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.

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!

Burda 09-2009, #121, the long-delayed skirt

I liked the look of this skirt right away when this issue of Burda showed up, um, almost four years ago, but it has taken me until now to get around to making it. It's a great basic skirt: fitted at the waist, full and forgiving through the hips, easy and quick to make but with lots of pleats (two kinds) so you feel as if you are doing something.












The waistband runs a little loose. My waist and hip measurements are toward the upper end of Burda size 42, but the waistband slides down as I wear the skirt. I was focused on whether the skirt would be too small, rather than too big, so I completely missed this until I had already put in the zipper and sewn on the waistband. As another PR reviewer mentioned, the fullness of this skirt feels best when the waist stays snugly where it's supposed to be. The good news is that the pleats are in the same position for all the sizes, so you can put all the pleats in place and then decide how much seam allowance to go with on the sides.

And as for the seam allowance at the top of the front and back: don't bother adding it when you trace off the pattern in the first place. One of the first things you do after getting the pleats in is "Cut off seam allowance at upper edge of skirt." Yes, really. And the bias strip for the waistband? Allowances are already included in the measurements given. So if you really hate adding seam allowances to Burda magazine patterns, this is the skirt pattern for you.






We've got knife pleats in the front








             and box pleats in the back.






My fabric is a charcoal corded cotton from Fabric Mart, sturdy but surprisingly lightweight. (The top picture is closest to the actual color. It's neither light gray nor steel blue, despite what some of my photos show.)


The instructions are clear, and I suspect many sewists wouldn't even have to use them (though I can't keep myself from reading any and all instructions; I blame it on my former life as a copy editor). I did stitch in the ditch (I stitched in the ditch?) instead of edge-stitching on the waistband, and I hemmed the skirt by hand. The invisible zipper is not perfect, but we're getting there . . .

    Happy me.





The PR review is here.




















Audio files:

Listening to Johnny Flynn and Laura Marling, separately, though they're also very good together, as you can hear here.

Shape Shape no. 4

Also known as the flared wave skirt. I have used two patterns so far
from Shape Shape by Natsuno Hiraiwa, and I love both of them. I first learned of this book from the blog of the talented and inspiring Carolyn S.








More on the sleeveless scarf blouse another time. For now, here's the skirt.

Several years ago I bought some beautiful raw silk mesh from B&J Fabrics in New York. It was black, woven into a very open grid and then apparently smashed flat, rough but with a nice sheen at the same time. I had no clue what I would do with it, but it was so interesting that I couldn't bear to leave the store without it. And it sat in my stash for all that time, exuding its loveliness and what I thought of as a vaguely Japanese vibe. Finally I came across the skirt pattern and had an aha moment.

And since I am all about blue and black, I made it wearable by underlining with some light blue China silk I had hanging around. This took it away from the rustic, rough quality of the fabric, but I think I liked it even more.

This skirt pattern is quite unusual: it's really one huge piece of fabric that wraps around and attaches to itself in such a way that the grain where it joins runs in two completely different directions. I believe this would make it pretty tricky to alter the length.














You can wear it with the buttoned opening wherever you want, and it will hang in a subtly different way accordingly.

I absolutely love this skirt. In fact, whenever I wear it, I'm surprised that people don't come rushing up to compliment me on it. Haha, I do realize that sounds terrible.

I only dared to cut into my silk mesh because I had already tried the skirt in another fabric. From an even earlier trip to B&J, I had a couple of yards of a rough brown hemp.

Again, this was bought just because I liked it and not because I had any idea what to do with it (a pattern emerges!). The fabric is fairly heavy and stiff, maybe not well suited to garments in general, but I was pleased with how the skirt came out. This one is definitely rustic.

Garden notes:

The rain has been knocking our peonies down into the mud, so I cut most of the blooms today.

Bonus entertainment note:

If you are interested in other places and don't mind spending even more time online, take a look at GeoGuessr. It's seriously fun: You get dropped down at some random place in the world in a Google Earth street view, and you use whatever clues you can find to figure out where you are.