Author: 459856pwpadmin

Some days I just feel like pulling my hair out.  There is no time to focus on anything.

 Luckily there are simple projects for days just like this.

I've had a simple necklace of wooden beads for some 25 years now.  It is nothing fancy, very basic, but a summer favorite.  I picked it up from a street vendor somewhere.  

A couple of weeks ago the string broke.  I managed to find all the beads, and since I really love this thing, went to a local bead store to get the items necessary to fix it.  This is the first time I've ever fixed a broken necklace myself, but it is just stringing material, beads and a clasp.  It seemed like it was about time.

The coral beads were not originally part of the necklace.  Although I love this simple necklace, I somehow have been wearing it less frequently in recent years because it always seemed either too short or too long.  It was too long to wear with a tee and a little too short to wear outside the neckline on a shirt.  The broken string created the perfect opportunity to turn this into a necklace I would use, and to learn a new skill without much sacrifice.  Again, it is really the most basic of necklaces, no knots, just string, beads and a clasp.

 The coral beads were what I found in my stash that worked with the wood.  These too are very cheap beads, purchased from another street vendor, this one somewhere in the British Virgin Islands.  The string on this strand broke long ago, but I saved the beads, not because they were precious, they aren't, but because they intrigued me.    

Inexpensive stained wood beads meet coarse dyed coral.    I am very happy with the result.

I've really had sewing on the brain of late and I have started a list of projects, have pulled some fabric and patterns, but am working at an extremely slow pace just due to distractions here on the home front.

I've come to realize that it is not working in 15 minute increments that is difficult for me.  I can do that.  I have more trouble when there is a lack of focused time; and this affects everything, cooking, sewing, knitting (although not perhaps as much as I can switch to a mindless stockinette project), reading and just keeping up with life.  This has been the problem in the past week.  I have time, but I don't have time where I can allow my brain to focus on whatever I am doing to the extent that I can tune out other stimuli, even for just a few minutes.  I suppose it is not that I am unfocused either.  I have realized that I can focus, but my focus on G is paramount, and I can't necessarily tune him out if he needs help, and when he needs help he needs help now.  Unfortunately he does not always have the ability to distinguish between what is urgent or necessary, and what is just ephemeral so there are times when I am always on my guard. This is deadly for sewing.

 There is a fabric I want to wear this spring.  I have the coordinates and the accessories, I have the vision in my head.  A few days ago I pulled out the pattern and some muslin.  But it took me until yesterday to actually cut the muslin, and even then there were glitches primarily due to this same lack of focus on what I was doing and the constant call of interruptions.

 I am cutting a skirt.  This was a TNT pattern, Vogue 7333, and I have made several iterations in several sizes over the years.  In going through my closet I saw that the 2005 version is the closest to my current size.  Since this was the first version I made, I still have my final pattern pieces from that first skirt.  Still, I will need some alterations so I decided to make a muslin, make the changes, and use the muslin to make a new skirt and a new copy of this pattern, probably on oak tag as this will be a basic skirt for me.

Due to my distracted state however, I made a few simple mistakes, not critical mistakes, just mistakes that added to the time requirements involved.  

When I lay the pattern out on the muslin, I thought to myself that I now have these large sets of tracing paper so that I can mark with the paper underneath so I don't have to lift the pattern.  I laid the pattern pieces on the fabric as if the outer side of the fabric was up.  Then I got distracted and walked away and came back.  Since this pattern has no seam allowances, the edge of the paper is the seamline, I proceeded to trace the pattern onto the muslin as if I was tracing on the wrong side of the fabric.  

 It wasn't until I came back, after yet another interruption in my thought process, and put the piece on the tracing paper that I realized my mistake. As you can see, the dark tracing paper is under the pattern in order to trace off the darts and other necessary markings, but the seamlines have been marked on the part of the fabric that is facing up — the outside or public face of the fabric.    Luckily for me this is just a muslin and now that I see the error of my ways, it will not be repeated.

This is not a particular problem in terms of the marks showing on the finished garment.  I always sew along the inside of the mark, so the mark is actually in the seam allowance, but it is a problem for seeing the markings while I am actually sewing.  This meant that I had to remove the pattern paper, reposition it and mark the seam allowances again with my chalk.  In my befuddled state it only occurred to me later that I could have just used the tracing wheel to trace the pattern shape onto the wrong side of the fabric on the seam lines.  

 It worked out anyway, the muslin is thin enough that I could see the shadow of the markings through the fabric, something I would never do with fashion fabric, and I had marked all my darts, dashes and matching points quite carefully so it was relatively easy to realign the pattern and trace the seam lines directly over the previous markings. But I could have saved myself a lot of trouble.

Now, I could have originally traced the pattern using the tracing paper.  But I find this is a little more difficult to do with a tracing wheel if you have cut the seam allowances off the paper.  It is for this reason that Kenneth King, in the Sit and Sew class I took in November, recommended leaving seam allowances on patterns.    If I were using muslin, or a thin tissue paper as a pattern I would have worked this way.  But if my pattern is on a thicker paper like oak tag, or in this case exam table paper, I find I get a sharper line if I drag chalk over the edge of the paper, simultaneously marking the paper and the fabric.  Although the marking looks wide and fuzzy on the fabric, the inside line, the actual stitching line, is quite sharp and clear.  In my case this is often sharper than the sometimes wobbly lines I get using a tracing wheel.  The advantage of the chalks is that they don't fade with time or steam, and they are available in enough colors that I can, if necessary get a color that is very close to the fashion fabric but still visible enough to see when sewing without show-through.

I am sure my tracing wheel technique will improve with practice.  If I were matching a print or positioning the pattern on the right side of the fabric I would probably use the wheel, or fall back on my old standby — thread tracing, which also works well if the seam allowances have been removed from the pattern.

What I need to do now is focus on keeping the arsenal of techniques available in my head separate and in order, not all jumbled together.  This is just practice.  Apparently this is what I need.  Practical practice and sewi
ng practice.  It is all falling back into place, albeit slowly.

I managed not to buy or accumulate any new fabric for a few months, but apparently have now fallen off the wagon.

And I haven't even gotten back to my indexing and cataloging project, abandoned after a frantic couple of weeks in December.  For some reason I opened an email from Elliot Berman instead of deleting it outright.  The fabric arrived yesterday.

 A rayon knit in a group of my favorite colors.

 And a fabulous silk twill in bold stripes.  This is absolutely gorgeous.  It also appears to be printed slightly off-grain.  This may require some revisions of my plans for the fabric and some playing with grain and line in the layout.  

Even with this small setback, I intend to get these made up before they can be added to the stash catalog.

Just because I said that most of my favorite colors are more muted than clear, or more deep than bright, and sometimes just softer, don't think that means I am dull and dreary.

 When I came into my studio yesterday morning, this colorful pile of clothes waiting to be ironed caught my eye. The bright red on the bottom is an old pair of J Crew Chinos that I purchased several years ago and put off hemming for too long.  Shame on me.  Now, however, they fit me better than they did when I purchased them, and they have been hemmed and are ready to wear.  I am determined not to repeat the mistakes of the past.  They are not actually as bright as they appear here, the morning sunshine and the reflected light from the colorful knits  seem to intensify the color through the camera lense. 

Now I firmly believe that if we all buy only the colors we dearly love, we will buy colors we can wear well.   I think we are naturally to those things that look good on us and we dislike those things that are unflattering, that is, if we don't let friends, family, and society tell us what we "should" wear.  My color palette contains my favorite colors, and I love it.  These colors are the mainstays of my wardrobe.  But there are things that don't appear on that palette that look good on me.  I think this is true for most people.  Everyone one of us has a unique combination of skin and hair and eye colors and they all work together in different ways.  

 Take this green.  I have been color-typed as an Autumn, a Winter, and a Summer at various times in my life, but never a Spring.  But this shade of yellow-green is one of my favorite colors — yes it has white added, and perhaps the tiniest bit of gray, but not much gray.  Yes I have yellow greens in my eyes, but not this light.  Yet this color works for me.  

My gray/white/yellow outfit fit the spring-like weather that we are having again, but I needed a light jacket this morning.  This bright green cashmere jacket from Akris provided warmth and the perfect touch of color.  It is the kind of jacket that garners complements every time I wear it.  All morning people were commenting on how fabulous and pretty I looked (not the jacket).  The sun is higher in the sky now and it brings out the warmer highlights in my hair, the ones that get lost in the winter-time, when my hair looks darker, and those warm highlights also reflected the warmth of the jacket

It has also not escaped my attention that yellow-green is the complement to purple, my favorite color, and the dominant undertone in my skin.

I've spent the last few days playing with color.  There have been several reasons for this.

First of all, I have been working with the items of clothing in my wardrobe, and putting things together both in old familiar ways and in new ways.  As I've do so I have occasionally wondered to myself why certain color combinations do or don't work for me; not just in terms of what colors I wear well, but in terms of what I feel comfortable wearing. It is not the kind of thing I am used to spending time thinking about, but I am finding it relevant now, in this time, when I am rediscovering so many things that I have put aside for a while.    

While I was doing this several posted about using the colors in their eyes as a guide to the colors to wear.  Always one to try some new thing, I played around with that for a while, coming up with several different versions of eye palettes.  Here is one of them.

My first thought was that I don't actually wear a lot of those colors.  Should I?  No, I decided not.  Then I thought I would look into it further and started playing with the colors and eye palettes and translating colors from one color system (RGB, CMYK, HTML codes, Pantone codes) so that I could visualize these colors in the pantone fabric system that I am used to working with. 

Around about this same time, Myrna posted on her blog about the colors she wears, the colors she defines as her colors, and the ones she does not wear.  This got me thinking because I would generally say that I wear most colors, or at least a couple of colors or shades from each segment of the color wheel. As a result I started looking in my closet and my fabric collection and thinking about what I wear and why I wear it.  

I have basically a cool skin tone, and medium-dark ash-brown hair.  My eyes are green. Long ago, I had my colors done a few times, but the definitive analysis was by Donna Fujii who basically said that I am a High Contrast Summer. 

  

Actually this worked pretty well for me.  The sample swatches Donna gave me included most of the colors I wear the most often and her analysis was pleasing.  That doesn't mean that I only wear the colors she gave me, but they gave me a foundation around which to play. 

But wait.  The colors Donna gave me include a few things that are not in the High-Contrast Summer palette, at least as defined in her books, and they left a few things out as well.  Here are the cards from my palette, disassembled and piled up on my cutting table this morning.

See those olive greens, and warmer browns and caramel colors?  Those are part of my palette too.  Where did they come from?  Look at my eyes.  Some of those colors are in my eyes.  But what are those eye colors?  Those bright "olive" colors are actually grayed shades of yellow.  Some of the greens in my eyes are yellows and yellow greens, some are blue greens, most of them are grayed shades. I do wear these colors, some of the colors in my eyes, but not a great deal, not usually alone.  I wear them with other colors, often complementary colors.  I often wear colors that are complementary to the colors in my eyes, medium-toned muted or grayed shades  of blue-violet, blue-red, magenta, and purple. These all go well with my skin tones and complement my eyes. The bright brights and the dark darks are not for me.  

When I wear analogous colors they tend to be more in the red to blue-violet range than in any other shade, but I will sometimes wear a range of greens as well. 

I primarily tend to be attracted to complementary colors, and to split-complementary groupings, as well as triadic combinations.  These are my loves, color-wise, and they allow me to play with a lot of color, even if I stick primarily to the muted, deep, and grayed shades, which is my wont.  As I look at these things they fit, the cool blue-pink skin with violet undertones and sallow overtones goes with my cool ash-brown hair and my eyes which are a mix of grayed yellow and blue greens.  

I don't actually know where I am going with all of this, perhaps nowhere, but it is helping me to articulate the way I put things together, and also to better understand why some things "work" better than others.  I've never really studied color, never thought about it, just kind of threw it together.

I'm finding it rather interesting.

 This beautiful fabric arrived in the mail last week, a surprise gift from a friend.   When I first opened it I was awed by the beauty of the strong colors.  It practically shimmers with hot summer heat. I noticed the texture and assumed it was linen, but I was distracted and I didn't really feel the fabric, didn't run it through my hands and assess its drape.  It is not linen; rather it is silk.  And I still think it is beautiful.

But what should it become?  My first thought was that I should make a dress.  But I had a much harder time pinning down what kind of dress.  A shirtdress?  A sundress?  I came up short on ideas.  I thought of things but had trouble visualizing them as something chic and modern.  I thought that as much as I love the pattern, cutting the dress and not ending up with something that looked old or dated or fusty was harder.  Retro chic is not my thing.  What to do? What to do?

I thought I would turn to a master of bright, even ethnic print.  I started looking through the archives of Dries Van Noten's last several spring/summer collections.  As usual I came up with lots of inspiring ideas, although not necessarily for this particular fabric.  I continued to think that a dress might be nice, but that I should play with shape or drape. Perhaps some interesting placement of the pattern would work well.  Tucks, pleats, and interesting folds figure heavily in the 2010 collection and there is much potential there although it would require some playing with pattern and muslin.

 I also thought the pattern might work well as a light jacket or a skirt, or perhaps both, although not to wear together,  worn together I might look more like I was wearing some draperies resurrected from the 1970s.

In the Vogue Pattern catalog, this new jacket caught my eye.  It has the right amount of interest and drape, and is geometric enough to play well with the pattern.  This is a strong possibility.

 Although I was originally thinking of a narrower skirt, one perhaps with a bit of drape or interesting play with line, I also recognize that there is potential in this skirt from the April Burda Style magazine. Actually, I tend to waver on this, worrying about whether it is just right, or if I am once again falling back into old habits and assumptions:  if you don't know what to do make a skirt.

I haven't made a decision yet.  There are several things that are higher on my list of priorities at the moment.  But the fabric is here, and I have intentionally left it out, draped over Matilda, waiting to see what ideas arise. It has indeed captured my fancy and my dreams.

 Sometimes I think that my true avocation is as a cataloger.  Not that I don't do other things, but I do love lists.  I love reading them; I love creating them.  I love maintaining them.  Because I love lists I was attracted to medieval literature.  Who but the medieval author would throw a list of all the known birds or colors in the middle of a poem?  Because of my love of lists I was drawn to early literature, and beyond the Medieval, to 16th century literature and Spenser (portrait of Spenser courtesy of Wikipedia).  Because I wrote my thesis on Spenser, I was hired by a computer time sharing company and discovered my love of computers, and later, my love of databases.  Lists come full circle from the Medieval to the Modern.

How does this relate to sewing, you ask?   Well, I have been playing with databases again, learning Filemaker, a database program with which I have no prior experience, but I do have experience with databases in general.  I started with a simple offshoot, and discovered it didn't do what I wanted, and I am moving on, slowly.  

I am cataloging my sewing patterns (knitting patterns too, and fabrics, among other things).  I have only just begun, and so far I have 365 items in the pattern database.  That is a lot of patterns, and truthfully, I have only scratched the surface.  There are not even two file drawers full.  Now there aren't 365 paper patterns in there, yet.  Some pattern envelopes contain multiple garments but I am only interested in one. Some contain multiple garments and I am interested in several; these get separate listings for each garment.  By doing this I can easily pull up a screen full of pattern illustrations or even of line drawings.  I can search by type of garment, or by recommended fabric, or anything else for that matter.  Do I want to remember why I bought four 2" buckles?  I can search for the pattern.  

There is great potential here.  My brain is buzzing with ideas.  Each time I enter a pattern, either new or old, my enthusiasms are renewed.  But there is also a fair amount of duplication.  I am weeding as I go, noticing how many jackets or dress patterns have the same lines, identical styles.  There is very little new under the sun.  Are the differences enough to warrant storing the pattern, or are they extraneous?  Decisions must be made.

In the meantime new patterns are always available.  The new Vogues are up.  The April Burda Style arrived. Do you think I would ignore these sources despite pattern overload?  Not on your life.  But I am trying to be more careful.  It is easier now.  I look on line at the Vogue patterns.  As I look at a dress, I pull up similar dresses in the background on my monitor.  Sometimes I pass the new pattern by.  Sometimes I don't.

 Which patterns have caught my eye and survived the cut?

This caftan by Ralph Rucci was an obvious and immediate choice.  First it is by Ralph Rucci, although I wouldn't necessarily buy a pattern just for the designer name, Rucci is a long time favorite and I am very biased.  Secondly I adore caftans.  I adore putting on a caftan at the end of a long day.  Perhaps this stems from something in the styles of my childhood, of dreams of women in colorful caftans by the pool, drinks in hand. But to me, an elegant caftan is the epitome of luxury.  

 But what else?  More practical things perhaps?  No, I guess not.

This dress isn't particularly practical.  It is classic, timeless enough that I could wear it for a long time, elegant.  I don't yet have anything like it in my catalog and I doubt I have many patterns in this vein.  This is a style that I didn't think would look good on me when I was younger.  It  might not have then, or it might have been a missed opportunity.  It is an opportunity I don't think I want to miss this time around.  I might not wear a dress made out of this pattern often, but I would wear it, and feel elegant doing so.

 Then there is this dress.  This is much more practical, more versatile.  It is a nice pattern.  It is also similar to others.  It is not that unusual, but there is a bit of difference, small variations in the seaming, the slight crossing at the front.  Is this worth purchasing again?  I could probably duplicate it.  Would I do so?  At the moment I am leaning toward buying this pattern.  If I wait for the sale it is not a large outlay of cash, actually it is more of a storage issue.  But so far I am leaning toward getting this one. 

There are quite a few other pretty, nice usable Vogue patterns this time.  Most of them are small variations on designs that are produced over and over again.  For the most part, I already own those designs. The new variations may show me new ways to work an old pattern, but I don't need the new pattern to achieve this.   That doesn't mean I am not looking at anything else though.

 There is this Miyake pattern.   I like both the pieces.  The jacket is interesting.  I have almost similar short jacket patterns with interesting seaming, but not quite this.  It is interesting enough, and appealing enough that I would buy it.  

As a bonus, I like the wide pants too, althou
gh I would not wear the two pieces together.  My younger slimmer self might have done that, but not my current self.    I see these pants as perfect casual summer pants for entertaining around the deck or the pool, for casual summer parties with a close fitting top to balance the fullness on bottom.   I might even wear them with a little wrap top from this Koos pattern (Vogue 2971). 

 As for Burda, there are a lot of pretty things in the April issue, but to my jaded eyes they mostly look like reconfigurations of the same-old same-old and I will probably pass them by.  This blouse has really caught my eye though.  It is the combination of the ruffles, and the simple deep v-neckline with the stand-up collar.  I passed it by originally, and then a particular fabric came into mind.  I don't know if that fabric will work, more about that later, but it made me reevaluate the pattern.  

 The more I think about it, the more I believe that this one might just have a place in my summer blouse collection.

It took me all day to hem three pairs of jeans yesterday, and I still have the chinos to go. Instead of hemming the pants now, I am sitting here trying to write a blog post and my mind is coming up blank, whirling with all the things I want to do, want to make, the ideas swirling in my brain and not somehow finding their way to my fingertips.

Yesterday made me wonder how I am going to find the time to do all the things I want to do.  It should have been an easy day.  I finished my chores early.  I had planned the time.  But it just didn't work out that way.  It was a day filled with interruptions and questions and general confusion, and each time I thought I had everything settled down, it all erupted right back up again.

There, it feels better just to write it down.  

Tomorrow will better.  And at least I hemmed the jeans.  I wonder why I always put chores like that off.  It didn't take long to try them on, turn them up, cut, turn up the new hem and stitch.  Easy.  What is it that makes me want to start some complicated new project rather than finish some small simple task that will immediately make life simpler?