Second MMM14 roundup

Here's a little summary of this last week's Me-Made-May 14.

Debbie Bliss's Lara cardigan, in her alpaca silk yarn. I wore this fairly often during our three years in the Midwest, usually pinning it closed with a brooch that I have lost track of. I pulled it out of the sweater drawer on this chilly damp Sunday morning and found that it is still cozy and warm.

This is the tunic top from Vogue 8914. I used a bit of a multicolored silk/wool panel fabric that I had in the stash. This make has always seemed a little off to me, but it got a surprising number of favorable comments on the MMM Flickr page. The fabric feels good against my skin, so as my son says, That would be a good thing to wear around the house, mom.

This skirt is a favorite, from an old Burda magazine pattern. Blogged here.

Doesn't look too bad in this photo, but this top (Vogue 7717) is never going to work for me. The fabric is so lightweight that it catches and rides up on whatever I am wearing underneath. That's okay, I can tell that the pattern is good for other fabrics. The pants (Vogue 2064) in ponte knit are pretty much like yoga pants—again, good for around the house.

This Friday's theme was the color blue. So this was kind of a throw-away day for me.

Still having fun with this project, but getting decent photos every day is tough. 

Nature note:

This is prime time for birds migrating through and showing up for the season in the northeastern United States. Though I don't know much about birding, I have been out and about with my binoculars, and aside from the usual suspects (including the beautiful rose-breasted grosbeaks), I was lucky enough to see a northern goshawk yesterday, doing an elaborate courtship display, shrieking and diving and all, high in the air above the woods next to our house.

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.)

MMM: For me this counts as a real challenge

I have been coughing and febrile for days, and we are leaving for a family vacation in Japan tomorrow morning, so it is possible that my mind is not working right . . . but I have decided to join Me Made May 2014. I had such a good time seeing what people did last year, and I found a few of my favorite bloggers this way. Why not join in the fun and camaraderie?

My version will be a scaled down one, appropriate to my developing sense of how to connect what I sew with what I actually wear. For the month of May, I will make a point of wearing something that I have made — sewn, knitted, or refashioned — at least five days a week. In some cases I may not wear it all day, but I will put it on, whatever it is, and give it a chance to speak to me. Many of the garments I have made hang quietly in the closet. This will give me a chance to see which of them work, which of them don't work and what I can learn from that, and where I can go from here.

The other key part of this challenge for me is taking and posting pictures of my MMM garments. I have a really hard time with pictures of myself, and at the same time I do realize that that is pointless and vain. I'm hoping that the push to get pictures out there to the community for this fun monthlong project will help me get past the silly self-consciousness.

I'm so looking forward to seeing everybody's contributions.

Pretty poppies

Lots of photos ahead; if you don't like poppy prints, look away now.

In mid-March, my husband and I made a quick weekend trip to New York. (Digression: I love our house in the woods of New Hampshire, but I lived in NYC from 1986 to 1992 and have never really gotten over it. At least once a week I have a sweet dream in which I find myself living there again. Visiting every now and then makes me very happy.) We packed a lot into a day and a half: the Trend-ology and Fashions of the 1930s exhibits at FIT, Charles Marville's photographs of Paris at the Met, a Broadway play in previews, gallery hopping in Chelsea, an absinthe at a tavern on St. Mark's Place, some real Chinese food, and . . . a trip to Mood Fabrics, of course.

My plan was to find a soft cotton print, maybe a floral, for Vogue 1350. I looked with no special color or print in mind, thinking I would just know it when I found it, and then, bam, there it was. I could feel the tag tucked way down inside the tube and got my husband with his long fingers to fish it out. Turned out that was the wrong end of the tube—no price or content information, just a small brown piece of paper with Oscar de la Renta printed on it.

So later, at home, I searched for Oscar de la Renta poppy print online and found my exact fabric made up into dresses.

Well, maybe not my exact fabric. The red print dress is in cotton stretch, and the yellow is silk twill. My fabric is a cotton/silk blend, no stretch. With the information that these dresses were from 2012, I looked up de la Renta's spring 2012 fashion show, and there was my exact fabric again.

Okay, again, not so exact, but it's the same general idea. Let's take a closer look:

Can you see that the leaves are appliqued/embroidered, and the poppies have frills sticking out around the edges? What I bought seems to be one of several "flat" versions of this gorgeously intricate three-dimensional fabric. I'll take it!

I cut a square and gently, gently squeezed some mildly sudsy water through to see how it would react. It didn't shrink, but look at the fraying on those edges. Since it is such a lovely fabric, I will call it fragile rather than flimsy.

My muslin of V1350 came out nicely but on the snug side. (I usually go down a size in Vogue because of the large amount of wearing ease but didn't do so this time; when they say "close-fitting bodice" they mean it.) I've decided to save this pattern for a sturdier fabric that can hold me in where I need to be held in, haha! Seriously, I thought the poppy fabric would work better in a dress with more flow to the skirt, so I'm going instead with #124 from the April 2014 Burda magazine.

My version will omit the batting, piping, lace edging, and the shirring on the sleeves, as ruffles and frills just do not look right on me. I'm still agonizing over experimenting with replacements for the sleeves. Same pattern piece but droopy instead of shirred? Little half-moon cap sleeves? Two-piece short sleeves cadged from another pattern? Leave the sleeves off altogether? I'll need to tone up and tan my arms; fortunately my last post worked and spring has showed up.

A nature/garden note:

This snap out my sewing room window shows why we will have very few flowers this spring. The azaleas and rhododendrons have lost all their tips; even the crocuses are just nibbled stubs poking from the ground. I haven't been able to bring myself to shoo this group of three does and two teenage deer away often enough (especially because one of the does has only three legs), and they have taken up residence. Disaster for the garden.

Sweater weather

No one who lives in New England will be surprised to hear that it was 12 degrees when I got my son off to the bus stop this morning (that's minus 11 Celsius). While spring sewing has been happening, it's hard to get in the mood to put it on display. I did a little photo shoot yesterday of a sleeveless top from the Shape Shape book, in a Liberty print no less, but I look so pallid, goose-bumpy, and tight-shouldered in the photos that I can't bring myself to post them. Not to mention cranky and petulant.

I have an idea! I'll take this opportunity to look back at some of my knitting, in the hope that this will remind me why I like living in a place that has real winters. My dear grandmother taught me how to knit when I was quite young. We alternated these lessons with exercising in front of the TV along with Jack LaLanne.

The knitting didn't take right away, but decades later I felt the urge to get back to it and I've enjoyed it sporadically ever since. (It's pretty much the same story for exercising, come to think of it!)



Here's a complete success of a sweater that I knit for my son in 2010. It's in Rowan Lima, the softest yarn ever. Of course the son kept growing, so we need someone to hand this down to.

When I sew for myself, I gravitate toward blue, black, and gray, but apparently that is not true of my knitting:

There's a fourth purple one, but I think this makes the point. What does it mean? Why would I be more adventurous with color when knitting than when sewing, even though everything takes me ten times as long to make? Will have to ponder this . . .

The sweater that took me the longest to knit is my husband's Seahorse, from the book Rowan Denim by Kim Hargreaves. Yikes, this would have taken forever even if I hadn't messed up the pattern and had to reknit most of the back.

Though I'm far more interested in sewing these days, I do enjoy knitting, and I have a glorious yarn stash to work through. And I just know that if I turn my attention to a knitting project right about now, the general perversity of the universe will make spring come along posthaste. So I'm going to do it! For anyone who wants to see more, my Ravelry name is pittypat; new friends are of course welcome.

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.

That Manequim top

Some months ago I mentioned that my sewing plans included making up #266 from the May 2013 issue of the Brazilian magazine Manequim. I finally did it. The top is a drapy pullover V-neck with lots of details that I liked, and some that I wasn't so crazy about: my version has no epaulets with "spikes."

The muslin I made last summer was not promising. (Rant appears here, in case you are interested.) Basically, the muslin revealed my misunderstanding of how Manequim works. I had assumed that, as in Burda, the clothes shown in the photos were actually sewn from the included patterns. Instead, Manequim's photos feature ready-to-wear clothes (clearly labeled with manufacturer and price, by the way), and patterns have then been drafted that are more or less similar to the RTW. In this case, it was less similar . . . though Melissa of Fehr Trade, who has much more experience with Manequim than I do, seems not to have had this issue, so I may have just been unlucky. The main problem was that the V-neck was quite a bit smaller than in the original:

Once I got over my surprise, this was an easy fix. I recut the pattern pieces so that the neckline was a little wider and considerably deeper. I also tapered the side seams in, from nothing at the underarm to a total of 4 inches at the hem, so I can wear it out sometimes, as opposed to tucked in, without looking like I'm swimming in it.

It's worth noting that this is a size 40, two full sizes down from what my measurements call for according to Manequim (not the same as Burda sizes). Like many Manequim patterns, this one comes in only one size. Looking at the photo below, I think it's too wide through my shoulders even so. I know this top is meant to be a loose-fitting style, but it would be beyond loose on someone who normally wears a 40.

This top needs a very drapey fabric. The version in the magazine was made from microfiber, and my first thought was to use silk, as I so often do. In the end, though, I thought it was a good use for a length of peachskin I had picked up at a Pattern Review swap several months ago. Maybe everyone else knows what peachskin is? I didn't. It's a drapey polyester fabric with a brushed finish that makes it feel somewhat like suede. I generally prefer sewing with natural fibers, but this was a pleasure to sew with and feels good.

Pattern review is here.

A note for TV watchers:

My husband and I obsessively watched the first season of a French TV series recently. The Returned (Les Revenants, in the original) involves dead people who start showing up, alive and well, in a beautiful alpine town . . . but it's not just another zombie show. The series has subtitles, lots of interconnected characters, and a delightfully eerie, creepy feel that reminds me a little of Twin Peaks.