Did you make that?

That’s a question that causes me to pause. My thoughts are mixed between pride and embarrassment that I’m wearing something that looks homemade…and not in a good way. No one would look at my clothes and think I must be a budding designer in fashion school. On the contrary my style is quite "safe", even though in my secret life I’m a size 2 model with legs a mile long and a penchant…and wallet…for offbeat designer originals. In real life I could never pull it off even if I could fit into the clothes. I would just look ridiculous at work, where the majority of my co-workers wear a uniform of tops and pants that never have been nor need to be ironed.

Yesterday I wore this skirt I made, which I consider quite bold. I was definitely the brightest dressed person at work

On the way home we stopped at Pet Club to pick up some kitty food and it was here where I was asked the question. The young clerk who asked it followed up her question by saying that she too sewed and when she saw my skirt she admired the fun print and thought that she would like to make a skirt in that fabric. She wondered if I’d sewn it and then decided to just ask me. Indeed, the benefit of sewing is being able to turn fun fabric into exactly what you want.

Just prior to stopping by the Pet Club, we’d gone to REI, where my husband was hoping to buy a rain jacket for our upcoming trip and I was hoping to find a simple elastic-waist skirt. Why on earth would I buy skirt that is so easy to sew? Time. We’re leaving on the trip soon and I have 43502 things to do yet. Sewing a skirt just didn’t seem prudent with so much to do. But I’d had this skirt in mind for a while and now I really wanted it for the trip. None of the skirts I already had would do and although I knew I probably wouldn’t find what I wanted in the store, I thought since we were going there anyway I’d just act like a non-sewer and maybe buy what’s available. But there was nothing at REI. Well, there were a few skirts for sale that weren’t way above my knees and meant for toned, athletic legs, but I just couldn’t bring myself to spend the money on something so simple. Plus the choice of style and fabric would be compromised in order to buy a skirt at the last minute. I considered going to a few more stores but it was late and I hate shopping and I couldn't get the skirt out of my head, so I asked my husband to drop me at the Hancocks while he picked up a guide book at the bookstore. Believe it or not I did not have a pattern in my stash for the skirt I wanted. They were all either too short by more than 6 inches, too flat across the hips, intended for woven fabric, or had waistbands and zippers. There might be something in my vast library of Burda magazines but I did not want to take the time to trace the pattern. I also didn’t want to take the time to draw up a simple pattern or alter an existing one. So I bought a new pattern and in a few short hours (interrupted by doing a few loads of laundry) I had my skirt. It’s a bright and sunny print and exactly what I wanted for this trip. This is definitely a new record for me to buy a pattern and immediately go home and cut it out. Pictures will have to wait. I have 43501 things to do before we leave.

Blast from the past

I've been blogging about my sewing stuff for a long time, but they didn't call it blogging back when I started. In November 1997 I joined the Geocities free web-site "community" and started a home page. I posted some pictures and kept a journal (a blog!!) to let friends and family know what we were up to. In those days, people coded pages pretty much by hand. I learned some basic html code and borrowed ideas from other sites by looking at the source for their pages. This was before people coded web pages in Java and before sites got too complicated. Blinking text, color, and tables was about as fancy as it got. Later I used Microsoft Front Page to edit the pages, but the site is pretty much unchanged from when I first made it 8 1/2 years ago. So far Yahoo (who bought out Geocities) hasn't kicked my site off yet. That reminds me that I should archive it before they do...just for nostalgia's sake.

One of my pages chronicled my sewing projects . Although I learned to sew when I was a child and I sewed sporadically in my 20's, I didn't really pick it up again until the summer of 1999, when I bought a very nice sewing machine. I started sewing again by sewing baby clothes for a friend of mine. Here's one of my first projects:



Those shaggy green things are supposed to be grass. Unfortunately this wasn't the last time I cut out the fabric upside down!

It's kind of nice to go back and see what sewed. Did I really make this cute dress?



Fortunately my sewing room has improved over the years. From this set up in the dining room:



To this in a spare bedroom:




Go ahead and peruse the rest of the site if you want. Note that I changed the sewing page to point to this blog, so the link above is the only way to get to it. A lot of the other links are broken and I haven't updated it in a few years, especially now that I have this blog. At one point we even hosted the page on our own server, but we got tired of hearing the computer fan running all the time and the cost to keep the server turned on wasn't worth it. Most of the broken links point to the server.

Fabric placement

I just finished a knit top from the Jalie 2449 crossover top pattern. I love the fit and I like the fabric, so why am I not happy with the results? Well, take a look:

click for larger size

I showed it to my husband and mentioned I wasn't happy with where certain things ended up on the fabric. He said, "like the arrow pointing to your boob?" Ugh. Yeah, that. Nice. And if that's not enough it looks like the arrow points to a "B". And if you still need your eyes drawn to my chest, there's a big white box over the other one. Note that same design appears on the adjacent sleeve. Oh and look, the same thing happened on the other side! If I'd wanted to lay out the fabric with the sleeves matching the body I probably wouldn't have been able to. When I was laying out the pattern I was aware of the designs on this fabric. You can't see it but there's a boob-sized circle with a "B" in it that was in danger of being in the wrong place. But despite my ability to keep the circle away, I end up with an arrow, which I didn't see because it was on the bottom piece of fabric. I also don't like the way the top designs slope. It looks like I cut the fabric off-grain, or that I'm standing crooked. It's not off-grain. You can see that the lower designs are horizontal.

So I'm disappointed and not sure I'm going to wear it. Or am I just being silly? If I were twenty years younger maybe I would want to advertise where my boobs are located. And I suppose I wouldn't mind the slightly off-kilter look. This was a very inexpensive fabric from Hancock so I'm not too upset. It's a nice knit but I intended it to be a (hopefully) wearable muslin. I'm in the midst of sewing another one out of a luscious red cotton/rayon knit from Britex. By the way, this cotton/rayon was the third fabric that I couldn't remember I bought from Britex. I thought I bought this knit from Stretch 'n Sew because I was looking at the red knits there, which are also nice, but didn't contain rayon.

I don't think I would buy this in RTW simply because of the fabric placement. But it fits great!

More, more, more...

After finishing the blue knit hoodie, I started right in on more projects. So far I've traced two patterns and washed one of the fabrics. But I just haven't made enough time in the evening to work on them.

The next project will be the Jalie 2449 crossover top in a fairly vibrant and wild orange/red/black "graffiti" printed stretch knit that I purchased at Hancock Fabrics. If the pattern fits right I plan to make another version of it in a red knit to go with this skirt that I made last summer and haven't worn yet.

I also traced off this blouse from the May 2006 Burda magazine:

I'm hoping to squeeze the blouse out of a little over a yard of 58" wide fabric and either make the ties out of something else or see if I can use the selvedge instead of making the ties on the bias. I'm not sure it'll be possible but I'll see. I'll also have to make a muslin first because I'm sure I'll have to tweak the fit.

The Palace

A few weekends ago we had a mini vacation and spent the weekend in San Francisco. The Palace Hotel had a great deal on hotel rooms for weekends in April-June (good for SF and considering what it normally costs to stay there), so we took advantage of it and treated ourselves to some royal accommodations.


The door knob to our room.



King size bed, 9 ft ceilings, his and hers bathrobes. No view, but I really wouldn't have been able to sleep if we were facing the street.

I didn't realize it was the weekend of Mother's Day when I made the reservations, but it turned out to not really affect us. We just decided to not have breakfast Sunday morning when the special Mother's Day brunch cost $100 per person. We did, however, indulge in breakfast in the stunning Garden Court on Saturday morning. It was still outrageous but when the restaurant looks like this, how could you not.



It's fun to play tourist in your own (near) backyard. I urge you to do it. Explore your nearest city as though you're a visitor, which of course you are unless you live right there. You don't have to travel hundreds or thousands of miles to be a tourist.

The Palace Hotel is located right in the heart of downtown. We parked our car at a BART station south of the city and rode in, saving on parking and gas. There happens to be a BART station right around the corner from the Palace Hotel entrance so we didn't have far to walk. It couldn't have been any closer unless it was inside the hotel. After checking in (and admiring the room), we walked up to Chinatown and enjoyed some typical (Americanized) Chinese food. The highlight of the evening was not the food but the unexpected entertainment. The restaurant was on the second floor, right next to Old St. Mary's Church, which was the view out the window by our table. I guess the church was also a very popular spot for coach buses to drop off and pick up tour groups. We watched, with some amusement, at one of these groups of tourists as they waited for their bus. They were all dressed in summer attire, many in shirts that matched their spouses. Now anyone who lives or has visited here knows that summer in San Francisco is downright cold and shorts are definitely not a good thing to be wearing at 9:00 at night. The tour group members were a bit chilled to say the least and huddled together. We couldn't help but compare them to sheep. Sorry. But they seemed to be in good spirits, despite their constant hopping up and down to stay warm. One gentleman in shorts and sandals danced and twirled about, giving everyone a show.

Saturday, after lingering at breakfast for a long time to enjoy every taste, smell, and sight of the lovely Garden Court restaurant, we set out for Golden Gate Park. We rode Muni, which was surprisingly easy and convenient. Our primary destination for the day was the de Young Museum, specifically to see the exhibit on International Arts and Crafts, as in William Morris and Frank Lloyd Wright, not construction paper and glue. The exhibit, which included furniture, pottery, textiles, and metal and glasswork, was wonderful. One of my favorites was a dress. The fabric was white cotton embroidered with dainty purple flowers scattered throughout the cloth. The design was simple, showing a movement away from the restricting corsets of the time. It was a dress that could be worn even today. I stared at it for a long time. Unfortunately photography was not allowed. I'd hoped that the dress would be pictured in the exhibition catalog but unfortunately it is not.

After the museum we walked through Golden Gate Park, saw the buffaloes, and then caught the Muni to ride back to the hotel. We had planned on spending the evening at a local radio station's outdoor "bash", called Kaboom. Every year they put on free concerts and have a huge fireworks display. Last year we happened to be in the city the day of this event and stayed to watch the fireworks. We miscalculated the location (tip to visitors: odd numbered piers are north of the Bay Bridge and even numbered ones are south of the bridge!) so we watched the fireworks from a different pier. I actually planned this weekend to coincide with Kaboom, figuring it'd be a fun evening and we'd get to enjoy the concerts this year too. Well, that was not to be. Maybe I've gotten too old to enjoy being in a huge...no, massive, crowd. We arrived just in time for the second band and about 3 hours before the fireworks show was scheduled to begin. We managed to make our way to the food vendors and purchased some over-priced, but thankfully tasty, teriyaki chicken and rice bowls, but then found that there was nowhere to sit down. There was no where to go actually. We got caught up in a mass movement of people walking between the overflow of people watching the concert (we could hear it but couldn't see a thing) and an area at the end of the pier that was cordoned off by barricades for families who'd settled in with strollers, chairs and blankets to watch the fireworks. They'd probably already been there for two hours, since the event opened at 4pm. We shuffled along trying to grab bites of food while we avoided the drunks, moved out of the way of strollers (sometimes not successfully) and passed people coming from where ever it was we were headed. We had no idea where we were going and soon we realized the entire thing was silly. We turned around, found a spot where we could at least stand out of the way, finished our meals, and left. Incredibly there was a steady stream and long line of people still trying to get in. Later we walked from the hotel back towards the Embarcadero and watched the fireworks from there. I have to say that although it was a grand display, I was more impressed last year. Perhaps because I'd seen it for the first time last year.

A better entertainment Saturday night was watching the prom-kids. They were everywhere, including the lavish Garden Court restaurant at our hotel. Stretch white Hummer limos were a common site, as were the dressed up kids walking about the streets on there way to, or having already ditched, their Prom. We got a laugh out of how some of the boys looked - baseball caps to match their duds - and we cringed at some of the revealing dresses on some of the girls. I think we were both glad not to be parents of a teenager.

Sunday morning arrived too quickly and my husband had to leave to catch a flight to Seattle, but again, BART made that task pretty simple. Yay BART! I took advantage of a late checkout to shop in Union Square. I popped into H&M but decided that I'd rather make half the stuff they had for sale there. I wandered into Saks Fifth Avenue because it was there and I was there. Oh. My. All I could think was that I'm glad that I sew. I had to blink my eyes to make sure that I was reading the price tags correctly. Four digits on most of them, although they did have jeans for a mere $270. I left and headed for one of my intended destinations that day: Britex. Yes, my stash overflows and then some, but this is Britex. I missed one of their big sales, 20% off of everything, by two days. Boo hoo! But that was probably a good thing. I would have been inspired by the "it's on sale" factor and bought more than I should have. Well, buying any fabric is probably more than I should buy but I did anyway. I bought three pieces: a cotton lycra print in brown and mint colors, a beautiful rayon/acetate that I just had to have but I'm not sure what I'll use it for, and I honestly can't remember the third piece. Shut up. At the time I felt that I had to buy it. From Britex I grabbed a quick bite to eat for lunch and then visited my second must-visit destination: Art Fibers. I'd never been there before but had heard rave reviews. It did not disappoint. Of course I bought yarn.

Art Fibers was my last stop. My feet hurt and it was getting near to my late-checkout time, so I walked back to the Palace, packed up my things, snapped a few photos, and walked the whole 1/4 block to the BART station. I arrived home to find whiny cats and a sprinkler that had broken and must have been on all day, judging from the amount of very wet soil. I definitely had a fun weekend though and I really, really enjoyed feeling high class in our room at the Palace Hotel. We'll do it again sometime for sure.

A finished dress

Here's a picture of the dress I made and wore to a co-worker's wedding earlier this month.



I used Vogue 7820. The fabric is a 100% rayon that I purchased from G Street fabrics in Rockville, Maryland. I posted a review of the pattern on patternreview.com.

Easy pattern...difficult knit

I just finished this Kwik Sew top out of a lovely sweater knit I purchased a year or so ago from emmaonesock.com. It's a fluid, chenille type of knit that looks like I could have handknit it. Yes I knit, so I could handknit something like this, but sewing the knit fabric was much faster.


click for larger picture

The pattern, KS3155, was easy but the knit made this a challenging project. I think I always had this kind of sweater knit in mind when I saw this pattern. In fact I bought a different sweater knit from emmaonesock first, specifically to make this sweater, but it wasn't exactly what I'd hoped for. Then the next month I bought the knit that I did end up using for this project. It only took two years to finally get around to sewing it!

Unfortunately the knit turned out to be a bit of a pain to work with. First, there was the issue with grain. I washed the knit and laid it out, matching one cut edge and the selvedge. But I got a big surprise when I got to the other end:


click for larger picture

Now that is seriously off grain! So I ran a thin piece of yarn through one line of knit stitches, approximately where I expected the center fold to be:



Then I attempted to get a clean cut-edge by cutting along one row, using the purl stitch on the wrong side as a guide.



I re-laid the fabric out and discovered that it wasn't actually off-grain but the piece must have been cut, very crookedly, from a larger piece. It would be impossible to machine-knit this with such wonky selvedges. I had to re-cut the selvedges to end up with a piece that I could work with, but in the process, my supposedly 58" wide piece of fabric lost a total 10 inches. The red thread shows where I had first thought the fold should be.



Fortunately I had enough fabric...just barely...to cut out the top.

The rest of the sewing went fairly well. The knit did want to unravel so I had to handle it very carefully. My sewing area is littered with little blue nubs of the fabric. This was a good pattern to use since there were very few details and no darts. I used a 3-thread overlock stitch on my serger for construction and a coverstitch for the hems.