My apologies to Bren

A while ago Bren from Brensan Studios emailed me and asked I add her to the white shirt project list. Unfortunately her email was put in my Junk Mail where it has been waiting far too long with a bunch of other useful and maybe not so useful stuff.


Bren has done some white shirt sewing and you can read more about that here.


Sorry Bren. http://www.brensan.com/blog/?p=18

This would say it all

I have found the perfect teacher:

 At last someone clear and at my level.

Tuning up

I had my annual Dr. visit today, all was cool, despite the fact that my doctor who is otherwise sensible, thinks that people should stay the same weight they were in high school.


He doesn't quite seem to understand that I was way too underweight in high school. A problem I have fixed since then.


It got me thinking on the drive home that I really hate going to the doctor, I mean really hate it. I would rather rip out a welt pocket than do this.


So it seems to me the point of improving your lifestyle is to reduce the times you have to go see those guys.


Which, since my doctor has a picture of himself running across the finish line in a race on his wall, got me to thinking about fitness.


There is a lot to think about. 


For instance there have to be four kinds of fitness. How fit you could be. How fit you should be. How fit you want to be. How fit you have to be to get by best you can.


The last one is all I am concerned with. All I want is to stay in the same multi-sized pattern range but have fewer lower body alterations.


Gyms don't do it for me. By the time I get home from work I am not going out again, except in we-need-milk emergencies where you at least can look forward to bringing home new lipstick too.


I have a treadmill that yes I do use, particularly since I have learned to knit and walk at the same time (go for slower speed but higher incline, it works) so I figured that maybe a workout  DVD might suit me. 


Last time I went to Cosco I threw a Pilates DVD in the cart since the core is what's shot but that didn't work out that well. Those people are crazy. Let's just leave it at that. I regretted the $14.99 I could have spent on lipstick.


So on my way home from Mr-winner-of-the-race I stopped by the local library. I adore libraries and have complete faith in them to deliver for me.


In this case though I was completely frustrated by the titles they had, which to my mind just showed a complete disconnect to the kind of people who would be reduced to borrowing exercise DVD's from the public library.


I mean do you have any idea how hard it is to find something that doesn't have the words "Burn" "Iron" "Bootcamp" "Blast, fast and endurance" on it? Where were the titles I was looking for? You know ones like:


Pilates for people who don't yet have the stomach muscles to do Pilates


Core work for woman who had really big babies a really long time ago


After work yoga for people who are stressed out working for crazy people


Exercise with good music for people who would rather be doing absolutely anything else


In the end I had to settle for a beginners pilates dvd that at least you get to sit down for on one of those exercise balls that someone keeps putting in my sewing room no matter how many times I put it out - in a routine much like Fred Flintstone putting out the pet dino.


Plus one where you exercise doing Bollywood dancing.


Listen I love Bollywood. So much. I watch through so many bad movies just so I can get to the part at the end where the whole family comes out and dances. I am a big time wedding dancer, the kind who hits the floor with the eight year old in a sweaty bow tie doing the Snake, so this makes perfect sense to me.


I will let you know how it turns out.


BTW WW online version is great - you just put in what you ate and it gives you the points, at which point you say "No kidding!" and resolve to do better tomorrow. I have lost about 1/10 of what I put on since high school since I have been on it.




I will leave you with my exercise aspirations:

Sewing up the raveled hem

I had a fairly frazzled weekend. I was busy, I was out, I talked to people. I felt scattered, worried, and just wish my husband's tour of duty working away was over. I have too much to do and too much on my mind right now.


And if you are alive and particularly if you have been alive a bit, not all news is good news, some people you care about are going through tough times. One of the best and most alive men I know, one of my oldest friends and the husband of one of my best friends, has started a long struggle with a tough degenerative illness. Their faith isn't the same as mine, and I don't know where you stand on such things, but I have to tell you, when the chips are down it makes a difference.


So because of a lot of things, not anything I can control or fix, the weekend wore me down.


It wasn't until 8:00 tonight, Sunday night, that I made it down to my sewing room.


At first I just sat there and looked at my stuff.


Then I got out the boxes and boxes of 60's, 70's and 80's patterns my neighbour had rescued for me from a church sale and I looked through them. I am taking a bunch to the local sewing guild Tuesday night but keeping all the ones that have meaning for me.


There are patterns in those boxes that I absolutely remember making, or I remember my sister making. It is as if all my very own patterns from decades ago in my life have come back to me. Looking through them I lost the years too, and it was as if I were in my dad's house in the basement sewing something new to wear to school, waiting for my mother to call me for dinner - my life just that complicated.


The amazing thing is  with all the things that have come with an adult life, the challenges and adjustments that come with serious territory, my sewing life and how I feel about it is exactly the same - that part of me is completely intact. Me, in the original, is there -with none of the parts broken off or worn off or given up on or taken away.


I am still there, as is, as always.


One of my sisters used to do some home care for a lady named Doreen. I went with her once on one of the visits. Doreen was in her 90s then and had lost a considerable number of her marbles, but when she heard I sewed she took me into her bedroom where her machine was set up and she was working on a blouse. The blouse was turning out very well, and this woman who I think had the elements disabled on her stove for that burning pot thing I think we are all going to do one day, had even taught herself how to use a serger, which she said wasn't all that hard to thread once you got the hang of it.


True, she wasn't remembering every body by the right name, even people she might have gone into labour for, but I sure understood why Doreen kept that little table in the corner of her bedroom set up to go.


That's the spot where she knew she still was.


So tonight after I looked through those patterns and felt myself settle down inside, I picked up the navy wool skirt I had started to make to go with some of these white blouses and I finished it, and took a lot of time pressing it too.


It turned out absolutely beautifully and while I sewed I felt like all my own scattered parts flew in from the corners of that room and sort of reassembled inside of me. So by the time I was done I was saying to myself that yes I knew what to do, it would be OK, these things can happen to anyone, we would all get through it.


And then I turned off the light and came upstairs.

Review of HP Boxy blouse

OK here it goes, with pictures.


I have to be honest with you, this pattern was a disappointment to me.


Like all disappointments this has to do with my own expectations. I was looking to add a comfortable and stylish casual, wear-around-the-house shirt to my repertoire and judging from the picture on the HP envelope this was going to do it for me. I needed something in the line-up that had camp shirt comfort but more than camp shirt style if that makes sense.


There are some definite pros to this shirt and some cons and to be fair I want to talk about both:


Pros:


1. The body fit is good. I lowered the dart point by 1/2" but that's all I did, no FBA and the fit you can see in the side shot is nice. Nice enough that I may try to figure out how to make use of the body of this pattern and fix up the details I was not happy with. Yes, I know though I need to add more tummy room and am well aware that drag lines to your midsection are not a great look.


2. The shoulder and collar sit nicely in the side view.


3. The sleeves went in easily and are well-drafted in the cap. This is a comfortable shirt to wear even though it is fairly close to the body. I definitely was not looking for a sloppy shirt.


Cons:


1. Collar: The wide spread collar was probably part of the decisions to dress this shirt up but I am not crazy about it. I remember collars like this from my past and they look dopey to me. I can however easily trim this down working from a more modest pattern, if I can figure out how to deal with the collar band.


2. Collar band: This is where the real disappointment lay for me. The finished dimensions of the collar band in my size (12) is 18". That is enormous on a woman's neck, anyone's really, think of men's neck measurements 15-16" being average. Obviously the larger neckline is meant to be part of the design of the big collar but it seams to me that any collar with a band is based around a band that can be buttoned around the neck and this looks terrible that way of course. If the designer wanted a big spread collar they should have just made this a blouse collar, without a band, IMO. This is just a misinterpretation of a collar on a band and will be hard to fix without drafting a whole new neckline.




2. Sleeves: OK these really made me crazy. The 3/4 sleeves with gathering look fine in the picture (when will sewers learn not to trust line drawings?) but the amount of fabric you have to gather into the band is tiny, which is why I ended up making sort of tiny pleats which I would have taken out and redone if I had liked the collar better. If you want a gathered sleeve give the sewer enough fabric to gather. 


Now of course maybe I made the band too big (the notch I was supposed to find on the pattern piece wasn't there) but you have to have a roomier band on a sleeve that ends under the elbow than say around a wrist. Flex and bend your arm and you will see what I mean. I am not making this to give a donation to the Red Cross. Someone should have thought this through.


And again the instructions annoyed me - they just weren't explicit or thoughtful enough and one full page of the three pages were spent telling me how fabulous the pattern would be and how sharp the blouse would look. I would have preferred fewer words like "groovy" and a few more things like notches.


Oh dear, I am usually not such a crab but this one really over-sold and under-delivered.

The more things change the more they stay the same

At the beginning of the week I took my sewing machine, a Pfaff 7570, into the shop. They told me it would be two weeks before I had it back.


Two weeks! The stress of it. Now I have back-up machine. A little Janome, but I have set up with my Singer buttonholer and it does a superlative job making nice little round ended buttonholes, just the way I like them. Perfect every time and no need to rip out and restitch, ever. I didn't want to mess with that.

BTW if you want to know why there is tape on the bed of the machine in this picture I have replaced the Janome feed dog cover (you have to drop or cover the feed dogs with this attachment) with a piece of clear plastic I cut out of some packaging, with a hole in it for the needle to go through and taped it to the machine. I find the attachment moves easier this way.


So not wanting to interfere with something I had set up just right, I decided to look for a second hand simple machine to do simple sewing when my main machine was down.


And I found this, for about the same amount of money I paid 
 for my straight stitch plate:

A beautiful old Pfaff that does such a gorgeous straight stitch. When I looked at those stitches I almost cried. So beautiful where those stitches and so nice the purr of this machine in fact that I stayed up last night and took out all my topstitching in my HP blouse and redid it on this machine.


Call me crazy and you would be right.


All this reminded me that despite all the fancy machines now on the market not a lot has changed. 


A good stitch is still a good stitch.


Let me tell you a story.


A while ago a friend of mine picked up an old wooded file cabinet at an estate sale. In it he found a pile of original patent documents, including some for sewing machines. They are dated just before WWI.


He was going to throw them out but at the last minute had the good sense to remember me and gave me them to me.


Five of them are now framed and hang over my fireplace.


Here is a picture of one of the patents here. You will see that the design of the sewing machine, how the stitch is formed, hasn't really changed at all. 

 Now off for a weekend of dog walking, paper marking and shirt sewing. More on that later.

Saturday morning coffee

This week I wore a black wool crepe sheath and a black and white cardigan to work. At the end of the day I wondered why I ever wear anything else to earn my living.


I was so comfortable and I felt chic.


Why do we wear those stiff old man suits? When I worked in a more formal job a while ago we all wore suits. I used to go to a great second-hand boutique where the owner saved designer jackets for me and I would take them home and make skirts to match. I figured it was the only way I could afford a wardrobe of expensive suits when I had so little sewing time.


But I was never all that comfortable and most of those time those jackets hung on the back of my chair.


But Michele Obama changed all that. I am a great admirer of the Madame Obama (not the least of which is because I think she gives an even better speech than her husband and I used to write political speeches) and love the ease of her clothing. I love the way she has introduced personality and femininity into a tough job.


And this morning over my coffee a NY Times op. ed. put it all into words for me:


.... she certainly promotes a healthy sense of enjoyment and individuality in fashion. With her brio and idiosyncratic clothing choices, Mrs. Obama has rewritten the dress code for women who work. We wear cardigans now instead of always jackets, flats instead of impossibly high platform heels. We have a little fun with fashion, even to the point of being more frivolous.


I also think she is an absolute well of inspiration for anyone who possesses a TNT dress pattern. Just look at this dress she wore to talk to Wal-Mart:

I love the collar on that grey dress and am going to be adding it to my own TNT sheath just as soon as I down tools on the Ten White Shirts