Making shorts on the road

As I said in my last post I needed some shorts. On the road with me was some 100% white cotton twill and this Simplicity pattern, that for some reason at some time I was going to make pants from. Well I adjusted the size a la Nancy Zeiman, basted and tried them on.

Your basic drawstring waist pattern of which there are a hundred patterns (hey do any of you wonder about the future of Butterick? It seems to me that those offerings are slimmer every season and since the same group owns Vogue and McCalls it wouldn't surprise me if they got fazed out). Of course drawstring pants and elastic waist pants are always a mistake IMO because you get all that pleaty volume around the waist that looks particularly bad if you are wearing a T shirt or anything over it, so I was not surprised that I didn't like the look of these ones, even for vacation sewing.

I was also not impressed with the below the belly, way below the belly waistline, which is a) dated thank god and b) just not all that comfortable.

What I did find interesting about this pattern though was that the yoke, into which the drawstring was supposed to fit, was cut on the bias and was of course, even in cotton twill, quite stretchy. This got me to thinking of some ready-to-wear pants I have seen and one pair I actually ripped apart to look at the construction in the interests of science.

So I decided to build a waist high yoke, cut on the bias and sloped in quite a bit at the waist. The original pattern piece was your old rectangle cut on the fold, one for the front and one for the back. I added about 2" to the depth of the yoke and took in about the same amount each piece, for a total of about 4-5" at the top. And to retain the bias I had to cut two pieces, one for front of the yokes and one for facings for the front and back and seamed them together at the top.

This was really interesting because of course what I was doing was making a yoke that I could try on and off before it was attached to the shorts, to make sure it stretched enough to go over my hips but snug enough around my waist. When I got there I then stitched the yoke to the facing and stitched a slightly stretched piece of 3/8" elastic to the inside of the seamline through all seam allowances, as a stay really not to gather them in, as I had seen in my ready-to-wear pair, flipped it all over to the right side and understitched the seam allowances to the facing.

The next step was just to stitch the yoke to the shorts.

I am really pleased with the results which give a nice flat, just as easy as an elastic waist, waistline that is comfortable and smooth under even a tight T shirt (I probably wouldn't wear this particular T shirt with them but wanted you to see the effect). I have also, at the risk of offending a family audience lifted my shirt enough for you to see how this rides on my three baby body.

I think there is some potential here for a comfortable, easy-to-sew slick waistband. I think this would work with any pants or skirt pattern if you placed the yoke just at the point of the bottom of the waist darts, which afterall are where the shaping in to the waist from the hips starts. You wouldn't even need a yoke pattern if you started out with a front and back yoke piece that = the width of the top of the pants/skirt at that point and was as high as you wanted it. With some self-fitting of angling the side seams of the waist in and trying it one yourself it would be pretty easy to adapt the yoke to fit your body and the stretch that the particular fabric was giving you. I used a fairly rigid cotton here cut on the bias and am looking forward to picking up a real stretch woven, probably a poplin, to explore this further.

I realize that these pictures are not the best, no real iron here and the yoke looks heavy and would be much better in a finer fabric if I had some (this is very funny because of all the fabric I have at home - but maybe the necessity of invention will be good for me).

What do you think?

On body images and Nancy Zeiman

I can't pack. No matter how well I think I am planning I inevitably pack clothes from where I am coming from instead of where I am going. A lack of ability to vision on my part for sure.

This has left me in Florida right now with a lot of pairs of pants and no shorts. Fortunately I am traveling with my sewing machine and a random assortment of patterns and fabric so I decided to make some. I have also had my 11 year old niece here and as she is a tall big strong girl who loves to sew I thought this would be a good time to talk to her about it being just fine to be non-standard, petite size, because if you sew you can fit and if you can fit you will always look good being just who you are, and that being who you are is every women's right. I believe very strongly that what we say to young girls has a huge influence on how they feel about themselves the rest of their lives and you have to do this with awareness. I can see her already wishing she was small and cutesy and I sure don't want her to waste the rest of her life wishing that. No not when she can sew and look her best.

What words said without thought when you were young are still in your head? 

For me I have always been tall 5'9", I have a prominent rear end that has been referred to as a caboose, and terrible fine frizzy hair. My three sisters all have thick beautiful hair but really if I had a dollar for every time I have heard a family member wonder what happened to my hair ( worse now with thyroid issues) well I could just move here to Florida permanently and live on the beach. But now I have a hair dresser who has introduced me to the wonderful world of hair straightening and smoothing products (and there are a lot of them) and I add inches to my patterns, and yes have learned to scoop out those back crotch seams, a lot.

So my niece and I spent a good evening with Nancy Zeiman's fitting book, one that just works for me and one with nice simple clear instructions that made sense to a young sewer. Zeiman's method which is a common sense edit of the old Pivot and Slide works well for pants for me. Her advice about shortening or lengthening side hips to reflect not crotch length but hip shape (more for a curved hip less for a straight shape like mine) and going down two sizes in your pants pattern and then adding to hip, waist and crotch eliminates the baggy front crotch and saggy legs I used to get, for years actually using hip measurement to buy pants patterns.

Maybe this is also works for me because I pay close attention to Zeiman's words. You see Nancy Zeiman is one of my heros. In the days when I was at home with the kids they knew that "Mom watching Nancy" was the one time you didn't bug her, and in fact it was peaceful if you sat on the couch and watched with her. My kids can all tell you about all the times they sat with me and watched this woman who was like a god as far as they could figure out. I think she represented to me a connection with my aspirations as a sewer and I appreciated any contact with someone who took sewing as seriously as I did. My kids also remember the day we all went down to the post office and picked up the book I was sent that had the hint I submitted in published in it. To their small minds it was as if Mom had won an academy award.

Of course we are all a lot more sophisticated now, or at least they are, but it felt very reconnecting to introduce Nancy to my niece who was as impressed as she should be.

Why knitting socks is like golf

I don't golf but my husband does and occasionally we go to the driving range and he makes an attempt to teach me (if you haven't had this experience substitute a husband teaching you how to drive a stick shift or something similar).

At some point in these lessons I have to make it very clear that this head can only follow one piece of advice at a time so there is no point telling me to bend my knee, straighten my arm, sit back, stay loose, hold my right hand this way and my left hand that way, to look here not there. We agree that if I am not going to do any stomping off to the car that Barbara is only required to do one of these things a turn and when this becomes absolutely automatic (see previous post on muscle memory) will she then move onto the next piece of good advice.

Teaching myself to knit socks appears to involve the same process.

OK I have found out that if you knit on needles that are too large you get loose socks. Have learned about gauge.

Next pair, bamboo needles break ( but they are so nice and the steel ones have given me sores in fingers - so get more bamboos and don't sit on them). But learned how to graft a toe.

Next pair, learn now pick up extra stitches to avoid holes at the sides of the heel from Youtube video. Good no holes, a very good thing.

Nice wool counts. I am crazy about this Opal yarn which is so soft in the hands and knitting this first sock for a large footed son has made me happy just to look at the colours. Also very happy with the k3 p1 sock top so that is another thing I have learned.

Still to figure out:

A decent cast one that won't be too tight. For this pair I used a cable cast on with one purl and three knit ( I saw this on another Youtube video) which is pretty flexible but not enough and still a bit messy looking.

Everything I read tells me to do the Long Tail cast-on and my reliable sock book tells me to do something called the Old Norwegian cast on which looks completely nuts like cat's cradle and both methods are supposed to involve using one end of the yarn from the top and one from the rear end of the yarn, if you can find it (and I couldn't and practically unravelled a whole ball trying to find it with my DH finally telling me "I don't know what you are trying to do but I can tell you that doesn't look like it is going anywhere good" and he was right I had twisted yarn all over my seat belt and NO OTHER END of the yarn at all) and also involves working out a length of tail that is exactly the right length and no longer (or apparently you will run out early) and that involves calculations of how many twists around the needle per stitch, and all of this just seems to me to be way too much work and completely nerve-wracking.

But still something else I have to learn.

So I am doing sock two the same way and doing some sewing while I think this through.

Outfit versus wardrobe sewing

Before I left for this trip I did the big seasonal wardrobe change over. Moved my winter clothes down to the basement and my summer clothes upstairs. In that process I threw out a lot of clothes, most of my winter stuff in fact.

And speaking of facts this process forced me to face one.

I don't like my clothes and the way I dress any more, not at all as much as I used to.

What happened?

 I have always sewn most of my clothes, nearly everything I wear and I used to enjoy my clothes a lot more than I do now. I had to think hard about what has changed and then it finally hit me. With all the sewing contests and SWAPing going on in the sewing world I started to think like everyone else about capsule wardrobes, the list of the 10 things you needed to have, and making everything coordinate. My wardrobe became another job and making clothes for it became an exercise in filling in gaps. This struck me when I looked at a couple of tops with some prints that I really didn't like and wondered why I owned them. The answer of course was that they coordinated perfectly with my wardrobe plan, and met some contest criteria. Suddenly I realized that there were three of us in this closet, me, my clothes and the Wardrobe and one of us has to go.

Up to now I have had a basic colour scheme and a sort of style which I would describe as simple, comfortable, a bit fifties, the word I always wanted to say to myself when I looked in the mirror was kind of North American sharp ( Doris Day versus Chanel) and I used to think in terms of outfits. This is a good fabric for a dress, what shoes do I need, what earrings, what bag, if it gets cold what jacket/cardigan/coat will I wear with it - move on. This also made for easy dressing because once you had the outfit organized you could get up and get dressed in the morning without thinking, which is important because I don't do a lot of thinking in the mornings.

Now I realize this isn't really SWAP thinking and kind of slow and inefficient but I felt pulled together when I go dressed. 

This is of course a totally different way of dressing than figuring out five different ways to wear the same basic white blouse or all the combinations that you can wear from a core wardrobe. That makes my head hurt and I am not all that creative about putting things together, that is real fashionista stuff.

I have realized I am not a component sewer, that the module wardrobe makes me feel like I am always wearing the same thing, and that I can't see a big picture full of connections.

I think I am just happier with fewer outfits and that it is more fun for me to think of one thing at a time, than to take on a whole scheme. Works well with just sewing what is in front of you and not feeling that you have another chore lined up in your life.

But that's just me.

On learning new things

I am writing this from northern Florida where we arrived yesterday. We will be here for two weeks and then off to Tennessee for a month while DH goes back to work.

Packing my projects up for six weeks to myself was quite an ordeal. Just deciding what to take with me was a huge crisis. I decided that after a whole winter of working too hard I had to be careful not to just fill the car with unfinished should-do projects (those wool work skirts stayed home). So in the end I decided to bring all my blouse fabric and patterns to perfect fit, three summer dresses that are cut, fused and serged, my DC son's shirt pattern and fabric, all my bra making supplies,  the bolt of fabric he had waiting for me in DC for curtains, and patterns to trace. I also packed all my sock yarn and my Getting started with socks book. Oh yes and a roll of tracing paper.

In the end my husband had to go out and buy a car top carrier to get it all here, and of course I might pick up the odd yard or two while I am down here.

And I am finally going to have time to blog.

So here is the progress to date.

Socks: 

We agree that my gauge was too loose in my first pair. 

The Dr. Seuss socks.

DH has kindly summed it up this way  "They are great socks, they feel like they are going to fall down all the time but they don't, amazing." So I went down a full mm. size in my needles next time and made one sock (cast on New Jersey turnpike, grafted the toe in Baltimore) that I had intended for one niece with size 9 feet but now

 are going

to go to her 10 year old cousin. These are some pretty firm little socks, pictured here in Kroy stripe sock wool, unblocked. I should be working my way through sock two except I sat on my nice little eco bamboo needles (the same time I put my knee in my sandwich checking on Mr. Rascal who we think hurt his shoulder chasing a ball at the side of the road in New Brunswick) and they now look like those mangled satay sticks you scrape off plates after a BBQ. Promise to pick up some more and at least finish this pair, and to buy steel needles.

I have also been experimenting (if you can call knitting three socks only in an entire lifetime experimenting) with the cuffs. Because I have a horror of knitting Dr. Seuss socks, even though that is exactly what I have done in 2 out of the three, I am reluctant to do a stockinette stitch leg part. I would like to build in rib to hold these things up. So the first pair had k2 p2 legs, but I think those look a bit lumberjackey, and the tighty tiny pair had regular k1 p1 rib, but that took forever so in the pair I have started now in this nice Opal sock yarn I am following Ann Budd's advice (it seems I am no better at reading instructions as a knitter than I am as a sewer - BTW that checking your gauge/tension thing is pretty good advice - I realize that this is the knitting equivalent of pre-treating your fabric ) and am doing a k 3 p1 

which looks stockingnette but has rib spring.

Also thanks to Claire for putting me on to good advice about not getting those gusset holes. I have followed this up and Youtubed my way through some more tips.

I have hope about this next pair. I have hope.

Finished socks and future knitting

Well here they are the first pair of socks, my maybe wearable muslin socks, (something that may make sense to you sewers) full of mistakes and obviously the totally wrong gauge. Followed the pattern but obviously have to go down a full 1 mm. in needle size next time. Also did one foot on dpn and one on small circulars and one foot is bigger than the other of course but I can't remember which is which. Will have to be very careful about gauge next time. I took me about an hour to graft the toes from a book. Interesting that I love hand sewing when I sew but hate using a needle at all when it is with yarn. I love anything seamless as a result.

I also have to figure out how to eliminate the holes at the ankles when you turn the heel.

Despite the fact that these are technique-wise about as skilled as a first home ec apron, I am very pleased with myself and am looking forward to making more on our car trip south.

One thing that interests me about planning projects is that my taste changes. Things that I thought looked cool look so dated to me a few years later and things I swore I never would wear I decide I like. This is an argument I think never to purge the sewing room too carefully.

Take vests.

I have always hated vests. Maybe the 80's did me in or all those sewing shows where we all wore those decorative boxy vests. Wearable art non-wearable garments.

Lately though I have been rethinking this. I was a cold winter here and I spent at least an hour everyday walking dogs and coming home chilled. Often I wished I had something warm for my core that still gave me arm movement and you know that spells vests. I have also realized that a lot of the blouses and shirts I wear fall and spring could work too in the winter with a third layer. The problem of course is that a lot of my shirts have 3/4 sleeves with cuffs and these get really lumpy under a cardigan.

So I have been wondering about vests and wondering if I made one or two if I would still hate them.

I my planning mind are one sewn (Burda 7494) and three possible knitted vests, including this one from Knitty ,  (would be faster than sweaters and would give me more new techniques to try out), the free patter chunky cable vest which is a free pattern from Lion Brand, and the gold cowboy vest from the latest Knitscene.  Due to midsection issues I am not sure, no actually I am sure, about short tight vests so I am thinking of these.

What do you think?

On not making it harder than it is

I have been thinking of simplicity a lot lately.

In two and a half weeks I am off to visit Florida a bit with my mother, sister and niece and then Rascal and I are going back to Tennessee with DH for two weeks to chill out while he works. This will be my first time ever of being a stay-at-homish wife when I wasn't doing it with kids.

So I have decided to pack along some sewing projects. Of course the first round of this involved about 40 backlog projects which I realized would just be turning my holiday into work and I finally narrowed it down to two patterns for blouses/shirts to perfect and some fabric to work that through on, and my son's fabric and pattern for a shirt.

I am committed to working through a full slate of TNT this summer.

Since I am a fabric sewer I would get so much more done, with less stress if my TNT collection was fully developed.

Which brings me to pants. 

About a year and a half ago I made a series of pants that fit, finally (see really old posts). Well I decided that that pattern has run its course. With pants styles slimming down these pants just seem too wide for me, lots of fabric flapping around the leg, particularly around my thighs. So last weekend, realizing that with all I have to do at work before I go that my time was very limited, I went shopping.

What a downer that was, and a good reminder of why I sew. Like a lot of women of my age, or any age for that matter, my middle is no longer my best feature. It is an area I want to minimize not accessorize.

Well the trouble with pants I decided is that they are designed for men, even if they are made for women. Do I need a fly? No? Do I need back pockets with flaps to carry my wallet in? No. Do I need angled pockets at the front to keep my change in? No. Do I need elaborate closures with big heavy hooks right at my navel in the waistband? No. Why would I wear this and why would I spend precious sewing hours fussing away at making these little bulk addition details?

I must have tried on a hundred pairs of pants and even the ones that had the slimmer legs I was looking for completely deteriorated by the time they hit the waistline, which in most cases was still too low at stomach bisecting level.

In desperation I finally went to a work wear chain I never shop in and tried on these pants, which are made of a stretch woven and have a "revolutionary comfort waistband" - read a contoured waistband with the stretch cut cross wise of course,  not interfaced, with narrow elastic stitched into the top waist seam like a stay. What was different was that the waistband seams were at centre front and centre back which kept the side seams particularly smooth. The pair I tried on were made in a nasty harsh fabric, pull on pants without the fly and they fit perfectly.

With my decreasing waist to hip ratio they pulled on and fit smoothly just fine - the stretch in the fabric was just enough. These pants were also on sale and at $22.00 I bought them and took them home. I ripped them up before wear could stretch anything out of shape and traced off a pattern. 

Remarkable to see how much more shape in the back than the front and how simple they were in construction.

This weekend when I should have been doing other things I made up a pair and they too fit absolutely perfectly. I will post pictures this week when I can get my daughter to take them. Rascal and Birdie aren't much with the camera.

Imagine that a perfect pants pattern finally just as long as I use stretch wovens. And no more sewing time that I would spend to make a pair of pjs.

This has me thinking now of how often in my life do I make things harder than they are. If the fabric stretches I don't need a zipper. With pants I can buy and rip apart I don't need 37 different pants patterns to buy and try. With some reliable TNT patterns I don't need to fret about fitting something new every time I sew.

Of course now I still need to buy some more fabric ....