Battle plans

In the scheme of things my battle is minor - survive an much overloaded upcoming academic year, a bit of work on a political campaign, and the challenge of working with my daughter on having Miss Heidi take a bottle/cup/anything with a straw before I take care of the two little girls while her mom and my dashing son-in-law are in NYC in four weeks visiting my son.

Should all be interesting.

Oh and in November I am booked to go to New York myself.

After much discussion we have decided that a person named Eric is who we are all going to be staying with AirBNB style in East Village. He is a designer has a nice place and rave reviews. The plan is that my daughter and son-in-law will stay there next month and then me a month later if it all turns out. And now my husband thinks he might too.

Poor Eric has no idea how Nova Scotians operate - en masse. He doesn't realize that we can't quite get our heads around the anonymity of the big city so we need a place where we know someone so we can all have a base. Poor Eric because he doesn't know how many family members/friends there are in the system and how many might be lined up at his door. He doesn't know he is being auditioned.

It has occurred to me just now that this may be the reason my son keeps getting small apartments with roommates.

No that can't be it.

Anyway my son and his girlfriend are on their way back to New York to their busy lives there, but they don't have to worry. We are all working out the visiting schedule, so no one gets lonely, even if that really is us.

And of course workwise I am going to need a break by mid November.

The school year started with the regular mix-ups of rooms, schedules, and classes and this year also included a call from a mother of a new student who wanted to make sure I was clear that her adult child was far more intelligent that any marks might show, and I needed to keep that in mind. 

I will keep that thought somewhere for sure.

Leading up to this school year I have had an interesting few months.

Somewhere along the time of the big fix-up I decided to also get rid off all spiritual and mental debris from my life. 

Best I could.

I have been pulling a few things from the back of the psychic drawers and taking them to the curb if they don't fit any more or more importantly if they weren't doing me a lot of good.

I have confessed, apologized, forgiven the best I can, remembered who stood by me and who didn't, the times I did and should have.

I have filled out garbage bags of things that aren't worth worrying about anymore and contemplated how many things really are in that pile called life's too short.

I have been letting things go, gotten some things off my chest. It's all good for the soul but maybe not easy on all bystanders.

Most of all I have realized that wondering why is generally a waste of time, that the things you fix yourself are the things that turn out, and that remembering your pleasures does you just about as much good as anything.

So I have decided that as busy as the next few months will be the hell with it there will be regular stops for sewing, even if the projects can't be too complex for a while.

Which brings me logically to Pamela's Perfect Fit T shirt.

You remember a few frames back I made the one with the full bust view in the size specified by my measurements and it was too baggy for my figure, and my purposes, which was something I could wear as a base garment.

Here is the same pattern, in the normal woman front in a size extra small, as incredible as it seems since I have not been an extra small since I was a baby.

I think this T shirt is just what I was looking for and I will be making it again in different necklines. Once I have been to New York and picked up more fabric of course:

Fast sewing is still pretty exciting.

Checking in

No I haven't forgotten about this blog or about my neglected sewing.

I have had my son from New York here and for a while his beautiful girlfriend too and I have started back at school.

Well the first part has been fun and the last part nuts.

We have some serious staffing issues at work and good old Babs is taking up a course overload (called that because you feel overloaded) and laughing at how much I am booked for.

The key question is what is this going to do to my sewing?

I mean I am going to need to keep sewing to maintain my wonderful good humour all term.

I am suddenly understanding the real true value of TNT's. 

This is clearly my fall to be working with those. Something I can count on, something that will always turn out and let me have the process to just enjoy. I usually go into new patterns for a new season but maybe not right away with this fall.

What are my TNT's?

• Scarlett's narrow long and now perfectly fitted knit dresses for pre-school. 
• My Stylearc Linda pants and maybe the Elle pants too.
• My two Stylearc shirts the Jane and Sasha.
• My Pamela's patterns Magic Skirt
• The Pamela T shirt - mark 2 (to be pictured soon)
• The FBA-ed cardigan also from Stylearc

Interesting no Big 4s in the list.

And as a treat I booked a flight for myself to New York the middle of November for a few days to see the son and girlfriend also listed above. To pick up some new fabric (of course) and see some of the many sights I have yet to see.

Right now tonight I am also trying to book accommodation. I have stayed in a couple of nice hotels so far (small though in NYC I found out) and I was going to book one of those.

My son however, who like all my children thinks I am cooler than I am, despite all the evidence to the contrary, thinks I should try Airbnb. He figures for the price of a decent hotel I will have a more NYC experience and more space - and more options in the East Village where he lives.

This seems a pretty radical idea for a middle-aged mom, but I am open to new ideas, despite my lack of coolness. I have searched a few listings for apartments versus rooms and have been looking at quite a few places where they could have done a better job of making the bed.

Places with flags on the wall and Christmas lights strung over the fireplace are out. 

Definitely. 

I am looking for security doors and not 5 flights of stairs. I considered one place because I spied a dress form in the picture and because it said the host was a professional "happiness coach." We don't have many of those in Nova Scotia, unless you count the grandmothers, but it doesn't sound like a bad thing.

Or does it?

Do mothers do this?

Should they?

I have emailed one person who has advertised a studio that is all in white and has a doorman. I said I was looking for a place to knit after visiting my son. Haven't heard back.

This keeping growing stuff is as much of a challenge as a good idea on paper.

What do you think?

Light sewing heavy canning

I had one of those weeks this week that started out lousy and then got really good.

Let's get lousy out of the way.

School starts next week and beginning of this week I went online to check on one of my courses, a real busy one, that I have built a site for full of notes, assignments, and all sorts of other good stuff. I had finished up on it last weekend and had announced to an empty room that it was the best work I have ever done (you might want to keep that one in perspective).

Well it wasn't there. My work I mean.

Turns out that one of our tech people, the only one who isn't marvelous (she replaced my midterm exam last year with the final exam by mistake doing "maintenance" and I had a bunch of kids write an exam on stuff I hadn't taught them yet - 65 freaked out first years), erased my entire summer's worth of work by mistake.

To make a long story short it turns out there have also been back-up issues and I was told - gee too bad. I was told too that there was nothing to be done, could be done, unfortunately.

Now I only lose my temper once every 15 years and it really is worth waiting for. And I never, never lose it at work.

However it now appears to be exceptions to that rule. 

I pretty much emailed everyone I could think of and left messages that are the kind people put on speaker and replay, to everyone who had an extension, until finally someone said:

"Well we could call Larry."

"Who's Larry?" I asked.

"He's from Downtown."

Anyway I said someone had better call Larry and after a day they did and he got it all back in about 5 seconds and then apparently went back downtown.

Crisis averted but really made me wonder if maybe my patience was attached to my uterus, and they both left the building. 

Could be an interesting year if that is true.

OK things got real better after that.

I made Miss Scarlett a new dress for school:

Knit in size 4T I need to take a picture with her in it.

And mid week my son from NYC and his girlfriend arrived and one of the things we did was go out to his brother's land to look at the place he has cleared for a house and to harvest from his gardens. Here is pictures of all of that (are you interested in this?):

A couple of most excellent sons and their "little mommy" looking like she just got off the farm because she has been on her hands and knees picking produce like the old school girl I essentially am.

One of the herb gardens

Extremely excellent girlfriend. I just love her and keep saying she is such a sensible girl which if you are old school mom is exactly what you want to see in a son's girlfriend, but you have to be careful with that one, I mean if you mother is that happy maybe, well ... you know what I mean. But really she is great.

Now all of this being in the country stuff ended up with my dining room table at home being covered in tomatoes and cucumbers and herbs and I have been canning my brains out, something I really like to do for some genetic born-on-the- prairies reason.

In fact I spent from 8:30-2:00 today cutting cucumbers into minute pieces for relish and chopping up crab apples for jelly. 

I had this idea that doing all this chopping would give me time to think but I realized when you do that much chopping you suddenly stop thinking entirely and you go into sort of choppers brain numb - which doesn't feel all that bad if you are a person who had their whole summer's worth of work deleted earlier in the week with all those consequences for yourself and other people for instance.

Tomorrow I should have a whole bunch new jars to line up beside yesterday's product:

Speaking of interfacing, and if I wasn't I should have been, a while ago on a trip I bought what looked like some nice cotton sew-in from Joann's but once I washed it it went all limp and completely useless.

Until now.

What you see below is a custom serged jelly bag with even the top raw edge finished, suspended over a bowl on top of my basement freezer. That's crab apple juice dripping out and if we are lucky tomorrow it will be jelly.

And then I am going back to making T shirts.

Make sense?

Semi-perfect shirt and less than perfect shopping

 Well.

My first look at the Perfect T looked pretty good - shoulder was right - but I clearly chose the wrong size. This is a small with the dart version and the FBA addition in width working along to the bottom. It is too big on me.

I don't always say something is too big, and a small at that (my full bust measurement is in fact a medium in this pattern) so it is back to the drawing board and an extra-small (ha) and the plain front without the bust dart.

To be fair to this pattern the fabric is very fine and this makes it look even more drapey - you can see that by the print from my skirt showing through.

However I do love this knit and have more of it. It's a hemp knit and so soft you could dress a newborn in it. This particular T shirt has a happy future life as a top half of some pajamas for sure. 

I am going to have another go at this pattern for a potential TNT T shirt.

Stay tuned. 

And if I'm not giving up on this pattern you shouldn't either. At least not yet.

On another note I had a super busy day and in the middle of it decided that I needed a treat. 

So I took myself off to the mall - it has been a year since I have done that- and decided to see what was out there in basic work sweaters.

Being in the stores sort of weirded me out.

I make my own clothes and put a lot of time and far too much thought into having clothes that I like and feel good in. It takes time (see above work in process).

But the stores.

The expensive jackets made from fabric of a quality I wouldn't waste my sewing time on. Tops that were too short and too wide - not much that shaped like me. The same colours everywhere and not my colour.

No choices.

Sales ladies who thought I was too fussy, nothing that gave me the rush I get from shopping for good fabric, nothing that I wanted to touch.

In the end I got three simple pullovers, the most boring basics but something I can wear as backdrops to the nice clothes I can make myself and I stood at the counter paying and thought "This isn't my culture, I don't feel like I belong here."

In the end the only shopping shopping I like doing is online, a throwback to the old catalogues of my youth, when I can take my time.

Question for you.

How do you feel about clothes shopping?

Where do you go for basics when you want to buy them?

A low sewing day

First off I have Pamela's Perfect T shirt mostly done.

I am so in love with her Magic Skirt I decided to try this one out too. So far it appears to be perfect. 

I am getting pretty tired of doing that old FBA so it is nice to have a pattern with a darted front option and the forward shoulder etc. already done.

I would have liked to finish it completely to show you but I decided the time has come for me to do some housework. 

I have been taking it fairly easy on that front since the big Fix-it in the middle of June.

And my floors have not been done on these knees since just before that. 

I have good support who has kept things going,  but really, it occurred to me when I came home from playing 18 holes and walking the course that my argument that I wasn't recovered enough for housework might be wearing a bit thin. I figured hanging my bathing suit out on the line after I came back from the pool wasn't going to cut it anymore as the upper limit of my capabilities.

So I manned up to the house today, or in my case womaned up, and got a far bit done. 

I have of course got an ulterior motive in that my middle son who lives in NYC is coming home with his girl friend for a few days between weddings in Prince Edward Island and Maine and mom's house shouldn't be a total wreck.

They will be staying over at my daughter's a few minutes away so they can have time with the little girls. 

Wait till they find out when those jokers hit the deck.

But to be truthful my daughter's house is a lot better for company than mine. A greater distance between the guest room and the rest of the folks for instance (here they would be next door - hey we could keep track of how many times everyone gets up in the night to go to the bathroom and I could do that "is that you?" thing when they rolled in at 3:00 a.m.).

Staying at my daughter's is an obvious choice.

I will of course be over there with food at all times, even when the only person awake is Miss Scarlett.

We can sit where the bar used to be and wait for everyone to get up.

My daughter's house is really interesting. 

It was built by a former political bag man and it has huge entertaining areas (and only two bedrooms upstairs) and the original kitchen had two ovens and there was a full bar service in the family room (long gone to make way for the Fischer Price).

There is also a full size, as in like a bank, safe with a giant combination lock off the laundry room in the basement. 

I am most impressed by this and just wish it could talk. As far as I know the only thing in it right now is my living will with the do not resuscitate part that the family really wants to make sure they don't lose.

This is leading somewhere and that would be why my Perfect T shirt is not finished.

I actually spent the afternoon in my own safeless basement on my hands and knees washing dried syrup  with about 8 million dead flying carpenter ants stuck in it off the floor around the furnace.

I actually would rather have been sewing.

Now here is something you don't get on this blog every day - a housekeeping hint:

If your furnace room is ever invaded by 8 million flying carpenter ants who can see the one crack in the foundation no one else can, and you have just had your uterus removed and are in no mood for that kind of nonsense, what you do is mix up a bunch of corn syrup with a bunch of borax and put it around where they are coming in, and in about a day all those little feet on all those greedy bastards will get stuck to the floor and their intestines will be full of borax which is apparently a flying ant kiss of death.

Now part B of this plan - to clean this up promptly - was never implemented since it is summer and the furnace room is not on the route and if a person were say to just go back upstairs and pick up her knitting and forget about it once she realized she had won - well in that case plan C -weeks later- is to waste a whole pile of good sewing time, scrapping up dead ants.

Which is not as much fun as sewing.

But tomorrow is another day.

Not exactly illustrated and that was the week that was

Unless someone decides that my blog posts are worthy of a full-time salary, I am occasionally going to be absent here, because I have to go to work.

Hope you understand.

Of course when I look at what I have to post tonight it makes some sense to me that I am not being paid to blog.

O.K. again.

This week I decided to make a dress that I knew would not suit me because it was a dress I remembered.

A long, long time ago I had this dress. 

It was full and I wore it with a belt at work and as soon as I came home I took off that belt and put on an apron and made supper. I later even left the belt off entirely and wore this same dress as a maternity dress. 

I told you it was a long time ago.

Well, when I saw this pattern, McCalls 6600 in the new collection ( I see the early fall Buttericks are out and I am not going to review them - they are all awful) I thought:

That's my old dress.

I even think I had a hat like that once.

The resemblance ends there.

I don't wear waisted things because I don't have one but I really wanted that old dress back.

I made mine in some wool jersey this week and went down two sizes as a result because it was a huge pattern and  I had a knit.

I love this new dress just as much as I liked the old one. 

Despite the fact I no longer have a waist, and a whole lot of other things, and despite the fact that the baby who gestated under the original is now colouring her hair because she sees grey.

Basically the person inside the dress is the same, and you are going to have to make heavy use of your imagination to see that.

So here we go, the regular odd shots on a windy day, sweating too because I decided to accessorize with real leotards like I will wear with it, and some Naot shoes I got cheap at the Golan Heights outlet store. Winter dress.

Full shot with snarky face. Big stomach is a wind induced optical illusion.

There is no head on this picture because of the vertical hair in the wind thing.

Here is the dress without a belt but with a head - maybe you can mentally photoshop them together.

Every once in a while I question my choice of fashion photographer. He does a great job with wild life shots, pictures of the dog, and heavy equipment digging large holes. I am sure I look better than this in the clothing shots.

But my photographer is cheerful.

And useful.

While I was topstitching the collar my foot control stuck down and so my machine kept sewing even when I lifted my foot.

This sort of thing just makes me yell "Leo."

Anyway I went and had a bath to restore my good humour.

Half way through there was a knock at the bathroom door and a man with a sewing machine came in, set up the machine at the sink, plugged it into the razor plug, and demonstrated for me how well it worked.

I don't have pictures.

And you can't find a man like that just anywhere.

Sleep

I have a true story to tell you.

I once worked with a politician who was nice but a bit odd. 

At one point this person came to me with a private member's bill they wanted introduce that would have legislated sleep. 

The background argument, well documented by a huge amount of academic literature, was that lack of sleep was a huge drag on the economy and public safety.

Needless to say that idea was left with me, until now, and didn't go anywhere.

This bill idea was not my mother's although it could have been BTW.

Our entire lives our mother has been asking us about six times an hour if we were tired. (If she is reading this, and she sometimes does, she will verify this).

This will drive a person crazy. And tired. If you ask her why she does this she will tell you it was because, as our mother, she herself was always tired.

The issue of women, sleep and fatigue is an interesting one. In fact I even have a book downstairs written by a famous Canadian women's doctor in the '50s called "Women and fatigue."

This was not my idea.

It seems the dialogue about sleep has been going on in my family my whole life.

My paternal grandmother complained constantly until she died peacefully, and ironically, in her sleep at 95, that she couldn't sleep. We were always being told involved minute-by-minute accounts of how she woke up at 4:00 a.m. and couldn't get back to sleep. My general impression was that she lay there mad, rather than getting up and start knitting slippers which is what she did the rest of the day.

Of course someone should have told her that older people wake up early and then maybe she could have rolled with it to 95.

OK back to sleep.

Why am I thinking about this?

Well since I have spent most of the summer in an unacknowledged period of what my daughter's mother-in-law calls a "convalescence" I have realized, as a high-energy person in genera,l that I do get tired. Particularly in the evenings.

The thing is I don't feel exactly tired but I do note that after 9:30 I lose my sense of humour. Sort of like that time when you kids start school and you finally realize that the feeling you had for say the last 12 years was just being tired.

I wish I could nap. 

I actually have never once in my adult life napped. 

I don't know how people do it. Like meditation. When David Page Coffin visited me he meditated a lot and that amazed me.

How could he not think about things? What about all the cool clothes and fabrics he saw at Threads? How could he put those out of his mind? How can a person think about breathing and not pockets?

Myself my routine is bed about 11:30 and if I am really really lucky, like not a work day, my best sleep is 7:00-9:00 am. And I sleep well but have trouble getting to sleep. 

Last night I was going over different ways to do a collar on the dress I am making (more on that later). Sometimes I wake up and look at the clock and am impatient. When will the night be over? When can I get up and do things?

When can I start that collar?

So I have a question for you.

How much sleep do you need? Do you nap?

What role does sleep play in your life?

Crazy question I know but on my mind this morning.