Category: Musings

It is 10:10 PM.  I am really impressed by those who sew in the evenings, alone, undisturbed by their families until the wee hours of the morning.  It is 10:10 and I am done with my tasks for the day.  I think I am too tired to start sewing now.  Of course I have to start cutting first, and I don’t think I have it in me to lay out the pattern, check it, correct it, get it ready to cut and then…put it all way before laying out the fabric on another day.  Don’t I manage to talk myself out of sewing projects so easily?

Of course it would help if I didn’t have to lay everything out on the kitchen island.  It is large, but I can’t leave anything out.  If I had a table in the sewing room/office I could shut the door.  This is a goal, but I don’t see how it will happen soon.  There is no room in the sewing room for a table.  If I moved the cookbook collection out, that would help, but that means I have to get shelving set up somewhere else.  If I could move the office stuff to George’s “den” which he never uses except to store things, that would allow more space as well.  But cleaning out and reorganizing the den is a major project, made even more major because it will probably require reorganizing of the husband before it can even hope to proceed.

I had hoped to get started on some sewing this Labor Day weekend.  So far I have thought about it.  I have done a lot of work in the yard.  I have done some closet weeding.  Here is a section of my closet.  (You know I must be desperate for photo content.)

My closet hasn’t been this empty in years; I used to have two sections of skirts.  All the ones that don’t fit are
gone.  Most of the shorter ones were made this spring and summer, I
didn’t have any knee length skirts for a long time before that.

Life is not really so bad.  We went up to Pittsfield for the first concert in our South Mountain concert series.  I felt like cooking so I have been playing in the kitchen, turning out some nice meals.  Too many choices.  Too many interests.  There is never enough time to do it all.

Sewing will come.  Something else will be ignored.  Should I start the summer skirt I still insist on trying to make?  It requires a lot of cutting table work.  What cutting table??  Should I make the little top instead?  It is simpler to cut – well perhaps, depending on how the pattern looks compared to my block. 

It is late.  Perhaps I will just knit.  No wonder I get more knitting done than sewing. 

There has been some talk on SewingWorld about coats, specifically this one:

Photo courtesy of style.com .  The coat is by Armani and I admit I am very tempted by it as well.  I love the style and it may indeed morph into something in my fall wardrobe.  Truth be told, if the nice young man from Bergdorf Goodman had sent me this coat to try instead of a bunch of black suits, all beautiful but none of which interested me, he might have even gotten a sale.  Luckily for my pocketbook, it did not work out that way.

Here is a detail shot of the collar, photo courtesy of www.elle.com :

If I make something inspired by this it will probably not be red and will not be exactly like this coat, even though I love red coats.  Perhaps I just want my own take on the coat, perhaps it is too strong of a signature look from Armani this season, and although I have knocked off designer looks, and I spend too much time in fashionable parts of New York, to want to look like I have a copy of THE coat.

Anyway, this coat strongly reminds me of a coat from the Valentino Spring Couture Collection (photo is taken from the Hola Magazine Spring Haute Couture Edition):

Obviously this collar is less dramatic but still much the same idea.  Here is a detail photo (from www.style.com ):

While I am on the subject of coats There are two others that are haunting my thoughts this year.  One is vaguely similar, this one from Luisa Beccaria (photo courtesy of Colleziona Donna):

And in a totally different vein, this one from Alviero Martini (also courtesy of Collezioni Donna):

I actually don’t think I would copy this coat very closely, but I like the idea of the leather panels on the lower part of the coat and I envision a nice plush wool coat, perhaps more fitted with a fuller skirt, with leather panels.  This idea still needs a good bit of time to percolate through my brain before we see what comes out of it, but this coat may eventually lead to something.

The cool weather has me dreaming of fall and the changing of closets even though true fall is a ways away yet.  The crisp has rekindled my energy and am back to tackling projects with gusto and already dreaming of more.

The first demon that has emerged is the organizing demon, an old friend of mine, sometimes even my alter-ego.  I love to organize things and I can get quite manic about it  – sometimes much to the despair of my family.  Still, whenever things get out of hand, I know that if I can just get a little more organized I can have everything under control.

Actually, as sometimes happens, organize demon, was brought out by
frustration at finding a pattern.  Now, I look organized about patterns
but this is really just a front:  Every time I buy a pattern, the
critical information is put in a notebook.  When I was young, I traced
these onto onionskin paper and kept them in a filofax.

I still have that book.  More recently, as more technology has become a part of my life, I scan the photos and make a page for the filofax on the computer. 

I haven’t yet gotten a useful way to get these all on my palm, although they can reside on my portable computer.    I still find it easier to flip through the book than search through the palm at least in this case, because I am not looking for a particular item usually, I want to look at pictures and see what catches my fancy.

The problem is finding the actual pattern once I have decided which one I am looking for.  Last year I started putting patterns I have actually used in file jackets and storing them in file cabinets.  I always intended to use this method for all the patterns but, well I get busy with other projects and it hasn’t happened yet.  The patterns I haven’t used, or that I haven’t used in the past 3 years or so, are stored willy nilly in pattern boxes and file drawers and shelves, and in stacks here and there, wherever they will fit.  There is no system.  They are just put into whatever the box or stack du jour might be.  Therefore finding a pattern can be a challenge.

Yesterday I wanted a pattern.  I wanted a pattern I bought recently.  I washed fabric to use with this pattern.  It was not on the most recent pattern stack.  Hysteria mounted.  My inner two-year-old was released and I dumped all my patterns out on the floor.  Did this help me find the pattern?  No.  Did this help me feel better?  Immensely. 

I decided that, until I get the real system together, I needed a better way.  So I sorted all the patterns into piles by type of pattern such as skirt, dress, jacket, ensemble etc. and I put them back in boxes according to these new categories.  Now, when I want a skirt pattern I can look through skirts.  The new blouse pattern turned up by the way, somehow it had squirreled itself away in a box of Vogue designer patterns from the early 90s.  I have no idea how it got there.

Here is a picture of the floor as I was near the end of the sorting processes:

Notice that a couple of pieces of fabric and some yarn jumped in to join the fun; they didn’t want to be left out.

I have been a little unsettled the last week and not able to focus my attentions on sewing.  This seems to happen a great deal.  I have thought about sewing.  I have a project cut out and ready to go; it will not take long, but I diddle about with other things. After guests leave I always need a couple of days just to wander about and kind of re-connect with my space.  It is not like anything really changes, but all the extra fuss and stuff, and disturbance, gets me off balance.  I suppose I am too solitary and too much of a homebody.  I certainly can sympathize with Miss Cat when she comes home from boarding – she has to wander about and look at everything, try all the napping places, kind of get resettled.

A VHS tape arrived today showing the fall Carlisle Collection and I started to look at it.  There was nothing spectacularly interesting there:  some interesting trapunto stitching on one jacket, one nice suit made of a lightweight boucle with coordinating charmeuse piping and a pretty skirt made of boucle with godets of the same charmeuse.  It looked like a pleated skirt or a “car wash” skirt with the charmeuse behind it.  There was certainly nothing I was tempted to buy and very little I was tempted to make.  The whole thing was so boring that I had to stop the tape half way through as I was falling asleep. I think I am better off just looking at the designer fashion show photos on the web.  I still have the Armani CD I got two years ago and I would love to get a Ralph Rucci CD as well, but have to recognize that I simply don’t spend enough real cash with these designers to ever get on their CD lists.   I am sure that Carlisle is trying to lure me back to the fold

When I look at clothes now I am most prone to saying “I could make that”, except for a few really special designer garments where sometimes I am taken by the workmanship or unusual design.  I will admit I sometimes just fall in love with the fabric.  Then there are the garments I look at and say I would have to make that, those that would be difficult to fit on me from ready to wear.  I could make them look good but there would be a good bit of pattern preparation beforehand.  They fill my head with ideas and inspirations, often with plays of cut, color combinations, and design I would have never come up with on my own.

Of course if I don’t shop and I don’t sew I will have to live in brown paper bags – that will not happen.  I am just more in knitting and landscaping mode than sewing mode right now.

Truthfully part of my general sewing malaise stems from the entire fit issue (again).    I have had trouble standing up straight lately–I list forward or to either side.  I don’t feel any pain, I just look funny.  If I try to stand up straight, that’s what hurts.  I feel as if my hips and my back have somehow become disassociated from each other – I know that is not what has happened, something has settled, that is just how I feel when I try to make them work together.  The good news as there is nothing new or major wrong, I am able to do most things, sometimes more slowly than I used to, and  I have far less back pain than I have had in years.  The bad news is it is hard to get clothes to fit.   The dress I made for Neil’s wedding looked terrible when I tried it on last weekend, but it looked great when I made it, or at least it did the one part of one day when I was pretty upright.  The problem is in the middle, the waist area, where the bodice and the skirt have to meet – it pulled on one side and had a big buckle.  That was due to the way I was standing. 

In desperation I tried on the dress I made for Adam’s wedding last summer and the good news was that it was now to big through the hips, and easy fix, but it had the same pull and buckling through the waist.  Separates work better because top and bottom can each just go their own way.  I wore a pantsuit to the wedding,  a nice one, but some part of me feels that weddings are for pretty dresses. 

I think the fit issue has been a large part of why I haven’t bothered sewing anything particularly complicated,.  The separates I have made lately have fit well and have become favorite outfits.  Even they fit better on some days than others.  Matilda is a much better model as she consistently stands straighter than I.  I suppose I am just not ready to reconcile myself to the bent over life – I am convinced that new exercise and stretching routines can help, and am giving it a go.  The new routines, and training help, take a lot of time and cut heavily into my available sewing time but the long-term payout should be worth the effort.  Improvement so far has been slow but I am hoping it will increase with time.  If in the end, I need to alter my fitting skills again and adapt to a more angular existence this is a manageable fate.  I’m just not willing to give in without a bit of a fight.

small though that universe may be (the boot’s universe, that is):

Given that I have been hauling stones, swinging picks and sledgehammers, and plan pretty extensive use of the tiller this summer, we felt it was time that I got a decent pair of workboots.

George said he would get me a pair of steel-toed workboots for my birthday.  I think the boots are great, even though there was once a time when I would have said I am not the kind of woman who would spend her day in workboots.

Given that the other type of woman is still very present in my psyche (Manolos not Timberland) I certainly hope that he has something else wrapped up for my birthday (Tuesday).

Notice however that my Sandra Betzina jeans pattern painting pants which were too short with sneakers are just the right length with the new boots.

Here is a picture of my first stone flower bed, my most recent distraction from sewing:

before:                                                                                        and after:
   

This flower bed had fallen down considerably but it had been used in recent years, unlike the other one, which is still ahead of me, and is in far worse shape.  Even so I had to dismantle and rebuild about  80% of the stone wall.  This one was 9 feet long; the next one is 19.  But I have some other flower beds, the ones I painted the 4x4s for to work on as well
.

Here’s a better perspective on the whole job.

Well I must go back to work, lovely as this lunch break has been.  Tomorrow we are off to Boston for Leonard’s birthday party.

I spent part of yesterday afternoon and evening cutting out a few simple projects to work on during the next week or so.  I probably could have cut more but as usual I spent a lot of time diddling about daydreaming, playing with patterns, caressing the fabric, and just generally enjoying the process.  It is really nice to be able to indulge myself this way sometimes, instead of just rushing to get something finished.

Most of these projects are simple and somewhat experimental.  I have no idea if a couple of them will even work out, but that is not really the point, I want to try them, and although in a way it sounds wasteful, I am not as interested in having a new garment as I am in the process itself and making it work, or if it doesn’t work, learning something from the experience.  Of course, having new clothes is usually a wonderful by product of my efforts.

First I cut the yellow linen, which has a stripe of a thin sheer thread, almost like a lurex.  I have had this fabric for quite a few years, from the days when I was mis-cast as an autumn, and I have been unable to part with the fabric because I love it so much even though I could never wear it next to my face. 

It is a lightweight linen, probably more of a top weight but I am going to make wide drapey pants.  I thought I would try making a pair of drawstring pants, perhaps only modified drawstring this time.  I still like the idea of drawstring pants more than I have liked the actual results on me.  As the fabric is quite light and sheer, it will be suitable for having extra width and the pants will be lined with matching bemberg.

I took a lot of time cutting out the pants, partly because I had to press the linen again as it had been folded on the shelf, and I allowed myself the luxury of pressing at leisure and enjoying working with the fabric and day-dreaming a little.  I traced the pattern pieces onto the fabric, as is my wont,  inspected everything before cutting and then finally cut and stacked the pieces.  I find that I am much more accurate using this technique as opposed to pinning the pattern to the fabric and cutting from that.  I like having the actual lines and markings on the fabric and it saves me much time later on when I am tired or distracted with other things.

Then I cut out the green knit.  This is one of the cotton knits I ordered from Nancy Erickson in January.  I never got around to cutting this one.  The pattern is a designer vogue pattern, Vogue 2483, probably OOP,  meant for non-stretch wovens, the only part of the pattern I am interested in is the top.  As this knit is really not that stretchy it might work, but I tried to allow for that when cutting.  This was the pattern I originally wanted to make from this top but had second thoughts earlier in the spring.  The knits are nice and I wear the periwinkle pieces a great deal but I am not as happy with the fabric itself as I had hoped so I don’t mind experimenting with the green.

The fuchsia is a remnant of a cotton knit I had made a dress out of a long time ago.  I had enough for a top and I saved it but never made it up.  I spent a lot of time with this piece of fabric because I couldn’t decide what pattern to try.  My first choice wouldn’t work because I did not have enough fabric, the second idea was a design adaptation I couldn’t work out in my head, the third choice just didn’t appeal to me somehow.  In the end I decided to use this to remake an old t-shirt type pattern from the 80’s that I used a great deal, Vogue 7128.  It is pretty over sized and was meant for shoulder pads at the time.  I thought I would play with re-doing the shoulders and sleeves and trying to reuse the pattern.  I always loved this top and surprisingly some of the tops I made with this pattern still fit pretty well.

Of course I will regale you with the details of my successes or failures as they occur.

Five reasons I might be able to sew this weekend:

1.      The mason is still working on the foundations in the areas occupied by raised beds which are attached/next to the house.

2.        The 4×4’s needed for the raised beds are not completely stained yet and then have to dry.  The top 3 sides will be dry by Saturday morning, when I can turn them over and stain the fourth side.  Even then, they will not be ready to use before Monday.

3.       The iris bed is not next to the house, but I have no place to put the irises as all my pots are filled with the plants that belong in the beds where the mason is working; therefore, I cannot dig up the iris bed.

4.        My back is too sore from bending over painting 4x4s, and the arthritis in my hands is acting up, so it will be hard to dig.

5.        I haven’t yet purchased the gravel for the french drain that will have to run through the middle of the iris bed.  Even if I purchase the gravel, my back is too sore to unload it from my car.  My DH would happily purchase the gravel and unload it, but then I would feel obliged to start digging and nothing else is ready (see items 1-3 above).

Surely, given the above, I can find some time away from the distractions of  a summer weekend to play in my sewing room.