On stashing

The issue of to stash or not to stash is a burning one in our world, and no doubt the reality check of the recession/depression/slow down is sensibly making us think over the whole fabric collection thing. Two of my favourite bloggers Marji and Carolyn  have written articulately about this, and they have me thinking, and so has the weather.

This week I have been thinking a lot of my background. 

Because it has been so damn cold.

Tuesday I woke up to an email from my sister in Winnipeg who has a 10 year old and a 12 year old (I got married young and had kids young, my sisters did the later marriage and baby thing, but that's another story) that said this:

It's -48 this morning and our Mom is parked outside my door at 5:30 a.m. to take her grandchildren to the pool. Not too many seniors at that age would attempt that without a thought. She lost her husband 16 years ago and look at her now. In some ways and I mean some ways I hope I am just like her.

We grew up when all the winters were like this one and we learned to plan for it. When you grew up in rural Manitoba you have this thing in the back of your mind called "The Big Storm". If the Big Storm came would you have enough in the house to get by? (The fact that half of the family went through the Depression working on the railway, on the farm, or trying to hold on to the one family business really made this part of our culture). So our freezers were always full and there were always cans under the stairs.

I think this has affected the way I look at fabric.

When the Big Storm comes will I have enough to sew?

So I have gone through huge stash collecting stages, regrettable stages of stash busting where I made up totally inappropriate garments from wonderful fabric (some Quick-'n-easy patterns in good silk still haunt me), and back to where I am now.

Collecting with a strategy, because it is so nice when there is a big storm, fiscal, emotional, or just because the local fabric stores have gone down the polyester print drain, to be able to reach out and put your hands on exactly the right thing.

But to be smart you have to do this strategically. To my mind the way a good librarian would build a great book collection.

Here are my rules:

1. Buy large amounts of solids, buy small amounts (one garment only) of prints. AACA (after a certain age) too much print on one body is too much. A top or a skirt, a dress if it's quiet, no more. It is a waste of good money to have 3/4 yard of anything left over and you can't use a print, most prints, twice in different garments without people noticing, most of all yourself.

So 5 meters of black anything for me makes sense (in 3 different garments this same fabric will look like 3 different garments, not repeats). Anything more than 2 yards in a print is just going to make me upset because of the waste.

Distinctive fabrics (this season's colour, print or texture) can and should be purchased only on an as needed basis, i.e. you will be cutting into it this week.

2. Never buy on price. OK, I, and no one else I know, is going to stick with this one because a deal is a deal. However I find this helps : I ask myself how this same fabric will look after 5 washes. That usually does it.

3. Exception to Rule 2. Stock up on notions. I am sure I am not the only one who has been shocked to see how much thread, interfacing, and buttons can add up at the cash, more than the fabric itself in some cases, many cases. If you get a deal on silk lining that you can use in a coat - buy it. Keep the fixings around.

Nothing gets a deferred project on the move faster than having everything you need in the house.

Which brings me to my big revelation of the weekend:

Most of my money-wasting-don't-really-need-it purchases have occurred when I just "ran out to get some thread". Keeping those fevered trips down to a minimum is the best way I have found to cut back on poor stash additions, and to keeping myself under financial control.

So to me the issue is not whether or not to stop stashing, but how to stash smart.

The way the vendor situation is developing, and the way the choices are narrowing, I am not totally convinced that fabric purchasing will soon become more work than it is now. So I better get a start on this.

Am I the only one who doesn't wish she could get into some sort of fabric shopping time machine and go back to the fabric stores of her youth where Egyptian cotton, decent shirting, Swiss dot, and sandwashed silks were there by the bolt?

OK, off I go now. To sew up some nice warm fleece pants and stay inside. I hear we have a big storm coming.

Ottobre tops finished

As promised, earlier in a busy week, here are the two Ottobre tops I finished for my SWAP.  I agonized over the longer top because I was worried about the mutton-dressed-as-lamb thing with an empirish waistline but I am pretty happy with the way this turned out. There are long ties that sort of integrate the under bust seam into a waistline and the lower part is panels, as opposed to under bust gathering so that helps too. The grey top is another version of the blue one posted earlier and I like the slight ruching at the bottom that serves as a pretty decent foil to the midriff/waistline issues that come with the territory. Easy to do with about 6" of clear elastic zig zagged into the side seams, stretched over about 8". Trick is to start the elastic about 2 1/2" above the hem so the sides don't pull up.

Pants are a product of my pant fitting experiments.
 I could wear these knit tops to teach in, they are essentially T skirts but both in nice rayon knit and with some details I think they look a little more than that, I hope.

Virtuous sewing

It is amazing how we sewers are totally uninspired by routine, fix-up, repair, alteration type sewing.

Case in point is a black straight skirt I made last year but was never quite comfortable wearing. It just felt too tight even though measurement wise there was not reason that it should have. After leaving this skirt in the to-do pile for about 10 months I finally dragged it out last week and figured out that for whatever reason the lining was too tight. I came too this conclusion by ripping open the lining side seams and finding that it was suddenly just fine - I could sit, walk, climb stairs without feeling like I had to take mini steps. No idea why this was (hang on ... is that the skirt that I changed the centre back seam on to accommodate a vent and move the zipper to the back ... did I forget to add the new seam allowance to the lining... bingo I think we have a winner).

OK anyway. It was obvious that I needed to add to the lining side seams and I didn't want it to look too crummy. So in the end I grabbed my Value Village silk tie collection ( I think I was once going to make a quilt) and cut two pieces from the thinner end and inserted it in the lining. Sort of cool looking I decided.

Note to self. If you have to do a repair/boring sewing job try to find some creativity in it to give yourself the energy to actually get it done.

Ten months is too long for any 20 minute job to be in the in basket.

A top machine

Well no not really but I have been working on two more Ottobre tops for my SWAP and am pretty pleased with myself, because I have tried something new and easy and it worked. Both tops will have to be hemmed and photographed in the next day or two but here are the details.

Simple I know but for me something new.

I liked the blue jersey top I did a few days ago enough to try another version. My SWAP colours are black, grey, red and white (boring I know but the assignment this year was to do a typical week) and one of my tops is from some grey rayon knit that has been festering waiting for transformation for a while now. A grey top is not the most exciting project in the world so for the neckline and sleeve binding (the sleeves in this pattern are gathered slightly into sort of cuff-like binding) I used some patterned knit that I had a scrap stuck away in a corner. Why only a scrap when I bought 3 meters of the stuff is a good question. Suffice it to say that sometimes, despite long experience, I sew something that I know will not suit me, because I am so entranced by the picture on the pattern envelope. Of course this meant only that some perfectly good fabric got wasted on a droopy old dress that even my husband noticed was highly unflattering. So out it went with some remnants saved because I couldn't face a complete sacrifice. That remnant became the binding for my grey top, and this totally simple thing that most other sewers have done, made me feel so creative.

Second innovation was to finally, five years after I bought it, use the belt loop maker attachent for my coverstitch serger to make ties of top #2 which is a variation of the first pattern,

Pretty slick and completely skill free as a process. Of course the fabric was very stretchy and I was not able to fold under or zig zag the tie ends without mega distortions, so for now the end are just knotted.

Off to bed now, school tomorrow.

Time

Random thought.

I have been sewing since I was 8 and made Barbie her first nightgown. I am 55 now. You know a lot changes in life. You live in different cities, people move in and out of your life, kids grow up, jobs change and one day you even stop going to work (not there yet). But my whole life I have sewn. I put the fabric out on the table and unwrap the pattern pieces, get up and go to the iron to press, just like I always have done, for my whole life.

Everything may change but when I do this I haven't. Sewing erases time for me and puts me in touch with all the happy times of my past, makes them present, I am in the moment and it is the same moment and I am the same person I always was.

Sewing gives me security in my life.

The first day of the rest of my year

Resolutions for myself.

The first one is to sew more and make more Ottobre or stylish-but-not-stressful wearable clothes.

 

The challenge of course is to find the time.

I have a lot going on. I love my job and am going to be teaching full time for about 2 more years, and after that about 2/3 time until I am 60. There are always lectures to prepare, classes to teach, reading and marking. The house always has signs all over it that say "clean this up", Rascal likes to walk and I have a standing policy that if anyone in my family, husband, kids in town, kid away, sisters, mom wants to talk, I sit and talk. And of course I need to get more exercise stay in contact with friends etc.

I have also made the resolution to sleep more. Don't laugh, even though I am right now.

There are some cardiac issues in my family that eventually seem to catch up with us and this fall I had all that tested out. I have noted that when I am rested and relaxed my b/p drops a lot (someone give this woman a research grant) and just before Christmas noticed this in the news too. So I have decided to make sure I go to bed early and to try to give up the waking up in the middle of the night and spending 2-3 hours working on Life's issues.

I am even going to try to learn to nap. Something I have never been able to do (the mind like a squirrel cage thing). My daughter works shifts as a nurse and is a world class napper. In fact she and my two boys too never really dropped their naps from when they were babies. My husband has perfected the dozing off thing (usually active when I am summarizing the things I thought about in my Life's issues middle-of-the night sessions) which he calls "listening but just resting my eyes." I need to learn how to do this too.

So when and how am I going to get in the sewing time I need?

Several things. First I am going to get my dedicated sewing area back soon. I gave this up when my youngest son moved back home and combined being a rep for a surf/clothing company with going to school. Half my basement is now a storeroom, complete with racks. It made Christmas shopping easy (wholesale and no shipping) but bumped my sewing back to the set it up and take it down on the dining room table thing. I got so much more done when I could cruise by and do a little stitching while I yelled "I am just putting something in the dryer, be up in a minute" up the stairs.

My DH has built a garage over the holidays (that project slowed down today by the blizzard) and when he moves all his projects out there I get the lovely two window very large room he built under our extension. I should be able to set up a permanent cutting table, pressing area, and all my machines and fabric in there. This will be a big help.

Secondly I am defining Fridays as my sewing day. 3 out of 4 Fridays a month I have this day off and if I run the whole week around trying to keep this day clear I should be able to make some real progress. If I had this day in the office I would and could do it, so I have to do the same for my sewing days.

Now off to start some New Year's cooking. Of course there is no one home but Rascal and DH and I. The boys got snowed in out last night. The youngest had to sleep at the bar downtown where he worked when they got socked in by the blizzard, the other guy just stayed over at a house party. My daughter's dinner guests mostly stayed over at her house too.

We may have a full house or nobody for dinner tonight. The streets have to be cleared first and the blowing snow has to stop.

I will get some things done just in case and get some other things organized.

Because tomorrow is Friday.

Happy New Year

Many resolutions this year but one of them is to just make time to sew more. In evidence of that I just finished this Ottobre top, design number 12, under the wire as my husband waits for me to start making our curry for New Year's.

It was my first Ottobre pattern and I must say I really enjoyed it. I have been troubled for some time about my failure this past year to actually sew anything from my Burda World of Fashion magazines. I used to sew from these magazines almost exclusively for years and loved the style. I used to look at my BWF and feel I wanted to make, and wear, just about everything in the magazine.

But somewhere along the line that changed.

Or maybe I did. And maybe that is something I should be concerned about. 

It seemed to me for a long time that Burda clothes were highly fashionable but very wearable. These were days too when I was a young mother and only worked part-time. But now it seems to me that the clothes now look less and less comfortable. The words "plunging neckline" appear a lot, the shoes all have 5 inch heels, and everything just looks so tight. And there are 42 pattern pieces to many things.

Don't get me wrong. It is probably not them, it's me. I still love many of the coat patterns but my sewing time is tighter than my clothes need to be, and I wonder sometimes how long some of the styles will be around. I worked with a fabulously dressed Russian woman at my last job and she sewed all her clothes from Burda mag.They were great, but I couldn't help thinking that many of them would go old fast, so I started to look more critically at what I would actually sew from the magazines that I would still think would be cool in 4 months.

While I was spending way to much time on worrying about this, when I should have been thinking about the economy for instance, or world events, I ordered some Ottobre magazines on a whim. Ottobre is famous for its Finnish kids patterns but twice a year they also put out a woman's issue. One thing I noticed when I looked at the pictures in Ottobre was that the models all had funky, comfortable Scandinavian shoes, like the ones I actually wear, and that nearly everything there (maternity clothes excepted, although if I don't cut back on the festive chocolate soon I may fit into them) was something I would put on and wear to work in my real life.

The rayon jersey (thank you Fabric Mart)  T shirt here is my first attempt and I found the instructions clear and interesting. Thanks too to Debbie Cook for her excellent instructions on how to end a coverhem that solved that mystery and problem for me.

The way it looks to me tonight Ottobre may give me one route to add a little Euro style to my wardrobe that actually fits into my prosaic East coast Canadian lifestyle.

Neat.

Oh, resolution #1 : Sew more Ottobre designs.

Happy New Year!