A jacket project

A few posts ago I showed you a reversible straight skirt I made from some suede knit with a rayon knit backing.

I decided that I wanted to make a jacket to go with both versions of the skirt for my travels. I was hoping for something that would look sort of suit like, despite the fact that my daughter has told me about two million times to stop matching things.

I figured that when she was around I could switch the skirt to the grey side and I would be O.K.

In addition to clandestine suit wear I also wanted a jacket that could double as a sort of spring/fall jacket, meaning that it would not be so fitted that I couldn't wear a sweater under it if I wanted to.

This is the pattern I chose, a new season Butterick from Katherine Tilton, B6596:

I liked the asymmetry of the zipper placement in the jacket and the fact it called for a knit. I usually don't like unlined jackets but in a knit that's just fine and in a two-sided bonded knit even better.

I am very happy with this jacket and will probably at least another one, it is that comfortable.

That said there were some definite surprises in this project.

First is fit.

Going by the back of the pattern envelope, I am between a size 16 and 18 bust, a size 22 waist and between a 16 and 18 hip.

Because I always choose pattern size by my high bust, I cut out a size 14, and added two inches to the hip and two inches to the length (these patterns are drafted for 5'6" women and I am 5'9".)

This meant of course that I was sewing a jacket that was drafted for someone with a bust 3" smaller than mine and with a waist 6" smaller than mine.

Here is how that size 14, with additions only a hip and length looked like on me:

Really not tight at all is it, in fact I might even have gone down a size, although this is fine for an over something else jacket. Next time I make it I will not add anything at all to the hip area and not add to the length.

Can you imagine what this would look like on me if I had made it in a size to match my measurements?

No wonder so many sewers have given up on the Big 4 and gone Indie.

And this is another case study of why I always work off my high bust, rather than my full bust when using the big pattern companies.

I have a pretty clear idea what happened.

The first clue was simply that the instructions were so nuts for a for knit pattern. 

If you read them, all the stay-stitching and clipping and turning and pressing and easing, a person would swear that this pattern was drafted for a woven fabric and that the instructions were written in an 1968 home ec class. 

No mention of sewing a knit with a serger (or finishing with a cover hem or twin needle) or even with a stretch stitch or small zig zag on a sewing machine. It is as if the last 50 years of knowledge in how to sew knits never even happened.

Most weird. This sort of breaks my heart for the new sewers out there who are diligently following pattern instructions and not understanding why they are a struggle, or why they produce garments that look home made.

It really makes me wonder how much input the designer has into these patterns or if they do a sample and the team, at say Butterick, just cuts and pastes in stuff that they have in the generic instruction bank.

Even more odd is that there are two distinct voices in these instructions. 

Most of the steps are as I have described above, textbook woven techniques, and completely ignoring the fact that this pattern was supposed to be sewn in a knit, but then suddenly there are some really wonderful, detailed and quite original instructions for sewing in the invisible zipper pockets. That section seem totally out of character with the rest of the text.

It was as if the pattern editor couldn't find any way of explaining these rarely atypical pockets and asked Tilton herself to write something and then dropped that particular text into the middle of the guide sheet.

Here are the pockets BTW:

A demo of how to put your hands in a pocket

A demo of how to unzip a pocket

Speaking of pockets the pattern calls for four, the two you see in action above and two more internal pockets.

These internal pockets are sort of pattern envelope size and are to be set up high, about three inched below the armpit in each side panel.

I actually made up these pockets and was about to put them in when I realized what I was doing - getting ready to sew in some big pockets to go one under each armpit.

I reminded myself of Miss Heidi when she was asked to stand on a balance beam in gymnastics "Why?" (actually what she actually said was "why do you want me to stand on a piece of wood?")

What is a person supposed to put in these pockets?

Conceal and carry sandwiches? Library books to read on the bus? A cell phone under the right armpit and a pack of cards under the left? Passports for the whole family and the plane tickets home?

Nothing about these pockets made any sense so I left them out. Maybe you should too, unless their purpose is clearer to you than it is to me.

Not all details were this unusual.

The zipper front was easy to install but I did have to work with the zippers I had locally. I really wonder sometimes if it s within my rights as a mother to ask my son, who is happily living his life in Berkeley, to move back to New York for the sewing notions - zippers in particular? Wonder if he would go for that?

In the end I was pretty happy with how the jacket went with both sides of the reversible skirt as hopefully you can see in the shots above. Ignoring the pattern sizing and instructions were worth it.

This is a very wearable garment and hopefully the shots show that.

Speaking of photography I will end this post with an out take just like they do at the end of some movies - all the things they leave on the cutting room floor.

I have to saw that neither my husband or I would say that these photo taking sessions are the high points of our martial experience. I generally want to know why my husband holds the phone in such a way to make my head look small and my stomach look fat and my husband wants to know why if I want the top of my head in the shot I don't tell him.

I also know that my loyal husband thinks I am not helping him reach his creative potential. If for example you are wondering how I actually look when the suggestion is made that we shoot my sewing projects from the drone in the sky - so my readers can see the garment from all angles - well wonder no longer:

On process as well as product and how I sew shirts the relaxed way

A week or so ago when it was mental health awareness week ,many sewers spoke on social media about how sewing was good for their mental health. Myself I actually think I have a whole blog that probably expresses that.

I think we can identify with that experience, and the role our sewing plays in how we go through life in one piece.

What struck me most however was an Instagram post by someone whose work I admire. This younger sewer, and a good one, said that sewing helped her occasional depression and anxiety but that, to be honest, sometimes trying to do things right only added to her stress.

I have been thinking about this a lot. 

Sewing is of course an elective activity. (I have heard that there are folks out there who don't do it and actually buy their clothes). It should therefore be an addition to your life, not just one more thing to add to the try to achieve list.

This of course doesn't mean I am an advocate for sloppy sewing, far from it, but learning and getting more confident should also be a nice way to spend time along the way.

To my mind the value of sewing is as much about enjoying the process as the product.

If I were to put into one sentence what my philosophy of sewing would be it would be that finding the ways to create clothes that keep it stress free as well as high quality are what matter most to me.

The question we need to ask ourselves IMO is how can I make this part of the garment in a way that I will enjoy the sewing, without angst.

I am still and always trying to figure this out.

Sometimes that involves some personal go-to construction methods that I use to put together things I sew a lot. 

These personal systems are sort of a combination of my own short cuts, and the kind of fixes that I build in to deal with problems that I know from experience are lurking on the horizon.

Today I would like to talk about how I make the regular fun, print shirts that I give my sons and son-in-laws for presents.

These are not dress shirts. I have made those and have collar stayed and flat felled with the rest and the best of them but these are different - more the casual shirts that the boys wear to parties or out. 

Untucked as opposed to tucked in shirts.

I am going to go through the process for my own stress free casual shirt making but the note that this is not the way most folks might sew shirts and certainly not the classic way to do it.

However in my life this works when I want to make a fun shirt to put a smile on someone's face.

Here goes.

The collar and collar band.

One of the things I do is to interface both the collar and band pieces with a light to medium weight woven fusible, rather than using a proper crips shirt interfacing on only one collar and band.

I find that fusing tends to make fabric more rigid. So if it is only on one side of a unit, say only one side of the band, it is less mobile that the other piece. This means when you try to fit the two of them together the un-interfaced piece is just going to be a little bit stretchier, and you might find yourself struggling to fit that tiny bit extra fabric in say the neck area.

Since any kind of struggling is out in my world when I can eliminate it,  I interface all the collar and band pieces so they behave the same way and will fit together easily. And to my mind two layers of mid weight interfacing equals one layer of something stiffer.

Note I always try to cut the interfacing without seam allowances but if, after stitching, I see some fragments within the seam allowance I trim it out. Interfacing in the seam allowances makes turning a  collar and band neatly too hard.

Construction step one.

1. Make up the collar and top stitch it. 

Of course turning the corner and top stitching can be tricky because the foot is not level after the turn. 

The usual fix for this is to put a shim under the back of the foot so it won't stick at the corner and make those annoying little packed up stitches. Ideally the shim should be the same thickness as the collar. I find the quickest way to find exactly that is to swing around the other corner of the collar and put it under the back of the foot just while you do these stitches:

This little trick always give me nice corner stitching. Once made up of course baste the cut edges of the collar together:

Construction step two:

Sew both band pieces to the shirt along the neck edge, sandwiching the shirt between them:

You will notice I hope that the neck edge has been both stay stitched and clipped a lot so I was able to pull it straight. It is easy to sew a straight edge to a straight edge, so much easier than trying to sew a straight edge to a curved edge, so it is important to make that curved edge of the neckline straight - clipping will do that for you.

Once you have the bands stitched on, press them up. At this point it might be useful to also press under a seam allowance on the top edge of the outer (away from the neck) band:

Construction step three:

Sew the little curve ends of the band. 

Now this is the part that gives you palpitations so to avoid that we are going to take it slow and avoid stressful situations. This means giving yourself a chance to fix up any mistakes or crooked sewing.

Go easy on yourself.

To do this shorten your stitch length, always easier to go around a curve in little steps rather than in big steps, and don't get in involved in backstitching when you start and stop. The little stitches should hold it and in the off chance you have to unpick anything, best if you don't have to try to untangle any knotted, backstitched thread.

To set up this stage of construction fold the front edges of the shirt in a bit to get them out of the way. I don't do any "Burrito" method that involves lots of high level rolling that I find fabric and nerve fraying, just, in this method, make a little fold like this:

Once the front of the shirt is out of the way turn the ends of the band down, right sides together and lower your needle into the point where the band meets the shirt and stitch around the curve and in a bit. 

You could, if you were a different kind of person than me measure how big a space you need to leave for putting the collar in but I sort of ballpark this and make sure I stop my stitching a bit before where the collar starts. 

I do this because it is a real pain, and sort of defeating the laid back process we have going here, to have to try to wiggle an interfaced collar into a too small space. Any tiny gap between the band stitching and the collar will be fixed up and closed with the eventual topstitching anyway or even the odd minute hand stitch if no one is looking:

Hopefully you can see here how in this case my first set of stitching was a bit wobbly (watching the final episode of Outlander on Netflix while I was sewing which may have had something to do with it) so I just went back, took a run at it again along the neck stitching again, pivoted at the corner and tried to do a better job. I did just that and Jamie survived another near death experience. Maybe we both did.

Construction step number four:

From here on you are cruising.

Next turn the corners of the band and lay the collar so the top collar is right sides to the inner band and stitch the collar onto that band.  

Below you can see how this looks from the back of the shirt at this point, collar attached and only the outer band to be hand stitched to the under collar where no one will see it. 

Note: yes I know there are slick ways to just double sided tape this down and capture it all in one round of perfect topstitching, but at this point that would require a person rising to the occasion performance-wise and being fairly precise. 

I find it easier to keep watching Outlander and leisurely stitching this down by hand with little slip stitch (I believe the how-to for that is in my book and on my YouTube channel).

And here is what that hand-stitching looks like:

Construction step number five:

Taking it slow all there is to do now is topstitch around the band, and later to make the buttonholes. 

You will notice again  I do not use a big stitch to do this. I was taught to proportion the stitch length to the thickness of the fabric and with shirt fabrics a stitch length of about 2.0-2.5 seems to work, again also makes curves easier to navigate. 

Note too that since a shirt like this is never worn with a tie I will later make a button hole in the band but don't cut it open. Looks neater that way and less traumatic.

That curvy hem:

Another area that can cause stress in shirt making is the hem. 

A shirt tale hem is a fine idea but the bias nature or that dip up can go wobbly and flare out. There are of course many intelligent ways to deal with this, stay stitching and paying care to pressing etc. but when I am sewing a relaxed shirt this is how I do it. BTW this is also the same method you see in many RTW shirts.

Construction step one:

Stitch on the front bands but before you top stitch them down fold them back on themselves, right sides together, just like you would handle to bottom of a facing in a blouse.

Stitch a hem distance from the bottom edge through all layers, trim, turn, and press. 

Then topstitch the bands. This gives a nice neat edge to the bands and avoids any clunky awkward hem bumps later (remind me to go back and trim some of those thread ends):

Construction step two:

Now before you sew any side seams make a narrow hem on the back of the shirt and on both fronts. Only then sew the side seams. 

If I am continuing to sew in an easy on me way I will probably straight stitch the side seams and then serge them together.

Construction step three:

Press the seam allowances towards the back and then, and I got this trick from looking at RTW, make a little row of straight stitches to hold it down and secure the flow of the hem at the side seams. In real life this is actually flatter than it looks here in the close up, but even still might give this another press:

a

So there you have it, with my apologies to my friends David Coffin and Maris Olsen for violating a few rules here, but really for gift giving type casual shirts this is a pleasant way to do them.

Have I been clear enough?

What to say before I get back to reporting on sewing projects

Hi folks.

I know it has been a while since I posted and I know you understand. 

We are regrouping around my daughter's situation and that takes time, and effort. She is a remarkable, remarkable person. 

As her mother I can't fix any of this for her but there are some things I can do. One of those is to follow her lead  and do what she needs me to do. That includes not asking her every day how she is feeling. It's pretty clear that we already know the answer to that.

I wasn't quite expecting how much learning this was going to require of me. I have been so lucky in that for some reason none of us are asking why and are just more or less accepting this. I am in fact just very grateful right now that this will be more something that will require some major life adaptations, now and in the future, rather than facing something even more serious. We have all been affected by the situation of the young girl who lives right across the street from Katrina, who the very same week this all happened was diagnosed with a difficult, but hopefully treatable, cancer. May she survive and may my daughter adapt to a new reality.

The truth is, and we all know this, is that in every family there always is something. Right now this is our thing. 

I am also understanding that the most powerful thing anyone can do is keep it normal. You just can't let that be taken away from you. I remember a long time ago in another context really understanding the adage that living well is the best revenge. It is time to understand that again.

I also believe, quite deeply, that whatever lessons you need to learn in this life will come back to you again and again until you learn it. My daughter has always had trouble with uncertainty, she is highly organized about everything to sort of a world class degree, and here she is now asked to learn to live with a long term chronic illness with an uncertain future. The way she is rising to this completely amazes me. Completely.

Me, I have always had trouble with hyper focus on an issue. My general approach is to hit things with a hammer until I fix it. My sewing self education has been a relentless example of this - I keep at it until I understand it, and I have no idea how many people have been left waiting for their dinner as a result.

And now here I am helpless. A test of faith indeed, as it always is when there are no other choices left, which I believe is exactly the point.

Which bring me back to the importance of being normal, or turning my mind away from what I can't do, to what I can. To doing what you would in normal times to make these times normal again.

You know it sort of works.

I am learning that despite the adaptations and the no turning backness of things like this, the more you can be who you always were and the more you can let the person you are worried about be who they always were, the more you can shrink the challenge down to manageable size.

And in all of this for me sewing is no frivolous thing.

After all I have been sewing since I was eight years old. To keep doing that now is to be bigger than anything that happens on the day.

Does this make sense?

So this past weekend I went on a three day sewing retreat where I sewed a lot, talked a lot and saw what other people, my good friend sewers, were making. I wasn't worried about anything all weekend except maybe what ever did I do with that piece I needed for the back bodice that I was sure I packed.

And right now, tonight, I am making a red cape for a Little Red Riding Hood costume for my middle grand daughter named Heidi.

Now what in the world can be any saner than that?

We are going to be alright.

Flypaper thoughts Friday night edition

• Well
• It has been a while since I sewed a Butterick pattern
• Shapes and end result were great
• But
• Where did these instructions come from?
• Remind me when I am boss of the world to ban "for knits" patterns
• With "for wovens" instructions
• Stay-stitching, hems that are basted, pressed, trimmed, finished basted, then pressed, then topstitching two parallel rows of straight stitches
• Twin-needles anyone?
• Cover hem?
• Serged seams?
• This is getting tiring
• No wonder new sewers or any sewer are buying the best indies with 20 pages of good, realistic instructions
• You got to keep up folks
• I try to do that myself
• If my 90 year old mother is on Linkedin why not?
• (she's down as "looking for new opportunities")
• My latest is trying to learn how to apply false eyelashes
• You can buy a lot of fabric for the price of extensions
• I figured DIY for $5 from the Superstore was a better idea
• After all I can make bound buttonholes
• How hard can it be
• Yeah well try making bound buttonholes with one eye glued shut
• Another trick
• Don't put them on upside down so they curl into your eye
• Fairly disappointing when you are going for glamour
• I am going to be so ready for Halloween
• About to gear up for the costume requests
• Trouble is they change their minds the afternoon before
• Last year that was after the feathers were stitched onto the owl cape
• And the owl decided to be a princess like last year instead
• My son-in-law is great at Halloween
• One year the kids were the lion, the witch, and the wardrobe
• The middle child burst into tears
• "Why am I wearing a stupid box with drawers painted on it?"
• So next year she got to be a racoon
• With claws I glued to some wool gloves
• I am thinking of going as the Cat in the Hat
• After all I am the one who says we need to clean this up before your mom comes home
• Currently babysitting a Golden Retriever
• He's having a great time
• So far we are down two pounds of butter, a small dog bed, a package of hamburger buns
• And the pumpkin pie before it got served for Thanksgiving
• What I have learned
• Golden retrievers have heads that are counter height
• Tomorrow I am cutting out a shirt for my son-in-law
• A summer shirt he has been waiting for since before we started covering the tomatoes at night
• Oh well
• Then I am cutting out for myself
• Stay tuned for trial versions of a series of T-shirt patterns
• Because next weekend I am going on a three day sewing retreat
• Same place as last year in the hall of a local yacht club
• So excited
• Nothing but sewing people doing nothing but sewing
• No more trying to pretend that you are really interested in anything else
• It's my birthday next weekend and I can think of no better gift to myself
• Don't you think so?

Construction details reversible Lisette knit skirt

I am in the process of doing my twice a year sewing of samples for the Fabricville blog, Fabricville being the Canadian equivalent of Joann's in the US or Spotlight in Australia, although probably bit more fashion fabric oriented than either one.

I am working with some really interesting suede knit that has a rayon/poly knit fused to the back of it - nicer on the body than some of the scuba versions, I thought.

This has not been previously announced but this fall is also my season to work more intelligently with my cover hem. 

I have a Juki 1500 which is a great machine - I bought it because it handles the bulk of cross seams without hiccups. So it's a strong machine and trouble free but not one for which there are many attachments. 

Of course now, due to many evenings spent in the bath with my phone which I shouldn't use suspended above water (already have had one repair because of that and let's not even talk about the cracks in the screen), I realize that a cover hem binder is a great attachment but one that I don't have for this machine.

As a result I have bought from some mysterious source in China a generic version that is about the size and appearance of a bicycle gear and I have no idea how I am going to attach to my machine before I can even attempt to use it.

Current Facebook group advise suggests drilling your own attachment holes (Ha) or machining up a nice attachment platform in the sheet metal shop some people seem to have out in the garage. 

We actually don't have one of those sheet metal set-ups here  since our garage space is currently filled to the brim with semi disassembled snow blowers, what I am told are investment motorbikes, ride-on lawn mowers inherited from my high speed driving late father-in-law, and towers of winter tires.

No room for a sheet metal substation. as useful as I am sure they are.

So as a fall back I note that some woman are just taping their binders in place with packing tape.

That's probably what I will do.

None of this is on topic because I haven't figured out how to stick the binder to the machine much less use it, so don't expect to see much activity on that front real soon. But I thought you might find this an interesting topic.

I really do want to start using my cover hem for more than basic hemming, so I have been inspired by this two-side fabric to make a reversible skirt. This might be useful when I travel.

Am I the only one who puts literally nothing much in her suitcase and still can hardly lift it once the top is zipped closed, and routinely pays excess weight baggage fees every time she flies?

I need a ton of multi-purpose clothes.

The pattern I used to make my skirt is a beauty Jalie's Lisette:

This is such a nice pattern with a great peg shape and a really nice contour yoga style waistband in View C, which is the view I have made before.

There's something really important you need to know about the Lisette however and that is that it is tight, negative ease tight, and really requires a very stretchy fabric and a really flat abdomen to avoid the dreaded belly cupping.

The first time I made this skirt I liked it but really decided that I was just too old to look like I was in my second trimester. 

When I measured the pattern I also discovered that this knit skirt had been drafted to be about 3" less body measurement in the hips, so of course it was extremely body conscious.

So this time when I used this pattern again I took the measurement of my own hips - 40" - and added that 3" and then selected the pattern size for 43" hips. My idea was this would give me a knit skirt that would just be exactly my measurements, but because it was a knit still stretch enough to be comfortable.

Pretty crafty thinking for a person who cut this out in her slippers and an apron over a nightgown just after breakfast I thought.

Here is a shot of the original skirt, the one in my usual Jalie size laid down over the skirt I made in the size of someone who has hips 3" bigger than mine (also representing a 40" skirt, if you are not confused already):

Sorry the grey skirt looks wrinkled. I grabbed it from my to-be-given-to-someone-smaller pile, for the picture.

Now back to my fabric. One side is navy fake suede and the other a grey knit, sort of like a T shirt. Since I travel a lot with family everywhere and I had this brainiac idea to make a reversible skirt, I decided to use my cover hem on the "wrong side" the grey jersey, to cover up the seam allowances.

In my own mind I figured I would have two skirts, one a nice classy suede one, and the reverse a sort of atheleisure look since the reverse side of me, not the maturing dog walking basement sewing side, is so hip.

So here are the technical details:

1. Side seams. Stitched these first on my sewing machine with a stretch "lightening" stitch. A triple stretch stitch or a narrow zig zag would do just as well.

2. I trimmed the seam allowances down to about 1/4", knits don't fray, and cover stitched from the right side, more or less centering my stitches on either side of the seam. I had navy serger thread in the needles and a grey wooly nylon in the looper. Here and there some of the raw edge of the seam allowances peeked out past the cover stitch loops but I just trimmed those away after with my trusty duck billed scissors, which did, as they so often do, save my life.

Here is what that all looked like:

3. Of course when I considered the next step, which was the hem, I realized I wasn't as smart as I thought I was. Of course turning the blue suede to the wrong side to hem would mean there would be a blue hem allowance on the grey side. I solved this by pulling out an old school trick from this old school arsenal and put on a false hem.

A false hem, in case you are new school, is simply a strip of fabric sewn along the bottom of a garment and when this is turned up the seam becomes the hem fold and therefore is invisible. I stitched a grey side of the strip (I sewed it in a circle to match the circumference measurement of the hem)  to the blue right side of the skirt which of course gave me a hem allowance on the grey side that was also grey when I turned it over to hem. I cover hemmed the hem just like I did with the seams.

So this is what the hem on the skirt looked like from the right side:

And the turned up hem with the raw edge more or less covered by the cover hemming on the wrong side:

And here is what the seam joining the false hem to the skirt looks like when the hem was finished:

4. Having warmed up on the hem I did more or less the same thing for the waistband, that I split in half along what would have been the fold line, added seam allowances. This allowed me to make a waistband that was one side blue and one side grey. I then stitched the waistband unit to the top of the skirt, blue right side to blue right side, then cover hemmed that done like I did the hem and the seam allowances:

I am pretty pleased with this project. I have done a lot of sewing for other people recently, and I was so happy to do that, but it did feel good to invest a bit more time than was necessary on something I can wear.

Next I am making a jacket to go with this (my daughter has worked hard to keep me from veering off to matchy match with only mixed success) and when the whole deal is done expect some pictures of all of this on me. 

But in the meantime I thought you might find the construction details interesting.

Another one of countless Adeline dresses

There have been many versions made of Stylearc's Adeline dress and I have made several for myself and now two for my remarkable daughter. 

The pattern is intended for a woven but really it works just as fine in a knit.

Katrina needs really comfortable clothes right now so I made this version in a French terry. The only real change we made was to dispense with the shaped hem facing, probably necessary in a woven, as Katrina found it too restrictive for movement. In a knit this uneven hemline turns up just fine and of course I cover hemmed it since I am trying to use my cover hem as much as possible these days.

Here is how it looks, really who wouldn't use a dress like this? 

This is a cocoon dress, wider at the waist than the hem and the pockets are large and as a consequence set quite close together. This may seem funny when you put them on but really, as a place to put hands, are quite functional.

The V neck here is faced, this is a pretty plain dress, but there is a nice roll-up detail with the sleeves that I actually think looks even better in a knit than a woven. I just ditch stitched the cuff along the seam line on both the top and the underneath side of the turn back to hold it in place.

I think Katrina likes this about as much as anything I have ever made her and it's always nice to score a win with adult children who have better taste than you do.

Flypaper thoughts this nigh's edition

• We are regrouping
• That's what you do
• Everyday life is where all of us live anyway
• I have been meaning to tell you
• My new best way to cook any kind of greens is in the slow cooker
• Force them down under the lid, add garlic and olive oil and turn it on to high
• Check it when you remember that you left something cooking
• Really terrific
• I have decided to minimize the cooking
• But maximize the sewing
• Seems like the right balance to me
• My 85 year old neighbour has just adopted a Golden Retriever puppy
• The whole street is now raising it
• Turns out she knew what she was doing
• After all
• Currently working on a reversible skirt
• I have family everywhere and some travel this fall
• When you travel with five pairs of shoes
• Four coats because you never know
• Knitting projects that have seen more travel than production
• There isn't much room for clothes
• So I had this brainwave about reversible clothes
• Stay tuned on that one
• Speaking of travel
• Airplanes are last on my list
• Remember when you could smell the food in the galley
• And you sat there wondering should you say chicken or beef
• Always there was mushrooms
• And silverware
• Now the attendants drag garbage bags down the aisles 
• And collect plastic cups of ice cubes
• Every flight I take there are two inched deducted from my leg room
• And I get bonked on the head by folks trying to put steamer trunks in the overhead
• It is a great injustice that trains don't make sense
• I actually tried to cost a train trip from here to my son in San Francisco
• $11,000 and that's one way
• I could book a flight to Mars for that
• Or go around the world on a ship
• Actually can confirm that
• When I was 8 my dad and I took a train home from the Rockies
• There were little beds and you were rocked to sleep across the country
• Which reminds me
• I had a friend whose dad was the chef for the CNR's president
• One day from university we went down to Central Station in Montreal
• Down down five layers of tracks down underground
• And he sat us in the president's car and cooked us dinner
• Now why don't they give us back the trains
• So I could go a little way from my house and get off a little way from my kid's house
• With the only interruption being
• Fields and rivers and the windows of houses sliding by
• Windows where families eat dinner and dogs run around yards
• And crops zooming by that you can't name
• Except the ones that you can
• And that makes you proud that after all these years you can remember someone teaching you
• That's sugar beets
• And walking between the cars which feels dangerous but isn't
• And playing cards being something to pass the time
• On a train there is time to pass
• So unusual
• Can you imagine
• Having extra time
• And every one wouldn't say the first thing you talk to them
• "Busy I'm so busy right now"
• Like we all know only one line to say to each other
• And you could take so many suitcases that they wouldn't be called bags
• And you wouldn't need to make your clothes reversible
• And five pairs of shoes seemed about right
• If they gave us back the trains