Road trip

I haven't blogged for a bit because things have been active:

• my husband is home at the end of his third winter away. I have learned to live alone, a life stage I skipped up to now, and learned too that the absolute happiest I am is when I am doing my own thing (translate that to fooling around in my sewing room) with the sounds of someone else knocking around the house and interrupting me.
• my youngest son was in a terrible car accident, failure of a friend's vehicle, a limited concussion but otherwise fine, back at work today. All four of them are OK. A miracle. That cat has many lives and don't think I'm not counting them. That's all I can say.
• I am wrapping up work before heading out Friday for a month in Tennessee and two months, with family visiting, in Florida. I am so lucky to be working online until the fall because I can go off and do things like this. 

On the sewing front I have finished those 12 pairs of StyleArc Peta pants/capris/shorts.

I fully realize this is crazy but I am just so pleased I can make pants that fit that I couldn't stop. One of my sisters said to me, "where are you going to wear all those new pants?"

"Around," I said, "around."

It has to be the crotch curve and here that is:

Flat short front crotch and L shaped back - it works on a lot of women

I am currently involved in the usual paper stopping - mail re-routing - dog food buying - clothes packing jobs of getting ready to go away, which in my case also involves intensive discussions about how many machines and how much fabric to bring. This is where I am so far, piled up in the grandkid's room:

It is a delicate balance between enough to keep me busy and not so much that this stops feeling like a vacation. I am going to be with a golfing husband after all and Mr. Rascal, and have my daughter Misses Scarlett and Heidi and my son-in-law down for three weeks, and hopefully my mother-in-law and sister-in-law too.

I realize that for many people time away involves beaches and books and quiet time together but that's not just us. We have in fact never really had a holiday without family and I have never gone on a vacation without a sewing machine.

I have been thinking about this lately, seeing many early retirees around me, and have realized that my life is always going to be about an entourage, always going to be busy, always going to have sewing going on in it when a rational person would be doing something else.

And I will keep working, I like it.

I will tell you a story about work off site.

About a year ago I was on the road and teaching online. One night, just before I was due to go live with a class, we got stuck in one of those awful rush hour traffic jams on the Baltimore DC corridor. My husband is never late, always precise, and more or less was losing it with trying to get me to the hotel so I could use the wireless. 

When it became clear that wasn't going to happen I looked around and noticed we were driving by some pretty fancy suburbs.

"Those folks all have to have wireless," I said "Take the next exit."

So I put on my headset, opened my laptop, and put it on my lap and we drove around until we picked up a signal.

So if you looked out your window a year ago and saw a car parked in front of your house and a stressed out man and a talking woman in it, that was just us, not some sneaky security firm.

I got my class taught without a hitch, went online two minutes before the start time.

The class was, coincidently, called "crisis communication."

Off to the dentist now.

Talk later.

Aren't we lucky

Thanks to my fascination with politics and another of the innumerable Republican debates I finished a pair of Stylearc Peta pants tonight, two pairs of shorts, and two pairs of capris or whatever you call the 7/8 versions. By the end of tomorrow night that will make 12 pairs of bottoms from either this or the Cargo pants pattern.


This whole exercise has reinvigorated my interest in TNTs, and an appreciation of their utility.


I mean really.


Once you have a pair of pants that fit, or in my case a pattern line, what's there to change that is any real trouble? 


What I like about this is the ease of an elastic waist in pants, like the Linda pants, that don't have a dopey cut or leg. These look like normal stylish (oh that's where the style arc comes from) pants rather than kind-to-my-middle pants.


In the process of unpacking my summer clothes, because I am going to warmer places soon, I tried on an old pair of store bought pants that fit me pretty well, apart from the droopy bum part and the girdle like feel of the front.


Well tonight I tossed them and thought, baby I can do better myself thanks.


I have a horrifying thought for you to think.


Can you imagine if you had to depend entirely on strangers, on stores, to cloth your own particular life and body?


Can you imagine if you could only wear what you could find in the stores in that season? 


Can  you imagine having to wear pants or shorts all summer with big pleated pockets on your butt when you knew they just made you look ridiculous and that was the last place you needed anything extra, but you still had to wear them because that is all you could find?


How lucky for us that we are independent of all of that and can do for ourselves.


How lucky.


O.K. there are so many things I could say that are political but I won't. 


But I will say one thing that really, really burns me.


I have read several spindoctor type articles that have emphasized how Callista came from such a modest and in fact almost poor background that, get this, "the only clothes she could wear were those her mother handmade for her."


Poor, poor girl.


The only thing poor about this is the reporting because I have read the original quote (in case you are wondering, I googled Callista because I absolutely wanted to know if the hair was a wig, or a hat, or a something - if that's all because of the hairspray then that woman's lungs have to be plastic).

O.K. back to the original. Apparently Mrs. Gingrich blames her expensive taste on the fact that when she went out on her own to the places she was going to go, she found out she had to go designer to match the quality she was used to in the clothes her mother made for her.


O.K. so that's one thing about this one I can understand.


Handmade. Really.


That reporter should be so lucky.


Over and out.

Catch up on the fabric shopping tour, family and points between

Gorgeous wool knit with couched yarn illustrating why a person goes to NYC. This stuff is not at Fabricville.

First of all I need to wrap up my New York trip with some trim shots to say, yes Carolyn I did hit those too, as part of my long slow runway onto my Channel jacket. My husband, who trooped around with me, did ask a few times if I didn't already have enough black trim since we were already carrying multiple yards from the last store doesn't fully appreciate how trims could be so different, but I am sure you can.

The black stuff is for the black boucle with zebra print silk lining that is waiting for me to get started, the red for some Linton tweed I picked up because after all that princess seam muslin fitting I am certainly going to be get some kind of return by making more than one:

This is crazy wool ruffle on an elastic centre so it will stretch - I love it and have no idea what to do with it.

Some poodle type trim that I now need to buy some pink boucle to go with it - sort of invoking the poodle skirt colour scheme which maybe is too literal an interpretation of the poodle resemblance.

Can't get an thing like this here - think I might try lacing some white something through it because I am so creative and the jacket lining is black and white.

What do you think about this next one? Is the red trim too much or not? You have until 2018 to make your mind up about this - I still haven't started even one Chanel jacket remember:

Of  course I followed the garment district to go to visit family in Winnipeg and to hit up Northwest Fabrics, the place where most things are $5.99 a meter, including some excellent pant weight. I saved so much there that I had to pay a $50 surcharge for a super heavy suitcase, a fact you better not mention to my husband who doesn't understand the cost of doing business completely all the time.

First the family.

Later this week the pantweight that may even be in the form of pants, or shorts, or capris, since I am not sure how much of each I bought.

My mom, 84 and sharper than I am and most other people too. She's the person who taught us all to sew even though she hates doing it herself. Great mothers do things like that.

Miss Scarlett getting to know my sisters' kids, in a sort of great grandchild on top of grandchild pyramid.

Now off to measure my fabric.

Happy Valentine's Day!

From my sewing room to yours.


Have a great day today.


I will be celebrating mine with Miss Scarlett running errands before her mother sister and I fly off tomorrow to Winnipeg to see my mother, sisters, nieces and nephew and finishing up with a talk I am giving at the sewing guild on how to sew knits.


I actually think they all know how to sew knits so I am hoping somewhere between dropping the key off at the dog walker and buying heavy duty blanket sleepers at Sears that inspiration hits.


If any of you have some super knits sewing hints to share now would be the time to do it.


I have been wrapping up a huge amount of work for work to liberate some time and hope to start catching up with my blogging.


Carolyn I did the trim stores too and that deserves another post. OMG they are something else. I am still recovering.


Off to start the my day. You enjoy yours.

The tenement museum

One of the most affecting things we did in New York was visit the Tenement Museum, a walking tour of a tenement, organized by my smart son.


Really if you are in NYC you have to do this.


From the sewing point of view it was interesting to see how the garment workers managed, and the conditions in which the earlier home-based piece workers lived and worked.


Absolutely unbelievable.


What has stuck with me most though is a story about Fanny Rosenthal. Fanny lived in one two room apartment (toilet down the hall) with her husband and five children. Her husband died young from TB (he was a garment presser) and she stayed on there after the kids had grown and gone.


Over time the building owner decided that to bring the building up to code was going to be too expensive, and he asked all the tenants to move out.


Fanny refused. Refused to leave the place she had first lived in when she arrived in America, raised her family, lost her husband. 


In the end the building owner upgraded her apartment only and she lived on there in one apartment surrounded by every other apartment vacant in the building alone for 14 years.


This story really got to me. For a start as a social person I find the thought of living alone in a vacant building for all that time horrifying. Just imagine that. At the same time I also understood her. 


I understood that when Fanny looked out her window she wasn't seeing the street as it was, but she could still see her own children playing out there, her husband coming home from work. Those were her best years and she didn't want to walk out of that apartment and close that particular, precious, door behind her.


At the same time I heard that her kids eventually forced her to move, they still lived in New York, in other places where they had moved on. It made me wonder what Fanny missed in those 14 years. What listening could she have done to her complicated adult children, new times she could have shared, grandchildren maybe playing on other streets.


It made me think of sewing, and of grainline. You know how sometimes when something doesn't hang right? Often it's because the grain is off, the pattern piece is not parallel to the selvage like it's supposed to be?


What do you do? You can't change the arrow on the pattern piece, can you. If that's your direction of grain that's your direction of grain. But you know what you can do? Rearrange the pattern piece on the fabric, move it a little bit. Sometimes you just have to do it.


Then it works.

The New York garment district though my eyes

It's been almost two weeks since I got back from New York and I have still to write about my experiences in the garment district (where I also stayed, just in case).

There is a lot to digest. And as I am sure nearly every other blogger has a better knowledge of this community than I do,  what I have to say probably isn't very complete, insightful, or useful.


However if you are a person who is tied to finding whatever they can at the local big box or small box chain fabric store, or someone who orders online and dreams of a world where the fabric is as big as your dreams, if you haven't spent much actual time in this part of the big city yourself, well these are my thoughts.


1. I have seen this part before, the remnants of the schmatta business, from friends of my mother's who used to manufacture in Montreal before re-locating production to China. To a New Yorker what isn't there any more is probably as acutely apparent as what is. The garment district of today is an echo I suspect. But still...


Yes, there are innumerable small shops ( apart from Mood they are all pretty small) selling enormous quantities of sequined chiffon and stuff most of us don't wear, but the actual garment fabric stores that sewers look for are wonderful, but quite numerable.


What you find in the garment district is real quality, not quantity, get that straight.


2. Look up. If you bring your eyes from home you are going to expect to see the best stores on the street. Not so. Mood and Metro for example are on floors in what looks like office buildings - you go into an elevator just like you are going to the dentist except the doors open and there is fabric - messy, gorgeous fabric. Much better.


3. The area is a subsidiary of the garment industry not the home sewing industry, so this is a place for different, for distinctive more than it is for staples.


I understand now why sewists who live in New York (yes that would be you Carolyn) still buy big from places like Fabricmart. The garment district is where you find boucles, mohairs, tweeds, wool and silk jerseys, but not a place where you load up on bargain pant weight for instance.


I got myself some nice Linton tweed and some $40 a yard wool jersey with yarn sort of couched on it and I am still short the pant weight.


But lack of bargains aside ( although I got an excellent deal on the Linton tweed) did I like it there?


You have no idea.


Do you ever have those moments where you just wonder where all the good fabric has gone? Do you ever go into the local fabric store and decide that you are just so tired of trying to persuade yourself that a blend is the same as, that maybe polyesters do actually breath? Do you just walk in and walk out because you just aren't in the mood that day to lower your expectations?


Do you ever just wonder if you will see real fabric again in your life time? The 100% thing, the best there is, the fabric you won't do anything less than your best job on, because that is what it requires?


Do you ever wonder if it's all gone?


Well in the garment district it's all there, an outpost really, of when fabric was fine.  You can shop there like they did in the 1920s, the 1950's with your hands in fabric that would have met standards then and meets them now.


To a sewer, going to the garment district is just well, a relief.


A relief.


And here are my pictures:

My coat of a few weeks ago on the street with my most excellent and beautiful son Nat walking beside me. He looks like he belongs there doesn't he? He does.

The famous Mood Fabrics which is vast and organized and on several levels in a big building.

Me at Metro. Note the trance like look on my face, your face looks like that if you finally are in a place you have been trying to get to for thirty years. Note the calculator adding it all up.

Metro Textiles, on a 9th floor I think. A tiny space with fabric rolls and rolls deep. It reminded me of my husband's garage - only the owner knows where what's what but everything still seems to be there.

Will I go back?

You better believe it. As soon as I can. If there was such a thing as a garment district passport I would apply for it. 

Now next time, or sometime, if you want to meet up with me there, just email me direct so we can find each other.

Conspiracy theory

My friend Robin over at a sewing on the side has been making some Style Arc pants lately and having the same extreme success we all have had with those patterns.


I made three pairs of Linda pants in ponte for my trip away. They were perfect. Super comfortable, with a waistband suitable for sitting for long periods of time in restaurants and on airplanes, but with a leg that looked like real tailored pants.


Most of all the best thing about these pants are the fit. Right out of the envelope with these minor, made-for-me adjustments:


1. My waist is 1.5" bigger than the hip measurement of the size I bought. This is no surprise to me. I added 3/4" to the front seam tapering down to normal by the crotch.


2. See belly above and also the ample rear end. I added 1" to the waistline at top at CF and CB and then tapered back to usual by the side seams.


The result is a perfect, perfect fit.


I have made the exact same alterations to the Kerry Cargo pants which I made once in a poplin as pants, and once cut shorter as shorts.


Yes, family members no need to tell me the photos on my blog suck, but you folks are out of town and Rascal's paw shakes when he holds the camera and the shots are too blurry to use. So it's the old back-of-the-door shots:

Yes too I know these are just your old elastic waist units, however the cut is so good that once on and the elastic expanded to Babs size they look smooth and excellent. You have to trust me on this until I can get a photographer around here.


Now get ready for the rave.


I have been trying to make pants that fit since 1972 (yes I know you weren't born yet, but pants fitting was no easier then than now). 


I have made gingham muslins, tried 47 different perfect fit patterns (some documented on this blog). I have taken classes, taught classes,  pinched, tweeked, taken in and let out.


I have pivoted and slid. I have cloned and drafted. I have bought software, tracing paper, broken countless mechanical pencils, and used more Scotch tape than Christmas.


I have spent enough money on this to have paid for medical school. That is if medical schools accepted people who stopped taking math in Grade Nine (thank you thank old school system of the province of Quebec which had a very francophone view of the importance of arts and languages).


Despite all of this I have still, no matter how much I have tried to convince myself that it was only an issue of not standing right in my clothes, had:


1. A sort of space at the front that would have accommodated a fanny pouch, that is if I wanted to wear one under my pants as sort of a security measure to thwart pick pockets on my travels.
2. A rear end that pulled down when I sat, exposing my vast collection of old lady underwear.
3. Diagonal wrinkles on the inside of my legs that only moved to new places when I tried to get rid of them.


I am not the only one this has happened to.


What if - this is where the conspiracy theory comes in - the problem was pants patterns for sewers that were drafted not to fit nearly anybody, and not me? 


Or you?


What if a decent pants draft reduces pant fitting problems to human-sized tasks?


What if there was one or two simple tweaks you could do to every pants pattern that a particular organization produced and every one of those pants patterns fit?


Style Arc has made me suspect this might be true.


To my relief another Style Arc order arrived just in the nick of time yesterday, with the Peta pants Robin made, and with the Sasha blouse too.


I am attaching the pattern shot of the Sasha to show you why I am just as optimistic about this pattern.  


Note the shaping of the collar stand and collar, compared to the ruler straight units we usually see, the small front armhole versus the back and the high sleeve cap.


Interesting.