Burdastyle webinar

I have a couple of projects I have been working on, including a radio show on elections, but the one I am really interested in are a couple of one hour live webinars for Burdastyle.

The first one will be on September 19th and will be on how to make your garments more professional looking. I will be doing one on knits in October and one in November on sleeves.

The details for the first session are here. 

I am so pleased to be doing this for a whole lot of reasons:

• I have sewn for a very long time. I have made a lot of mistakes, figured out how to do a better job, taken classes, read, talked sewing, and practiced. A lot. I have sewn long enough to know how much the patterns don't tell you, and I also know most new sewers are more or less teaching themselves as they work through the pattern instructions. I want to share some of what took me so long to learn with sewers just getting going - because I want their projects to turn out so they will feel as good about sewing as I do.
• This is an online course, a live webinar, although my understanding is the material will also be available as a recording. In my day job I do a fair bit of teaching that way. I am pretty pleased to have my worlds collide like this, and for once to be working with material that is dear to my heart not just my head. Imagine how you would feel if you went to work and they called a meeting and said "OK let's forget about the agenda and just listen to (insert your name here) talk about interfacing instead." Pretty cool thought isn't it?
• The folks at Burdastyle have been a delight to work with, clean, organized, and best of all, they are letting me do my own thing. All the characteristics of a good relationship.
• The webinars are cheap. $19 is reasonable and this makes the course accessible to the kinds of sewer I am most interested in talking with.

The only downside of course is limiting the content in my head - there is a lot of "man I have to tell them that too" going on around the old laptop at the moment, but I am trying to control myself.

Oh and yes they sent me this, makes sense:

The camera never lies subtitle: how to waste time for non-beginners

I am wrapping up this week having waved goodbye to my son from New York, and gearing up for a weekend with the little girls doing a multi-night sleepover while their parents get a well earned break and some fun time at a wedding in another part of the province.

I am of course crazy about my son who lives so happily in New York and will be heading down there for a visit end of November I think. My daughter and son-in-law will be there earlier so we are going to space ourselves out a bit. Us folks from Nova Scotia operate on the assumption that anyone who moves away must be just dying without the relatives so we try to make sure they are never alone- as much as seat sales allow.

This trip my son didn't have his girlfriend with him, she is in the middle of big and interesting work projects, either that or lying in a dark room somewhere with a cold cloth on her head recovering from the last round of visitations, and I really did miss having her here too.

Don't get me wrong, I raised this guy and did a real good job, but he is a guy and there is a limit really to what you can do.

I'll give you and example.

They have just moved into an apartment in Brooklyn and I want to do a housewarming thing. Of course I want to make it. In my worldview a person doesn't need a mother to do what you can buy at a store. So when I was home I asked him, "I really want to make you something for your apartment, what would you like?"

His response was, "well I am not sure we want to clutter the place up."

This is not an answer. Not a reasonable person answer, so I really wish his girlfriend had been with him. She gets it. I can talk about projects or all the stuff that is moving around inside my head and she knows what I mean. 

I don't need a translator.

I really like her. I think I will just email her instead now, go direct.

As I wrote last post I have been up to my eyeballs, with family stuff, with students (I taught summer school) and now with coordinating a new program we have got going.

Just so you know when you take over someone's job and they are sooo delighted and rush over all the files and thank you publicly in all the meetings, well that may not be a good sign and there might be a lot of pages in those files with the page twos missing so to speak.

All that said I have done an enormous amount of stress relieving project planning (we are going minimalist this fall owing to the time crunch not the runways) have almost finished a StyleArc dress (can't find the battery recharging part so the photos are probably going to be taken by an almost four year old with an iPad this weekend, take that into consideration when you see them), and have been engaging in some excellent time wasting.

First off I read this piece in the NYTimes before terrorists took the site down this week (this really happened) on how lipstick was toxic which I knew anyway but up until this week didn't care about.

I decided however that I might as well care so I invested in a cool bunch of mini samples of mineral makeup from this outfit

Since the samples arrived I have been doing major fooling around in the bathroom where I apply one of the samples on my unmade up nearly 60 year old face and then take an iPad picture of it, (that's when I realized the recharger had gone AWOL), find my glasses and take a look.

It is really interesting to me how things I wouldn't normally wear look so different in the bathroom mirror than they do in an actual picture. Much like when you make something which you think is splendid until you take a blog shot and realized it makes you look dumpy.

Same phenomenon.

This is really pretty fun and both Mr. Rascal and I are very entertained by this process, which owing to the number of samples I ordered is going to be going on for a few more days (the little girls are going to love this).

Here is what this high level process looks like, which you might find interesting if you don't see nearly 60 year old women's faces without makeup except one part with her natural hair colour and natural baggy eyes often enough:

Au natural except for some purple mineral eyeshadow and some lipstick made of organic something or other.

Googly eye glasses with some dark powder type eyeliner added, no mascara nothing else. BTW I also have a pink smaller pair of glasses but I have to say the big nerdy glasses are good for seeing, which if you are talking eyeglasses has some relevance.

This is a pretty fun way to waste some time and my one revelation is that this stuff actual seems to stick to your face pretty good which surprises me, since it is all essentially loose powder.

In addition I have also worked on the smallest of sewing projects. My youngest son has lots of theories about most things and one of those is that the tiniest bit of light keeps people awake.

His solution is to go sleep in a forest or something but I like my running water and power plugs, but it is true sometimes I don't sleep - a pattern that started waiting to hear that teenage kid open the door and rolling over to see what the time was on the digital clock, before they moved to New York and the forest. The pattern of broken sleep of course continued with The Change and things like fair isle vest knitting,  nailing down the sub sections of the meaning of life, and wondering if this year I should be a dress person or a skirt person.

Long and short of it I made these little numbers, one for summer and one for winter, although with there being more light in the summer I think I have to season reverse them. And yes that is lingerie elastic you see:

The thing is.

These eyeshade really work. I haven't slept this well in years. Seriously. They even worked to help me get back to sleep when the phone rang at 3:00 a.m. and it was a student, you know the one who had called me at home that afternoon to ask for an emergency extension because she had strep throat and had a fever of 103.

"Opps," she said, yelling over the sounds of the bar. "I must have pocket dialed you."

Yep my sleep mask worked great and I went to bed with a smile on my face knowing whose paper I would be marking first Monday morning.

What's with the end of summer?

As bizarre as it is, apparently it is now the end of summer.

I am taking this hard despite the fact I got a jump start on summer by going to Florida for two months starting in April.

Summer is my season.

Even so this one is a bit of a blur. We started with that horrible week when we drove home in from down south in emergency mode to join my poor daughter for about seven days in and out of hospital with the staff unable to "call" if the baby's heartbeat was still there or not. A full week. I did the rounds after that returning the maternity clothes.

We got through that. 

Because this was also the summer Miss Scarlett learned to swim. And the summer my niece came and learned to knit hats and cook.

It was also the summer my step-daughter had her own scare and went on bedrest.

Most of the local fort manning has been done solo.

My husband got called away to work on a project out of town in July and that will be ongoing until maybe Christmas. At least he is home on the weekends.

I miss him anyway. I like people in the house. I think I was about 35 before I was in a room alone and I sleep better when there are doors being opened and closed (if you have teenage sons that would be microwave doors). But that stops after a while.

The thing about my husband is that he is pretty eccentric. He hasn't found a problem a three inch nail or duct tape can't fix, and he has a limited future as a home decorator or image consultant. In fact we just had two mantlepiece things he had made arrive this morning and they are different styles - for the same room. He can't hear the noises I can hear in the car and can tell me from a chair in the living room that it is just because the wires are wet, whatever that means, and which in Nova Scotia on the ocean is a pretty broad analysis. He once installed an electrical outlet in the ceiling because he ran out of wire and didn't think plugging the lamp cord up to the ceiling is weird. "It works doesn't it?" he said.

He is also shy with new people and is no master of cocktail party small talk. He figures Yes and No and analyzing the possible recipes of everything on the tray should just about cover it.

But the thing is he is the nicest man in the world and he listens. More than anyone I ever met, more than any other man for sure, he knows how to deliver those magic words:

"Tell me all about it." 

Words that are as powerful to the female psyche as that other fabulous line: 

"No I don't think you're crazy."

A person misses a man like that.

So it has been a busy summer and not a lot of sewing got done, apart from some utility stuff (more on that later) and a lot of knitting. Knitting late at night in bed work with Netflix on the iPad and Mr. Rascal trying to take over the pillows.

I can't show you what I have been making however as it's all for presents for Christmas, so I figure the next step is to ban the family from blog reading.

I think I am due to sew again soon.

Since summer is over I need to think about back-to-school clothes for this person at the front of the classroom.

Always a bright side.

Sewing on the edges

We have had a busy week around here, getting the bed rest routine down, and doing details like feeding three dogs in sequence, as well as the regular work and other family stuff.

I have slipped in some sewing related activities but nothing real heavy duty as those sorts of things were being done elsewhere.

First I have to say I can't imagine what a nuisance life has to be if you don't sew.

One particularly warm night I found myself wrapped up in a knit nightie around my neck. When I got up I said screw this and went down to the sewing room and made two minimalist nightgowns from 100% cotton seersucker left over from that delusional white shirt project. 

Minimalist means I serged the whole thing and the only decoration is a bit of baby rick rack around the neckline.

You absolutely can't buy exactly this. I don't know why. I am reminded that one of my sisters ordered in some $50 or something "menopause" nightgowns that were supposed to keep you cool. These babies cost me nothing except my time spend rooting around in my piles of fabric to find this seersucker.

Since I have made them I have been sleeping like a baby.

Must be the rick rack.

Here is a shot on one on a bush which is my version of an arty bit of photography:

I just adapted a summer dress pattern which is why this has bust darts, not a usual nightgown detail.

And yes I know this looks like something they issue you when they take away your shoelaces and sharp objects, or like something from a Swedish film where there are subtitles and more angst then should be fit into any one life, you know before the character in this nightgown is told to go back to her room and continue to go mad.

So if you overlook the part that this is a highly institutional little garment it is mighty cool in the literal sense, so I am just moving on.

In my time slivers I have also been doing some sewing room organization.

I am always impressed by the organized sewing room shots, you know the ones that look better than your living room at home and are about as disorganized as the instrument tray at the dentist's office.

Suffice it to say that my sewing room, although a large and even partially drywalled room in my basement, doesn't exactly look like that.

However organizing a sewing room is fun in a 14 year old boy cleaning their room sort of way - you know you pull something out and then spend 20 minutes fooling around with it until you go to the next item. I mean this isn't exactly top speed cleaning or organizing.

So as evidence that not all sewing rooms are marvels of decor here are some corners of mine.

My dear husband, the not finishing drywall one, put up some peg board a while ago for me. The plan was to go to Home Depot and get little hooks and be a new me.

That was fine for a while but the hooks turned out to be too expensive, about $20 for five, particularly if you translated the dollars into fabric.

However this month I discovered a retail display store and they had big long hooks that were perfect for serger thread for less than 20 cents each and these bicycle basket things that are perfect if you are pretty messy for tossing in odd spools of sewing thread, for $5.00 each.

So here are some shots of all that on the pegboard:

Finally in the back corner, furthest from my sewing machine, I have neatly folded all the mending projects that hopeful men in my family have brought down for me to fix:

I have no intentions of ever touching anything on this shelf. 

And yes that is a Tennessee Vols sweatshirt with the broken zipper. My husband has been back from Tennessee for nearly a year and a half now.

Small projects

My week has been a blur. 

Only two weeks left in summer term with the usual wake-up call going on that everyone (including me the marker) has to get a push on to finish.

And two days ago my step-daughter got installed in the spare room to start her four months of bedrest until her baby is due with breaks when her husband can get home from his job out of province.

Rascal is eyeing her two dogs (nice quiet Labs) with a full exhibition of his Little Man Syndrome and if the fur flies, well I have a new vacuum. And Labs are pretty serene.

This is going to work out fine. My step-daughter ( I need to find a new way of saying this because if I could have I would have chosen her) has one of those crazy even, easy going dispositions and is going to manage being trapped without being able to do much a lot better than I would. Now if she can survive my creative cooking we are all set. I serve a lot of meals with the words "well it may look weird but it's really healthy".

And now I know about botulism too thanks to the University of Georgia Preserving Food at Home self-study course which I finished this afternoon. Since I passed, they are apparently going to send me a certificate and that baby is going to get framed and hung in the kitchen I can tell you. The clientele may find it reassuring that I do in fact know about botulism, in case what is on the plate doesn't make that apparent.

The point is I figured out a long time ago that particularly when there is a lot going on, the one thing I cannot cut corners on is my creative time. It is what makes things work for me.

On that note I finished my useable muslin version of My Favourite Purse, my first purse project, and I am so pleased with it, pleased way out of proportion to how good a job I did, since the cotton duck I used was pretty thick, and some of the stitching is not flawless as a result.

I have used this purse a number of times already and am so happy with it every time I look at it. I even hung it on the back of my bedroom door so I could look at it in bed. It has been a while since I felt that way about a project. I think making something totally new to me made it particularly interesting. Lesson there.

I have a bunch of nice purses, but for some sectors of my life, like being at the pool with the little girls, or lugging groceries, it is nice to know I am not ruining something decent when I fling it onto the floor of the backseat.

And this purse has all sorts of pockets so I can, for the first time in my life, find things when I need them.

You want that car door opened? 

No problem I have the key right here. 

You call me on my cell? 

Guess what I can answer! 

No more waiting 15 minutes for me to find my phone at the bottom of my purse and another 15 minutes for me to find my glasses so I can read the missed calls and call you back.

So what if I can't use this purse after Labour Day, I love it and will probably make another one for fall, even better now I understand how it goes together:

See. A blurry picture of inside (I was trying to take the shot with the other hand) also the white interior helps. I think all the rest of my other purses are black inside, or at least it seems like that.

As if the purse wasn't exciting enough I also decided I really needed to sew a body pillow before my guest arrived. I remember when I was pregnant that getting comfortable in bed was not easy. In the theme of good baby vibes I covered it with Dr. Seuss fabric and here it is:

So that was my sewing week.

I am aware now that I need to think about back-to-school clothes, for me, when I go offline and back into the regular classroom in September. 

These small projects have reminded me just how energizing projects you can sew up fairly quickly are. It gives me a lift to go to bed at night and know I have something finished after even little time down in the sewing room.

This is definitely going to be my fall for knit dresses and I have three patterns I haven't tried before are taxing towards the runway.

More on that soon.

Project collection

Where do I start?

I am facing facts that with two heavy summer courses (with 60 assignments a week to mark) and a whole lot of family stuff going on, it is unlikely I will be posting again before next week. Maybe a review of the new Vogues excepted.

I am also watching the clock because I am off shortly to the 40th anniversary party of some friends. He has early onset dementia unfortunately but I have to tell you if things get rough in this life it helps to have lived a good one. They have six kids (the last two were twin boys, how did my friend do it? I wondered then and I wonder now) and they will all be there today. And they all turned out too, even the twins who were a couple of characters I can tell you. It also helps to have faith, which they do in a sort of practical way.

So what has the week been like?

Yesterday my niece left for Ottawa where she is going to be spending the next two and a half weeks with my sister there before going home to Winnipeg. 

It has been a while since I had a 14 year old to take care of and I enjoyed it. We did a lot. She had surf lessons from her cousin, learned to chase toddlers (new experience for an only child - and I learned how many times a 14 year old says "Oh joy, there they go again"), now can knit on four needles (took me 20 years to get that far), and can cook enough to stay alive. For my part I now understand I need more eyeliner and  how many documentaries are on Netflicks, and that kids really are the same as they ever were, texting or no texting.

It feels odd now not to have someone in the house up till three and sleeping in till noon. I will miss her.

I have already changed the sheets in that room. 

It looks like my half-way through pregnant step-daughter has some issues and has been put on complete bed rest for the next four months. She and her dogs are going to be coming here to do that as she lives in the country and her husband travels a lot with his job. I have a ranch house with a bedroom right across from the bathroom and next to the kitchen and we are only 15 minutes from the hospital. If we do what we are supposed to, and we will, she will be fine. Personally I have decided losing one baby was enough for this family this year. More than enough.

I am always busy but I do it by making sure I have some project time, as random as it is. Here is my update for the week:

The fair isle vest. Well that project is moving closer to the finish line and I only have to cut it open for the neck and arms (yes that's what you do after you machine stitch across the knitting) and sew in 2,000 yarn ends. That will be a back-to- Netflicks project for sure. I had planned to give this to my son's girlfriend, the one I am crazy about in NYC, and I would really like this to turn out, best I can. Here is a picture to prove a) I am not that great a knitter b) I am not lying to you that I am doing this crazy thing:

You will notice, as I have, that this is not perfect. Far from it. I forgot to knit the little yellow dots in the centre of the squares in one row, but I have googled that and am now poised to add duplicate stitches to my repertoire.

I have also been working on my utility summer, going to the Superstore in shorts purse, which I hope to have finished before actual summer ends. I have never made a purse before and just used stuff lying around my sewing room so this is kind of a stuffable muslin.

I really wanted to try for a purse with a lot of pockets so it would be easier to find my things. I am super pleased with this pattern.

I have sort of a messy purse reputation. 

Once when I was working for politicians and talking to the media everyday I lost my cell phone and had to get a new one. In those days a new cell phone meant a new number. By the time I had contacted everyone who needed to be contacted, about three weeks later, I found my cell phone. It had been in my work purse the whole time, down in the dark depths, dead as a doornail along with 14 pounds of pennies.

Anyway.

Here is the partially completed purse, still needing the handle. There is also a bellows external pocket like this one on the other side, a zippered pocket inside and two smaller bellowed pockets, one of which could hold cell phone, near the top of the inside of the purse:

I used some cotton duck and I am telling myself it doesn't look this messy in real life. That little yellow tab by the zipper of course is a fix. The exposed zipper (gawd how I miss good NYC zipper access) went in fine but do you think I could get the markings out I put in to mark the placement at that end of the zipper? No. This made me crazy and I decided that every time I looked at this purse I would go off to get a wet washcloth or something to start scrubbing again and so I decided to cover it up so I wouldn't make myself crazier. Doing that well enough on my own.

Finally, I have been canning my brains out again. For no real reason other than it is in my DNA and because I find this the most soothing of my activities.

Here is what some of that looks like, I have lots of other shelves going on:

I grew up until I was a teenager in a small town in Manitoba. Canning was it. My dad's family were farmers (my grandfather excepted he went into Winnipeg and became a pharmacist and kept the rest of them going through the Depression, but that's another story). My dad's cousin's wife lost her legs quite a number of years ago now to cancer and the thing they say about her is she still got her canning done, the wheelchair worked just fine.

It's that kind of culture. 

In fact a few years ago the local jar making company decided, without warning, to discontinue a certain kind of lid. This caused a huge uproar. One lady in Saskatchewan was left with 3,000 jars she regularly used every summer useless, and the Hutterite colonies had 250,000 duds.

Even the Manitoba Minister of Agriculture got involved and sent a letter to the company saying " This province was founded on families surviving winter on home canned foods.."

So the scene is set. Somewhere in my reptile brain there is no Superstore.

The thing I like most about canning is not just that you preserve the food, but you preserve the day.

On my shelves now is rhubarb jam from the evening when the little girls and I went out back at my daughter's and they helped me pick rhubarb in her backyard, left over from the previous owner who was a gardener (my daughter is no more going to pick and can this herself than fly to the moon). Two-year-old hands picked what is in those jars.

And I have rosemary jelly made with rosemary my son grew on his hill near to ocean, and green beans my niece and I bought in the Annapolis Valley the day I drove her up to the Lookoff and I showed a prairie kid how the valley flowed into the ocean and that Prince Edward Island was just over there but you can't see it.

All that has been put down now. Down on shelves in the basement to last me the winter.

Flypaper thoughts on the week that was

It has been a busy week for me.

I have had my 14 year old niece visiting, doing the work thing, and general life.

This afternoon I am going AWOL however and taking my machine, a layer cake, and the pieces for that purse I have been wanting to make over to a get together of some sewing friends.

Really due for that.

Listen I have to tell you how much I have read and re-read your comments on the last post, re hair and glasses. This is probably vanity but when you go through certain stages you realize that you need to retool your look so you look like a good version of yourself in the time and place you are now.

And when you do the grey thing the fact is the colours you wear change and you have to make some decisions. 

The best way to describe this, and my week, is in the list. Good luck with it. 

Then off I go to pack up my sewing:

• My niece is so smart.
• She lives with her mother and my mom and this is a reflection of that household.
• My kids didn't watch only documentaries at 14.
• I believe Drop Dead Fred and Braveheart (viewed 24 times by the boys) were on then.
• I can recite "Men of Scotland " in my sleep.
• Too bad Mel Gibson went off the rails.
• Good thing he made that speech before he did.
• At least the boys think so.
• I am seriously considering dumping the grey and black and going navy and colours as my new neutrals.
• 30 years work/dressing to standard is just about long enough.
• I have decided to do some fill in the gap activities with my niece.
• We have done how to cook Thai, plum cobbler, and 14 easy vegetarian lunches.
• So far so good.
• Texting trumped my "let's can five quarts of beans" session however.
• Don't get that.
• Have taught her to knit.
• She is about where I am skill wise after half an hour.
• There is a lesson there but I have a feeling I am not going to learn it.
• Taught her how to remove shoulder pads from Value Village items.
• Totally failed trying to explain the 80s.
• Thinks I am faking it that we wore these things.
• Plus button earrings.
• Was on radio yesterday again.
• Sat in a studio with learned folks and said things like "that's nuts".
• Maybe the person who lives in the blog should stay in the blog.
• Saying what you really think can make you sound like a dip.
• Take it from one who knows.
• They want me back.
• This is stressful.
• Am going to be doing some webinars for Burdastyle.
• My people get the dip.
• This is not stressful.
• Have ordered smaller, pink rimmed glasses.
• Haggled down my optometrist assistant who revealed they had made two pairs of my lens by mistake.
• Got a cut price on the frames.
• Think she thinks I should go quietly.
• Like in a denim jumper down to my calves.
• Not happening kiddo.
• Like I should be taking fashion advice from a woman who wears a strapless sequinned T shirt to work.
• Doesn't she know I have a face for radio.
• Eyelid primer is a great invention.
• Should have had it in the 80s.
• Am thinking it is all about the lipstick.
• Thanks to the blog reader who said get off the diary.
• Thank you thank you.
• Saw ENT and my reflux throat is A OK and I am off the meds.
• Think the dr. is annoyed. 
• He told me medication was the only answer.
• I feel great.
• And I get to go sew now too.