iteration is a delight to work with and fun to look at. I've done everything I can until the interfacing I've ordered shows up (decided it deserved better than what happened to be on hand), but then I'll be right back on it.







Yes, I finally learned my lesson. If I see a new Liberty of London fabric that I really like, go ahead and buy some! Don't just keep looking at it, coveting it, thinking about buying it, until it's gone. I still regret that I missed out on Dr Tulloch C and pointillism D.











Okay, next. The Victoria Blazer, from By Hand London. I'm participating in their sew-along, a first for me. I assembled the lining first, so I could see how the unusual dart/neckline seam goes together. There was more easing in of fullness along the seam than I expected, but everything worked out fine and dandy. I do love coming across construction features that are new to me, like this one.




I picture this project as an easy throw-on jacket over jeans and a white T. The outer shell is a printed linen/rayon, and the lining is a pale blue cotton lawn.

Finally, that Manequim top from the May 2013 issue. In this post I ranted a little about my frustration with this pattern, but I'm going ahead with it. I've altered the V neck so that it is deeper and taken in the side seams a bit. After taking the muslin apart and experimenting with the pieces, I think I've figured out a better way to attach the front vertical strips. So the pattern is ready to go, but the right fabric is lacking. Keeping my eye out for something drapey and raspberry-colored. Or navy.






More about all of these once they are FOs instead of WIPs, bien sûr! Off to watch the Tour now. Meanwhile the garden goes wild.