A change of seasons

Spring officially begins tomorrow, but I have already declared it here. 


It has to be.


This week I purged perfectly good winter clothes that I was sick to death of and put them into a big garbage bag. I took it down to the diabetes society bin and threw them in and let the metal drawer close before I could get sensible and drag them back out.


This week I also decided black is no longer, after my whole working career, my basic. Black and grey make sense of course when you are traveling for work, or downtown in buildings, but my life is changing. At the end of April I become a part-time teacher and that's it. My private life or the classroom, no more meetings, no more pitches about projects people are "so excited" about.


Black is so sensible when you need to stretch a wardrobe but there are a lot of cool colours that you can't wear with it. OK white, sure, and primaries and red and grey but it is not so comfortable with anything quirky or individual IMO. So I am going to go in other directions now. Indigo navy, who knows what else.


This week I took my partially completed SWAP that was based on black and white and red and winter fabrics and bagged it. Put it away for next fall when I am likely to change my mind again and need those clothes.


I refuse to do any duty sewing. Ever. OK except in emergency, family situations. But never, not for myself.


I am done sewing a wardrobe. It's time I sewed a life.


And where does this leave the White Shirts? Right where they should be. In the department of I will make them when I get up in the morning and decide that's what I want to sew. And I will. I have collected some wonderful fabric and patterns but the long sleeved versions will be waiting along with the old SWAP for cold weather. The seasonal white shirts will appear not when required, but when desired.


On the subject of seasons I was killing some time in my office this week between appointments and read CNN for news. I got distracted from even that by an article on midlife etc. etc. A question posed was that people tend at mid life to think of all the things they would like to have done, but haven't.


So I wrote that down and thought about it. I was surprised at how short the list was, but it was important to me, and some of it I note had to do with things. Here goes:

• I would like every single thing in my wardrobe to be a "piece" I love
• I would like my house to be really clean, every day. (this will require getting rid of some family members and the dogs, and will bite into my sewing "pieces" time, oh well maybe next life)
• I would like to have a big laundry sink. You know for dirty paint brushes and muddy boots and big things that you want to soak. Somebody ripped out the old one that came with this house and replaced it with a bar sink. All you can put in that is a teaspoon and a shoe lace.
• I would like to be able to say I am in the best shape of my life. This probably isn't as hard as it sounds considering I have never even tried to go there so far.
• I would like to write a book, OK, even a booklet. On sewing.
• I would like to have the same number of towels in my cupboard at the end of the year as at the beginning. Why does no one ever know where the towels have gone? The same people, incidentally, that want to know what I have done with the other sock.

That's it. I realize this is a weird list. Not on it are family or travel I notice. I have done a lot of traveling in my life and worked in other countries and any more places I go to are a bonus. I have a husband I really like, and will like even better when he comes home in  few weeks. I had three kids and I am glad about that. Two boys and a girl. I used to wonder if I should have had another girl, but then now I have Scarlett so that's fine. As to working I have had some tough jobs but at the end of my career as a teacher I am doing the best job of my life. I am glad I will be finishing work this way - imagine if the best work of your life had happened at the beginning and the tough jobs came after? 

I don't wish I had a big house. I can hardly keep up with this one. I don't wish I had more money. If I have a fabric budget and can afford to go visit my son in the States and my family in the rest of the country I have all that really care about.

And I want spring to be here, really here. It's change time.

Jalie 2686 Pajamas

Yes I know I am behind. This weekend I definitely have to get someone to take some pants shots and get those up.

In the meantime I have been making my daughter some spring PJs to wear while she is pregnant. I used Jalie 2686 which is a terrific pattern. The only changes I made were to add length because she is tall and to eliminate the back neck facing (just serged the collar on) which I feel is a bit uncomfortable in pajamas.

I love this pattern. It is so smart. I like the collar being a little rounded, a bit retro, and I love the clever waist treatment on the pants. The back is elasticized and the front has a ribbon through it. Of course being corny I made these Easter colours.

This is one of Jalie's 20 sizes in one pattern envelope patterns that I will use in many variations for different people.

Now about the white shirts.

I haven't forgotten, just detouring on things that need to get done over the next month. I am going to be making some summer dresses for a month holiday with various family members in Florida. My DH has been working straight for nearly a year (and yes that includes many, many weekends) so we have rented a place in St. Augustine and are setting him up in the yard with the BBQ.

I am going to see if I can make some of my summer dresses with PMB to expand my software repertoire.

In the meantime too I am marking, about 130 assignments and papers over the next four weeks ... any takers? I am sure I can overnight them to you wherever you are.

Saturday night grab bag

I have had a lot on the old plate recently but feel like doing a random update:

• I have been sewing pajamas for daughter. She loves the last flannelette pair I made her, but that was last Christmas and those old red and green dots are looking tired. I am doing two pairs in spring prints, in flannelette still, in the hopes that these will be good outfits for her to wear around the house being morning sick. Least I can do.
• Why do we sew so many fancy patterns and outfits and neglect the nice simple projects like pajamas? Cotton flannelette is a dream to sew. I should be making some things like this for myself next.
• My DH is coming home in about 5 weeks after 17 months away on and off - carefully organized to include two Canadian winters I have noted. I can hardly wait. What do I miss most? Having someone to tell all my opinions too - even those times when he lies there in bed saying things like "I'm listening, it's just that I am resting my eyes."
• This last week I wanted to have him around to yell "if anyone shots me in the head and the bullet goes in one side and out the other, you better not go off into outer space."
• Outer space drives me crazy. I mean to me it is just another example of a bunch of men going off and starting something new when they haven't finished the first project. And what did going to the moon get us? Tang.
• Why when sewing makes me instantly happy and calm do I not find more time to do it? That is the big question of my life. 
• In four weeks I am officially going part-time at my job, cutting my work load in half and hopefully teaching online courses only for one term a year. This will require a total wardrobe reconfiguration. That is the big issue for me.
• One of the things I will be doing is taking care of Miss Scarlett part-time, until my daughter goes on mat. leave and then again afterwards. A day or two a week, with time off for some vacations for me. The older I get the more I like time with younger people (which is why I like teaching) so this works for me. I have some Cat in the Hat print that I am going to turn into pillowcases.
• I did a big wardrobe purge this week and realized that a lot of the things I got rid of were trendy items I got sick of real quick. Style and fashion are different - I am going to try to focus on style.
• I am considering turning a large portion of my front lawn into a vegetable garden this summer. Why not? That's where the sun is. Why spend a summer fighting dandelions when I could be growing things? Have you ever had fresh celery? It is wonderful and not at all, not at all like the stuff you buy.
• I am going to start the summer versions of my white shirts, in between other projects. Going away in May and want some summer dresses done up first.

I'll be back

I feel bad about not posting recently. Since I got back from Tennessee last week things have been mega busy. Work has hit the mid-term marking tsunami and Mr. Rascal went in to have bladder stones removed (very successful) that long-standing issue is now done. More importantly my DD is pregnant with her second child. Unfortunately despite a good later pregnancy and great delivery last time, her first trimester is again really difficult. As result I am doubling up on grandmother support and bring Miss Scarlett over here as much as I can so she can rest. I have also shelved other projects to get going on some requested pj's for my DD.


Which I do enjoy, and I have discovered Scarlett loves my sewing room. She talks a lot and her big line is "Downstairs, sewing" which means she walks around my sewing room throwing around old patterns and moving the scraps in my scrap box. She also sits on my lap and watches the machine work and says "Wow, wow" every time the needle goes up and down. Of course we are not working on seams that are longer than 2 1/2" but I feel she has real potential.


So I will be back, probably over the weekend. Time in my sewing room is like plugging this energizer bunny into the power supply.


And you know what I mean.

Sewing intensive in Tennessee- lightbulb moment on pants fitting

I am back in Knoxville visiting my husband who is still working on a project here. I am having an excellent time but I realize for a normal person this is one nutty way to spend spring break.

I go for long walks and can't get over that the place is not covered in ice and snow.We eat out and just enjoy the people. Tomorrow we are going to Alabama and I am pretty happy about that because I have never been there.

But most of the time I am in my hotel room sewing.

My husband, displaying one of the reasons I married him, borrowed a nice machine from the girlfriend of one of the guys on site and it was set up for me when I arrived. And we know I have 13 boxes of fabric here so I am pretty much in my idea of an ideal situation:

No phones.
No cooking.
No errands.
No job.
No housework.
Nobody who needs me to do anything at all.

Just sewing.

I call this a vacation.

I brought my CD with Wild Ginger's Pattern Master Boutique software with me. I have used it a bit in the past but never really had complete success, particularly with the pants. You get out what you put in I suppose. So I decided, since there was no way I was going to get time to do this at home in my busy life, to just see what I could do for a pants pattern.

I have been wanting a nice simple slim legged pants with a waistband like I see in the collections and do not see in the pattern books. I figured they would go with my white shirts and whatever else I decide to make.

So I started my research and looked a pretty much every pants shot I could find in the blogs and Patternreview.

I was absolutely amazed to see that most people, whatever their shape, had the same problems:

1. Too tight across the butt but with baggy folds under the butt
2. A sort of pouchy thing going on under the stomach, like a handful of extra fabric, and some wrinkles at the top of the legs at the front.

I even saw in some Threads articles with their own patterns this extra fabric at the front crotch. I know those model girls wouldn't wear pants like that if they weren't getting paid for it.

I mean raise your hand if you haven't made 497 pairs of pants with this exact same problem.

So before I did anything else and started 498 I sat down in this hotel room and thought about it.

That's when it occurred to me that we forget about legs, as in we walk around in pants, we don't just stand in front of the digital camera for a picture. And then I thought about arms, which also move (mine have been heaving boxes of fabric around the hotel room) and it occurred to me that pants and a crotch are just a sort of another version of 3D drafting just like sleeves and armholes are.

So what do I know about armholes?

1. A higher tailored set-in sleeve armhole is more comfortable and gives more movement than a looser dropped armhole.
2. A closer armhole, in addition to giving more mobility, has less excess fabric and fewer wrinkles, than a dropped armhole.

When I thought about this some more I realized what pants do most people wear most often? Jeans. Now I know whatever your throw-on default garment is, it is that because it is comfortable. So jeans are comfortable and generally don't have a lot of that extra fabric at the front thing happening. They also have a crotch that is cut closer to the body than other pants.

In PMB there are four crotch styles from loose to close to the body - culottes, trousers, slacks and jeans. Because I was fooling around making slim pants and a looser pattern for linen wide legged pants I was using the slacks and trouser crotches.

I changed both patterns to the jeans crotch, even though neither pair were jeans, and presto the extra fabric at the front disappeared and the pants ( I made 6 muslins during this process) became a lot more comfortable.

I also rethought my crotch length measurement. In all my versions I was measuring my crotch length as specified but ending up with something too long. I then realized that when you add a waistband you want the top of that to be at your waist, and if you add a waistband onto pants that stop at your waist, well you are going to settle them in and give yourself a droopy crotch. So I subtracted my 1" waistband, total of 2" from my crotch measurements and that did the trick.

In addition I learned a few things about PMB that might be useful to other users of this program, understanding this works for my body which is essentially tall, with a butt that sticks out a lot, no real hip shape, as in straight up and down, and the kind of belly that comes with three babies, a section, and leaving the category of spring chicken.

1. I wanted less fabric in the thigh like the RTW slim pants I saw. You get this in PMB by reducing the knee width setting, this pulls in the thigh. I brought mine down to 0.

2. My front darts looked poofy at the bottom. I tried every configuration of dart placement and length with no improvement. Then I re-read the Help notes in the program and it said to release the darts at the fullest part. Since my abdomen is sort of a unit from waist to crotch there is no curve and no high point. I don't need dart shaping where there is no shape. So I set the program for three darts (this made them tiny and also moved the front crotch vertical giving me the fabric where I needed it) erased the dart lines in Pattern Editor and just sewed up my muslin without any front darts. Nice and smooth.

3. Being hip shapless I have always been annoyed by that jodphur thing which I could not get rid of in the PMB pattern. I then went back to the fine print in Help and realized that how the program works is to give you the widest fabric at the front where you have identified your hip depth (I located this not by anything happening at my hip but by my widest-measurement which really is created by the big rear end not anything happening hipwise). So to get rid of this curve I moved my hip depth measurement in Settings up, from 8" to 4.25". If you look at the slim pants pattern I have put here you can see that little curve is close to the top, giving me a little extra so the pants don't pull across my belly. I also lowered the side seams .75" and the front 1". All my RTW pants dip down at CF. You will notice that there is almost no shape to my front crotch, I took out -.02 of the crotch shape (first arrow).

4. The back crotch after all of this was easy since I knew what I would do on paper. I opted for round back crotch, wild cut (meaning extra at CB waist) increased the back crotch extension .25,  changed the back crotch break to -2.5 and moved in the crotch shape 1.8 (second arrow) ( this is the old lower and scoop out combo).

5. Finally I added 2" to length and choose a contoured waistband because they are more comfortable.

What I have ended up with are pants that I think fit pretty near as perfect as you get on an imperfect body, all this info saved into defaults and a program I can now use to draft different pant styles.

It took isolation in a hotel room to get here, and I hope some of this information might be useful to you too.

Pictures of some finished pants are forthcoming when DH comes back.

Happy Valentine's Day!

Happy Valentine's Day to you all. And I would like to share my own Valentine's Day thought with you.


One of the best things about being a grown-up is that you see and appreciate love in more places. I am so glad to have left behind the stage of life where it had to be the guy or nothing. It's so good to be in a place where good love is as big as romantic love. It is a good thing to let your definition of true love grow.


I spent today with Miss Scarlett who was down with a cold and quite happy to toddle around my house with my "jewels" on (my old out of date necklaces) sit with me and look at books and give me lots of snotty nose kisses. I was happy to make the dogs happy with a long off leash walk in the snow at the golf course, and for the handmade heart ornament my daughter made last night before she went to bed  for her shift this morning at 7:00 a.m. at the hospital.


And I talked to my 83 year old mother today too who read the Valentine's Day card she got from the group she does reading tutoring at the local elementary school with "You rock. You no everything."


I also got a nice email from a friend I made when I was 17. She lost her husband before he was 30 and gone on to be the aunt who never misses the game. People who know how to love aren't held back from much.


So I hope some of this touched your life today. And Happy Valentine's Day from me.

The latest from the completely lost it department

I didn't get any, not any, sewing done this weekend. I did manage to go down into my sewing room and give it a few wish-I-was-here looks, but that was it.


On Friday I am flying down to DC to spend a weekend with my son and on Sunday afternoon going to Knoxville for the week to visit with DH who is still there.


It's my spring break from school and for me to get out of here is an operation not unlike the invasion of Normandy, and that's not an operation that regretfully involves much leisurely sewing.


I now have both household dogs, Mr. Rascal and my son-away-at-school's dog Birdie, on homemade, vet approved food. It started out as a health thing for Mr. R's diet (working great, latest bloodwork was perfect) but I couldn't stand the look in Birdie's eyes when the R man got the great food, and actually since Birdie is the gentleman of the pair, well it was only fair ...


So I have spent pretty much the parts of the weekend I was not marking student papers making and freezing 50 dog meals. I know I never got it together to be this organized or considerate of my children when they were all at home, but then again I never had to pay vet bills for them.

I am also wondering what I am going to be doing when I am in Tennessee. DH and I will be together in DC and the weekend at the end of the visit but he will be working during the week. Since I am flying I won't be taking my machine, but in our last conversation he told me that there are now 13 boxes of fabric I have ordered in his hotel room and that has cheered me right up during my no sew weekend. I have no recollection of what I ordered over the last couple of months, apart from the fact I got some real deals and I needed it.


My plan is to take all my cutting stuff and cut patterns out while I am there, and do some knitting. No interruptions. Won't that be great?


I will have a car so I might go off and see a few sites too, like any fabric stores I can find. Anyone have any suggestions?