Sewing time

I am taking today to sew myself something easy and useful. I need the break in the action and so do the people around me. Time for Mom to recharge. I have all my end of term marking coming up, plus some new semi-online courses for next semester to develop, the pre-Christmas move of the little family to help with, Christmas and a houseful of company, including a 10 year old niece who loves to sew. This is a funny kid. Her mom, my youngest sister, is deaf and this little girl got herself signed up for sewing classes this summer by email. She will appreciate my new sewing room and enjoy my stash, I am looking forward to sharing this with her.

Before I talk about sewing things, I want to say a few words of things I am grateful for this morning, still in bed with my laptop and coffee after my 7:30 a.m. wake-up call to watch Sewing with Nancy:

1. My granddaughter. Seeing the look on my daughter's face with her is amazing, as I can see that my child now feels the way about some little person as I do about her. The beginning of a lifelong connection.

2. That my son is alive. Not everyone makes it through a fall through a stairwell down onto a concrete floor. The ER folks made that pretty clear.

3. My family. Both my son from D.C. and my sister from Ottawa flew in for weekends after the baby was born to stand in the kitchen and make innumerable freezer meals for the new family. They are both awesome cooks and I am proud to be part of such a practical family. Yes it all gets a bit intense sometimes living as a group but they always come through, always.

4. My 82 year old mother for also visiting me and for giving me a good example of active aging - I should know so much about current events at her age.

5. My husband for being a sport, such a sport and for treating my children, who he didn't even meet until he was 48, exactly like his own. For serving my mom gourmet meals, lobster et al., every night she was here (and for my Prairie mom of the add a can of mushroom soup culture acting like she was used to such fancy treatment), for doing all the work to get DD's house to sell, and for all the times he says to me "don't worry about it, it will all work out" and for being right about that.

6. For my son-in-law. He knows me and so often he looks across the room at me and I know he just gets it. For explaining young men to me when I find being the mother of young men confusing being one of four girls myself.

7. For the dogs. Josie, Rascal and Birdie, mine, my son's and my daughter's. Often when things are busy I do the dogs and dogs always seem to me to have their priorities right. Lift your nose to the air and sniff, love a sunny day, rest when times are slow and always be ready for a fun time when it presents itself. 

8. For Birdie in particular. One of the incredible things about the place I live in is its generosity. Near me is one of those very old, establishment golf courses and when the season is over they open a hole in the fence for the neighourhood to use the course for dog walking. I did that yesterday and when I went back to the car realized that somewhere my car key had fallen out of my pocket. My DH was out of town with the other key so we walked the 18 again looking for the key - a pretty hopeless task but I told Birdie to find the key (he is a border collie and a good listener, the other two just major in random behaviour and fooling around). He ran around bringing me any stick he could find and but eventually after 36 holes turned up the key in a pile of leaves. What are the odds? A good dog, a very good dog.

Now onto sewing.

Today I need some instant sewing. I am going to make myself a velour knit dress for practical around the house holiday wear. A tights and Clark mules outfit for what will really be going on around here. Usually my Christmas outfit is for my husband's company's party which has always been a very dressed up and formal affair, long dresses and the whole bit, but for some reason they are doing a hayride thing at a farm, how hopeless is that, and we aren't going.

A comment on one of the things I have missed most during my sewing absence - something new to wear. Usually I have a new garment every week or two and having something new is a lift isn't it? I really missed that and have been forced en route to other things lately to go into the stores. With money in my pocket I have bought nothing and have come away feeling that I just can't dress myself at all unless I sew it myself. Here are the reasons:

1. Fabric quality. I am amazed at how chintzy the fabric is in even fairly pricey clothes. Polyester in everything - if I wouldn't invest in this fabric on the bolt why would I pay so much to have something made up in it? We don't in Nova Scotia have those outlet centres like they do every 10 miles on the US highways so maybe my choice is limited but is there nothing being made these days in quality fabric? My only purchases this year have been online from Landsend and if anyone has any other ideas for quality simple clothes I would be interested.

2. Too much decoration. I am facing the fact that the only clothes I really am comfortable in long term are pretty simple in nice fabrics.

3. Too much money for too little. OK there may be good reasons to spend $200 on a cotton blouse but I can't think of them. Not when it is $8 a meter fabric at the most and nothing special.

4. Fit. A jacket that is tight across the bust, too short and has a baggy neck and sloppy sleeves. No Ms. Sales lady it doesn't look great on me. I need a size small neck, a tall length, and a FBA and medium to large waist. What rack is that on?

OK that's it. Off to the sewing room.

So what happened to me?

There has been a lot going on in my life between me and this blog lately. Here is a short list in no particular order:

1. Grandbaby- I work full-time and my sewing time has recently be transferred into being part of the baby support unit. Very gratifying.

2. A son on the DL- my youngest is a student working part-time as a carpenter while he is at school. He was involved in a workplace accident that could have easily been very, very bad however he walked away with only a smashed shoulder and other less serious injuries. He is back at home with Birdie his dog and has needed some attention.

3. DD mother of new baby and her husband had a chance to buy a much bigger house in their area which required a 10 day window to repaint and totally redo their place to sell. Both the buying and selling missions are accomplished thanks largely to my husband who did nothing but paint his heart out for a full week straight. She will be moving in to her new place one week before Christmas.... part two of the saga.

4. Visitors - my family likes to go through everything together and so the sheets from the spare room have been in and out of that washing machine non-stop. Good to see people but no time to SWAP.

5. Oh yes the job, for some reason my career has gone into overdrive. Anyone free to help me mark the 110 term papers that will hit my desk Monday?

For the first time in probably 30 years it has been about 2 months since I have sewn anything. It is a crazy feeling.

Thanks though for Ruthie who put me on to earring making. I have been able to hide out in the basement for a minute here and there and have been churning them out, one at a time, and without this minor release valve on my creativity I probably would have exploded all over the walls. Thanks Ruthie, from me and from my family.

However I have thought many deep sewing thoughts in the interim and will be posting those as soon as I can. I am on my way back I hope.

Biarritz, not so much

Busy week but here as promised is a shot of my Biarritz jacket. When it was done, in some nice beefy rayon as per Loes Hinse, paired with my black straight skirt it reminded me of my dad's comments years ago when my mom brought home a black suit that she wore with a white blouse,

"Well," he said, "You look very nice, for a nun." Yes this suit turned out pretty dull for me too so I added some giant snaps to try and get the nun out of it, but generally I am not happy with this at all and you can see why. There just isn't enough support and structure, or lines in this for me. And even with my interfacing in the collar and on the facings and my taping the neck edge it is just really droopy (even without the weight of the snaps -actually it probably looks better in real life than in this photo which picks up every wrinkle.)

The Loes Hinse thing just isn't working for me in jackets and this is the third one I have tried. For me I think an unstructured jacket needs to be fuller to pick up the attributes of drape or flow or made out of a knit, and a jacket with a bit more structure needs to be lined and well more structured.

I will probably wear this a few times, until I feel I have my time back, and then ditch it.

I loved the tweed suit I made a while ago and that has me thinking I should try some more risky shapes and maybe focus on comfort shapes in jackets for a while. I can feel a style shift of some kind coming on. You know it might also be time to nail down a sweater set.

So Loes Hinse may connect with some folks but did not mesh with my own approach.

Not to worry 400 other projects on the runway, including some nursing tops for my daughter this weekend.

On knowing yourself, sewing contests, Loes Hinse, and fabric boards

I know this is a fairly random post title but it all relates.

First there are a lot of sewing competitions going on, SWAP, sew alongs of various types and my personal favourite (actually the only one I can finish) Wardrobe in a week. WiaW suits my sewing personality, I have decided, the other ones don't.

There I said it. 

I'm not SWAP material.

You see I have to be pretty organized in the rest of my life. I feel responsible for a lot of people. 120+ students, many of them first years and just about as sensible as you would expect. My multi-generational extended family, blended family, and now baby-in-the-family. The dogs.  My friends. I put a fair amount of effort in trying not to let anyone down. All this is good but in the one day a week if I am lucky that I get at my sewing I really don't want any more rules or any sense of obligation. If I am distracted by a bright shiny object (new pattern, fabric, often a project that inspires me on someone else's blog or at on the boards at Stitchers' guild) I really want to follow it and not feel I should do something else first.

I like to sew when I feel inspired. I like to look forward to my sewing day all week, to hardly wait, to run down and sew when I should be doing something more useful like washing the kitchen floor. Sewing is my creative place, where I actually sort of design my life entirely my own way, and not something I want to convert to another item on the to-do list.

When I get that organized I will let you know.

Wardrobe in a week on the other hand makes no logical sense and is all about sewing what you want in a craze before you lose interest in it. WaiW involves making up your mind really fast, announcing to other people that they are going to have to feed you, ignore the mess, answer the phone, and expect nothing from you. Oh I suddenly see why I enjoy this ...might not be entirely about the sewing. It is sort of dramatic and exciting which is part of what sewing is to my life - a passion way past logic.

I think there is another one coming on for November and I'm in. I am so in.

On an unrelated note. Part of understanding your sewing style is to realize that some fabrics and some patterns suit your style. And some don't. It doesn't matter that other people can make these things work and you admire what they produce - it all has to mesh with your own sewing identity.

I remember Carolyn once wrote that she wasn't a tailor. That's sort of what I am getting at.

Now I believe in Loes Hinse patterns. Some sewers I really admire make beautiful garments, that frankly I wish I had made, or at least own. I believe in the whole casual elegance, easy to sew an easy to wear thing, but I have trouble making it work for me.

Right now I am in the throws of a Biarritz jacket.  I should love it; I certainly love versions other sewers like Terri have made.

I think I have trouble trusting Loes Hinse patterns. These are supposed to be no interfacing patterns, very minimal in construction. When I look at her pictures I often think the hems looks droopy and even homemade a little so I add interfacing to all the hem edges. And I can believe that an uninterfaced collar won't disappointment me so I interface that too. And the facings. And the curve of the V worried me on the bias so I ironed on stay tape, and onto the shoulders too. And of course when it was time to wrap the facing around the collar and serge it down, it was all too bulky at the tiny, crucial corner. I was not happy either with the serged back neck edge which was through so many layers and really bulky, so I covered that with a strip of silk bias.

Etc.

I will finish it tomorrow and post some pictures. I think I am beginning to understand the problem here as I blog and watch DH cook. Now he is a much, much better cook than I am. I am not a bad family cook, but I would no more spend 2 hours on a sauce for pork chops than fly to the moon, even though that sauce will be amazing and I will love it, and have the waistline to show how much I love good cooking. As a cook he has technique and I don't. Loes Hinse is like that I think. It isn't about simple ingredients as much as special ways of handling those ingredients, literally at the machine.

The jacket I am working on is the right fabric by her standards, a beefy rayon and maybe I should have just trusted it and not used all the interfacing. I am just not sure if I can do it until I can believe it.

We will see what I think tomorrow. We will see if I decide I like it enough to do it her way in another garment.

Now you shouldn't read on unless you are a hardcore sewer. Sewers like me have their minds go in strange directions that might shock the ordinary person.

This is what I mean.

Last week DHs company asked him if he would go down to the southern US to work for a few months over the winter. Now he wants to go. He loves that part of the continent, likes the people and of course loves, loves the food. It is an adventure, and of course there is that thing about missing out on the Canadian winter.

Now I will miss him when he is gone, and he leaves in about a month. Possibly on and off for most of the winter. I will miss someone who acts interested in everything I say (OK Rascal does that too), I will miss the cooking of course and have been online trying to find recipes that I will make for myself - it has been a lifetime since I cooked for myself, back probably to my mother's kitchen, I am of that generation. I will miss having someone make me laugh. I will miss someone who takes good care of me, I mean how many men are there is the world who get up early every Saturday morning to make coffee and bring it to you in bed so you can sit up at 7:30 and start watching Sewing with Nancy?

I mean this is a good man, and my life was half over when I found him, and I know how lucky I am.

But you know what my first, my very first thought was when he told me he would be leaving me for months to go work in the States was?

I can now order more fabric online and have it sent to his hotel and save a fortune in shipping-to-Canada charges which means I can buy more cool fabric. And he could bring it back to me when he comes home on the airplane for visits because he misses me.

How cold is that?

I also realized that I could eat a lot of tuna casserole (low fat kind, I found the recipe on the internet) and spend a lot of time catching up on the decades of sewing I have had on hold while I took care of everyone else.

So I went down to my local fabric store and mooched some fabric boards to roll my fabric on because I am going to set up my sewing room like a store, like creativity central, to get me through my lonely nights when I am baching it, when I am not working, when I am not grandmothering, when I am not dog walking or being a good adult.

I will make something of this.

Starting with the coat

I have been offline for so long with work and life events, and also, to be honest, replacing some of my online time with sewing time. I have a lot to say though, all my blog posts were being composed in my head while I ran around.

To begin with my red gab CJDesigns Easy Coat came back from the cleaners with the mystery stains gone. This was a big event as I had already decided to take it apart and make another half a front and had got myself in a mental space to do this, and then, what do you know, the stains were gone! It was like being given a whole weekend of sewing for free, like finding a $100 gift certificate for Fabric mart under the bed, like finding out that your machine has a hidden feature for making perfect automatic buttonholes you didn't know about.

"You are miracle workers" I screamed at the cleaners.

"No actually we are drycleaners" they said while they waited for me to leave. The trick they said was that I hadn't tried to get the stain out myself. They said once a customer has started to mess with something there are other chemicals involved and it becomes hopeless. Whatever it is they said just bring it in, wine, ink or lipstick.

I will remember that.

As you can see this is just a plain old coat, but I really like it. It is simple but not too loose, and there is none of that crude easy pattern feel to it. The only design change I made this time, after the silver raincoat version, was to cut the collar back by about 3/4". You can see that it is still a pretty large and pointy collar and the only thing I might do next time is morph another collar onto it- one with a stand to lift it a bit. I have the coat in the line drawing from my 5/2009 Ottobre magazine in mind.

I also didn't add shoulder pads because there is a nice fit in the upper chest for me in a large, and I felt I didn't need them.

A TNT coat pattern for me for sure.

Major update

My big news and reason for not posting in a while is here. Here is my beautiful granddaughter just born and looking very Canadian in a hospital hat. She came a bit early but she and her mom are doing very very well. 

This is wonderful.

Up to her arrival I was very busy with lots of work and lots of sewing. I made a wool gab red coat in the CJ Easy Coat pattern with some very nice silk charmeuse lining but am unable to show you a picture of it here. After one wearing I reached into the closet for it today and right in the middle were two big anonymous stains. Like there were gremlins in the closet. I have no idea what happened and all they could say to me when I took it off to the dry cleaner today is we will see.

I have already decided that since I love this coat and have some fabric left over that if the stains don't come out I am recutting a new left front and taking it all apart and sewing it back together. I mean it. I absolutely am not going to put this much into a coat and wear it once. This is a crazy idea but that is my plan B. Only a sewer would even think like this but I am mad.

Off to bed now. Tomorrow my son-in-law goes back to work and I am driving the baby and mother to the doctor for first check up. I think I will also be hanging around trying to give my DD some time to sleep. Our baby is doing a terrific job of nursing like a crazy person and my daughter asked me today if she would always be this tired and if she would ever have time again for a peaceful shower.

I told her give it about 20 years.

More later.

Easy coats

Living in Nova Scotia outerwear is important to me, and as I also walk to work, pretty essential. I have been plotting new coats for a while now as I have a definite gap in the mid-weather (as opposed to really cold winter) can wear over a suit or skirt stuff. You know those times where you have to go somewhere and the same coat you wore to walk the dog in the morning won't cut it. Sort of a car door to the front door coat. I have collected some nice fabric and quite a lot of different patterns, but nothing that made me want to get up early and start sewing. I was also concerned in making something too trendy, aka dated, in nice fabric that I would not be wearing every day and would therefore likely have around for a few years.

Also, see previous post, I have some interesting fall projects lined up, plus a whole heap of bra-making supplies under collection and really didn't want to invest my precious Labour Day weekend in something that would not turn around pretty fast.

So on one of my many online whims I ordered Christine Jonson's Easy Coat, because, well it was even called easy, and seemed a pretty classic style. To tell you the truth I wasn't expecting all that much. This pattern has been around a while and I thought it might be dated and boxy, but felt it was worth a try. For my "wearable muslin" I decide to make an unlined version first in some metallic type nylon taffeta I got on a buy-one-meter-get-two-free sale.

I made it up yesterday, while dog sitting the three extended family dogs who entertained themselves by wrestling across the floor for 14 hours straight, and I love this pattern.

Here's why:

1. It's really well drafted and all the pieces fit together very smoothly. A one day project no problem.

2. It is simple, but not crude and boxy. Nice slim fit through the shoulders and chest with enough flare to cover wider parts without alterations. The finished pattern measurements are printed in the guidesheet so I knew exactly what I was getting. Good shape.

3. The sleeves are as close as a set-in as a sleeve that is still sewn in flat with that one long up under the arm seam as you can get, not too wide, and for my average size arms fit perfectly.

The coat I have would be good for traveling or for throwing on over a skirt outfit doing the dash-to -the-door-run in the rain.

So today I am making a wool gab version with a silk lining and have high hopes and glad I ordered a few more CJ patterns.