The best dress pattern

For a while all spring I have been looking for a new basic dress pattern, something simple I can make into 2,000 variations a la Carolyn.

I knew what I wanted. 

A front and a back and sleeveless with a neckline that wouldn't make me too hot. Something that was adaptable and basic but not a just a fabric envelope with holes for your head and arms to stick out of.

Something basic but with a bit of style.

Well try to find a pattern like that. Simple, comfortable and well-drafted.  

I looked and looked and finally ordered the KISS dress from Brensan Designs I admit I have a blouse pattern from this line but haven't made it up yet, and as a non-quilter, as a garment sewer, I wondered if these patterns were for me.

Here is the pattern envelope:

Now in my opinion this is one dynamite dress pattern, beautifully drafted, with these cool features:

• There is a pullover, more house dress, casual option that is made by placing the back seam on the fold and not sewing in the vertical back and front darts - only the bust darts are sewn. I made myself one of these directly out of the envelope in black and white cotton.
• There is also a more fitted version - to get this you use the same pattern, just sew in the front and back vertical darts and put a zipper in the back.
• There is a one piece back/armhole facing piece and a one piece front/armhole facing piece - so the whole top is sort of lined without any facings that can flip up or out.
• There are instructions to bag the facings/dress involving some pulling through the shoulder seam that is really slick. I can't explain it here because I am not sure I totally understand it but I followed the instructions on two dresses and presto it turned out. Very fast, neat and RTW.
• Most interesting, and you really need to pay attention to this, is the suggestion that since this dress has a scoop neck to sew the first 1" or so of the top centre back seam and then to put the zipper in below that! This means the back neckline is nice and smooth and faced and the invisible zipper is set a little way below in the seam. This totally dispenses with that horrible finishing the top of the zipper at the neckline hassle that has disappointed me in about 500 dresses.

Here is a picture of what that looks like in a photo that shows nothing and it totally non-illuminating but might make the point that this is one nifty way to put in a zipper in a dress with a neckline that goes on over your head:

That little bump you can't really make out about an inch below the neckline is the white zipper pull. Isn't this a totally cool idea?

So now the dresses. 

The first one is the vertical dartless pullover version I made with pockets to hold my dog leash, car key, and vegetable peeler as well as any other odd stuff I find on the floor.

Made this when I first got here and have worn it a lot. Notice just arrived from Nova Scotia pale legs.

Side view so you can see what the effect of not sewing those darts is. I might make this with only the back darts in for another casual dress, or make the darts slimmer.

And now for the very same pattern made up with the darts sewn front and back and the zipper in. 

Much more fitted and IMO an A1 dress to have. Note in both dresses the darts were perfect as is. In the second version I took in a little at centre front neckline to accommodate my scrawny neck:

 And this is me apparently holding up the house:

Back shot to show that if I had more fabric I would have matched the print:

So there you have it. A wonderful dress pattern.

Now I think I will go and have another look at this line.

Scenes from the golf course

We are playing 18 holes every evening and one of the things I enjoy most is the wildlife. Some scenery sharing.

And an actual sewing post tonight.

Brace yourselves.

Knitting in the round

I actually have done a bit of sewing, which I will be posting when my second dress is photographed, but I have been doing a lot more knitting. It is sort of cool to be learning something new.

I have always enjoyed knitting, the therapeutic slightly rocking in the corner of the mental institution soothingness of it, but I am not very good at it - owing to the fact I haven't invested enough time and attention in it. And there is all that counting. (I was once actually a paid counter of items in incoming orders in a warehouse when I was a student and held the company record for never getting the same number twice, counting the same order. Myself and a Phd in Medieval English, worst counters they ever had.)

Back to the present.

My quiet days here in Florida are giving me some of that time and, well, here we are.

There is one part of knitting I absolutely hate however and that is the sewing up pieces part.

My neat sewer, 2.5 stitches, back tack, 5/8 seam allowance, seam roll pressing, serger finishing self just finds knitted seams sort of substandard and, well, sort of weak and sloppy. I just can't believe they will hold up, and as my surfer son has proven, they often don't. (Eventually I had to machine stitch the armholes in the Central Park Hoodie I made him a few years back).

Also sewing up knitted pieces does not appeal to me on a philosophical level.

I mean fabric, which we don't make ourselves, comes to us flat. We have to take the flat and make it round because people aren't flat. This requires seams and things like darts and stuff like that.

However with knitting, which aptly has been described as two sticks and some string, (as opposed to a $12,000 sewing machine if you believe some machine dealers which I don't) you have the ability to make it round in the process, to sculpt around the body, not imitate flat fabric.

(All this intellectualization is a justification for not repeating a trauma of my past which was the time, when knitting the Central Park Hoodie, when I took so long I actually knit three sleeves because I had forgotten I had already done two).

To cut a long story shorter I invested in Ann Budd's top down ebook which I got from Interweave I believe and is nice can convenient on my iPad:

It offers formulas for multiple size sweaters and as experiment number one I have been working on this alpaca version for my husband for our not-in-Florida life. He claims to hate scratchy wool so hence this nice alpaca brought to the State Road A1A by eBay.

Now it isn't perfect, and there are some hole weirdnesses going on under the armpit where I did something odd when I picked up stitches, and I am going to work on narrowing the body below the chest which seems appropriate for the male shape so we are not dealing with a rear peplum thing, next time. I read a Mary Thomas idea about changing to smaller needles as you go down that sounds like a possibility, but really it is fine, and he likes it.

And there is zero sewing up knitting this way, so I am sold.

This of course has kept me up late on the iPad searching books on Icelandic sweaters ( I love how they are constructed, although the last time I wore one my Icelandic sweater felt a lot like wearing a sweaty bush) and Nordic knitting, and resisting the impulse to eBay them all, and making me think I should get up my nerve once this is done to cast on that Fair Isle Vest project for the Craftsy class I signed up for.

I have watched the videos but got sort of frozen when I got to the diagrams of 47 different kinds of Shetland sheep, going to take me a while, me who has armpit holes, to feel up to standard for that class. So I have been knitting my first round sweater and thinking and listening to ebooks.

Guess who is thinking about the beauties of retirement?

And even preparing.

My Diana interchangeable needle set - probably one of my major, gee I actually didn't waste money purchases. I love these, I can change around needles to get gauge which is a task I more or less find impossible, and don't have to keep running to the store to buy a different size needle every time I screw that up.

This actually looks better on, you can try on as you knit with this method, and my husband smooths out that chest crater.

See how nice the stitches look? Next time you see this sweater it should be on a man in shorts.

The colour mystery

O.K. let's start with where the canning intersected with the sewing.

I have been making various things, with a one week pause because my sister-in-law and mother-in-law are here. They are wonderful and it has been a great week.

But back to canning for a minute.

I have been making mango and ginger chutney and processing it in my new super duper giant canner, which is thrilling to use:

Just imagine what I can unleash on the family with this baby.

One of my great pleasures has been stirring the mango mixture because it is so colourful and so beautiful:

I mean how can anything that looks this upbeat not make you cheerful? Impossible not to smile when you look at this.  And below is my mango jam (all eaten up already by the relatives, at least I now know what to make them for Christmas), equally zippy looking:

And I have also made, among other things, a Jamaican banana and ginger jerk type chutney with a lot of pep and great flavour. 

However it looks like this in the jar:

I mean how non tasty does this look? It's is the kind of stuff you serve and have to say "Look I know it looks like gruel but it's really, really good." I should have added turmeric or something for colour. So this stuff, which is one of my best, is still sitting there looking like glug, jar after unopened jar.

The problem is the colour.

Which brings me to a huge contribution I am about to make to Western Thought and Civilization is general.

Maybe no one should wear clothes in colours that they would not eat.

Hang in there with me, think this through.

One thing that really strikes you in Florida is all the colour in the clothes. Walk into a Belk (southern department store) and the colour in the ladies' dresses is sort of an explosion. Look at Lilly Pulitzer clothes:

As  my sister-in-law observed these aren't the colours they wear at home in Nova Scotia. 

Gee that is too bad, and about to change.

OK I get it. 

I mean the colours reflect the environment, and in Nova Scotia for 3/4 of the year, in rain, sleet, snow, frozen ground seasons, this is what those colour are:

OK, now how about this.

If it is grey and dark outside why not resist? Why not counter-attack?

Why not dress uplift not downshift?

I mean who wrote the rule that people in February shouldn't wear sorbet rainbow colours? 

What's with the dead colours when you need life most?

What's with wearing what you wouldn't eat?

So I am staking out a place of resistance here, and with SIL enabling, here are my new sunglasses:

One step at a time folks, one step at a time.

Happy Mother's Day to my three children

This mother's day I am holding the line on my position that it is me who should be thanking my children and not the other way around.

Think of all the laughs I would have missed, the extra sleep I would have had, and most of all, all the growing up I myself would have not done.

It has also occurred to me that sewing is a big part of my memories of raising my children.

To my oldest, my daughter who was once toasted by her matron of honour at her wedding "as a girl who really loved her mother - look at all the weird home-made outfits she wore  to school."

This is also the same daughter who made me a scissors case, hand-stitched, to take to sewing classes so I wouldn't miss her.

And the same daughter who now sews too and told me that last week, when happily shopping for fabric, realized she had one child exhausted and asleep in the stroller, and the other laying on the floor in the middle of an aisle, eating snacks to keep herself busy.

"I suddenly realized I had become my mother."

I think too of my youngest son who used to help me by cleaning out my serger lint with Q-tips - no one did a slicker job, before every project, and who used to sit cross-legged behind my machine on the table sewing on buttons on clothes for his bear. He was also the one who got 100% in family studies for a perfectly sewn pair of shorts.

And of course I am thinking today too of my middle son. He always has some mending, alterations, or button sewing himself for me to do, every visit home and every time I visit him. Whenever he tells me, "Mom when you come down to New York can you bring some needles and thread I have stuff I need you to do for me" I know both that he is partially humouring me, and equally that it works.

He is also the kid, my real busy kid, who wouldn't leave some major project in the backyard when I wanted him to come in to shop for back-to-school clothes, but just shouted back to me at the kitchen window, "I am too busy, just take my measurements."

Thanks guys.

Happy mother's day.

What's going on today

Listen in.

Sandwiches made in minutes out of interfacing

 Right.

Now I am liberated to add a sort of cooking sub-department to this blog I have my latest to share.

Every year when we drive down here we go to this really wonderful Thai restaurant in Freeport that has these amazing fresh rolls - made out of rice paper wrappers and salad stuff inside with a few shrimp.

These are A1 units but that's a long way to go to get them, say on a Tuesday night in Halifax.

So I made it my mission to replicate what they serve and I think the head chef and I have come up with a very reasonable facsimile.

These are excellent summer sandwich substitutes and a total snap to make. If your salad gear is already chopped (the short cut sous chef is thinking right now of her food processor at home, or those little bags of shredded salad stuff you can buy at the store) the actual assembly is less time than it takes to cut the crusts off a sandwich and into diagonal slices.

They keep for a few days in the fridge too if you have some left over and are for some reason quite filling, which is unusual for something that is actually good for you.

I can see knocking a few of these back standing at the fridge door with my purse still over my arm and my coat on for example just to tide me over when I come in from work.

O.K.

This is what you end up with (my apologies to all South East Asian readers who will fall on the floor in hysterics over what we have done with this concept - note these are not hors d'oeuvre size, more like standing in front of the fridge door with your purse on your arm size.) And our version does not have rice noodles or other common and proper ingredients in them because cooking those noodles takes time ...

These units are ideally eaten dunked in a sauce. What you like is up to you. Some places serve a peanut sauce but the mecca in Freeport uses a thin chilli fish sauce - my own rendition will be at the bottom of this post.

What you will need:

Rice paper disks. These are sitting around on the shelves at Asian stores or maybe in larger supermarkets than our local Winn Dixie. 

This is what they look like:

When you take these little numbers out of the package they are sort of delicate looking and look just like non-woven interfacing so be encouraged by that.

Don't be fooled. These are sturdier than they look and all you do is dunk them in water for 5 seconds fill and roll.

They won't fall apart or rip and once rolled up they sort of gum up together (doesn't that description just make your mouth water?) and never unwrap. 

So no unrolling like a tortilla wrap, or shattering like phyllo.

This is easy.

If it wasn't I wouldn't be writing about it.

Once you have dipped the circles in water you plunk them down and put in whatever your little heart desires, or whatever you have in the fridge you want to get rid of inside and see what you can do to roll them up. Ours have been made of  shredded lettuce, carrot, cucumber, green onion, a few shrimp and some cilantro.

When you are done this is what they look like on the plate:

Practically zero calories and gluten-free if that is important to you.

The dipping sauce I made has this in it. No measurements because I didn't measure, just taste it:

• some water
• a bit of brown sugar
• some rice vinegar
• some garlic powder
• a slug of fish sauce (this is really the key - and the reason there is some water in this - fish sauce tastes really authentic but will knock your socks off undiluted, mainly because it sort of smells like old socks)
• some asian type chilli sauce from the back of the fridge

Now this is the best part. A video of the head chef making these up. The sound is awful as I was the videographer. We will do better next time.

Enjoy: