Restingmotion

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.

I haven't knit a stitch for two days.    This was not my intention.  But I have been obsessed with another project, not something that is going to yield any immediate finished objects but which, I hope will carry over into knitting and sewing projects in time.

 I did stop an buy the new, Spring 2010, Verena though.  I used to subscribe to Verena, when it was in German, before it was purchased by Burda, shut down, and the reissued in its new format.  Since then, I have found it hit or miss.  The first couple of issues intrigued me, then there was a long blah period.  I looked at the current issue at my LYS last Thursday but didn't purchase it before we all piled out of the shop in a hurry late in the evening.  This issue has several pretty things, a few of which I am sure I would knit and wear.

There is this simple mohair tee with the nice shaping.  This would be a great transitional garment with a lot of potential. And I adore mohair.

 More ornate (and on the facing page of the magazine) is this lovely cardigan, which I absolutely adore.  This one is knit out of a rayon and mohair yarn from Lana Grossa.  I can just imagine the texture, drape and shine from the supposed blend of fibers, although I am not particularly familiar with this yarn.

Obviously this sweater appeals to the more ornate and decorative side of my taste, although I do think this could be fairly versatile in the wardrobe, dressing up with a skirt and pretty blouse, and even dressing down, somewhat with more sporty flannel trousers or jeans. 

 This cardigan, knit in a sport weight cotton/linen blend yarn would look lovely over a simple dress.  It's shorter, high waist length would be very good on me, breaking up the expanse between shoulder and waist and lengthening the lower torso and legs.   

I would like to make a couple of basic knit dresses in solid colors to wear over the spring and summer, and this might be a perfect companion garment.  Somewhere in the back of my mind I have been thinking about making a few basic dresses.  If I think about this a little more seriously, and coordinate my fabric and yarns, this could work very nicely.

 Moving back to a sportier vein, my last choice from this magazine is this long, shaped, cabled vest knit from Rowan's Cashsoft DK.  The long u-shaped neckline allows me to coordinate my lengths to get the best effect from the neckline and the longer sweater, coordinating the lengths to the most flattering effect on me.  It looks like it would be fun to both knit and wear. Or maybe it jut appeals to me because it has that long, lean, sporty vibe that reminds me of an imaginary life of ease. 

I have to admit that it is when I look at sweaters like this that I think of my long torso and moderate height as a blessing, rather than as something to be disguised.