The agony of indecision

I've started looking on eBay for vintage patterns, the cheap ones, which means the less popular ones, but still. And I've actually gotten a couple! I haven't decided yet what to do with these, but there is some green and brown plaid at Fabrix I've had my eye on and I think it would make a nifty vintage dress, maybe the 1950s style one. On both of these, I will probably make the skirts less full. I like the full skirt look, but it uses so much fabric, and I'm not sure it's the most flattering for me anyway.

I continue to buy and buy and buy fabric without managing to finish much of anything, but I think I don't care, at least not yet, because I have a few other things in mind. The aforementioned plaid, and some thin sort of sweatshirty material for a dress I talked about in an earlier post, and some dotted swiss of some type for some thin sheer little floaty tops I'll make just as soon as I learn how to do buttonholes. I've been procrastinating on the buttonholes. I think I'm scared. It seems weird to have a phobia of learning buttonholes. Like Billy Bob Thornton's reported phobia of antique furniture. Who could be scared of antiques? Well, I'm scared of buttonholes so now I guess I get it.

I bought a whole bunch of dark denim on sale at Discount Fabrics in the Sunset on Monday, and have been trying to decide what to do with it. I'm thinking I'd like to make a denim cheongsam. I think that would be a funky twist on a semi-casual sort of wear-out-during-the-day dress. I thought I could put red bias binding around the collar and armholes and maybe the hem. Then it would go well with my red ballet flats and my favorite red cardigan. and red lipstich natch. I love me some red lipstick. Plus if I make it up in denim it will be easier to undo and fit better if I need to so that I can practice on cheap plentiful denim instead of the rarer, more expensive brocade I've had for months waiting for me to get my courage up for the cheongsam.

Which reminds me, I'm obsessed now with bias tape ever since I used some I made myself around the edges of the Butterick retro wraparound (pictures coming, I promise, but there's something wrong with the lens on my new camera phone so none yet!). It's so easy to make it! It looks so cool! And I can use it to avoid hemming! How awesome is that? So I'm going to stay on the lookout for super-cheap fabrics that I may not use for whole garments but would be cool to make bias tape out of.

Right now I have so much unused fabric and so many uncut patterns stashed away for planned projects that I can't decide what I should do next. I've realized that most of the things I've been working on, at least as far as sewing goes, have been too summery for usual San Francisco weather so I think I need to prioritize according to some things I'll, you know, actually WEAR. Like, maybe even to work. But I do want to get a lot of things done specifically for the New York trip, and I don't really know what to expect weather-wise there, so I'm torn. It's keeping me up nights. The agony of indecision! Tonight I have too much work to do to start anything new, so I can put off the decision till Friday at least.

Scout the dog and Scout the pillow

Scout the dog and Scout the pillow
Originally uploaded by fishbellywhite.

I haven't had the time to take new pictures of my work, even though I finished the Butterick 4720 (or is it 4920? the wrap dress thing) and it looks pretty good. I'm busy now setting up blogging from my phone, and from flickr. So this is a test of blogging directly from flickr, with a picture of my dog Scout and a pillow I made representing my dog Scout. I made this quite some time ago, and it has since been ever so slightly chewed by the new dog Sparky. Maybe it was jealousy and he needs his own face on a pillow. I should work on that!

I just used scraps that I cut into the appropriate shapes, placed on the square background, and then satin stitched around on the sewing machine. Next time I go through my scraps I'll see if I have enough to make one for Sparky, and also one for my cat Owen who died around New Year's and who I really miss. I always meant to make one of his face when he was still with us, but I'll have to do it as a memorial instead.

Coming soon: More personal photos

I'm very excited because I'm getting a camera phone soon! Maybe as soon as TOMORROW!

I think I might have blogged earlier that I was getting a hand me down camera phone from a friend, and I did, but she had warned me that it was beat up and not really very good and guess what? She was right. So I started whining to N. (my BF... I'm trying to think of a catchy nickname for him but so far have drawn a blank) on a regular basis about how I really really really really want a camera phone so that I will have a camera with me at all times and can pictures of things for my blog and of questionable parking practices in the city and of weird and fabulous outfits on the street and so on and so forth.

I didn't expect to really get one, but N. has been going through all our bills to find ways to save on monthly expenses and realized that if we change cell phone providers we can shave a substantial amount on our monthly bill AND get cheap (with the rebate) new phones with cameras. Yay!

So I figure I'll take more pictures. For example yesterday I wore a skirt I made to work, but I haven't ever gotten around to modeling it for a picture but I easily could have taken a shot of the inside of the hem to demonstrate my finishing techniques or whatever at any point during the day and then downloaded it to post here. Hopefully I will have many opportunities like that as I wear more of my own creations and also as I get used to having a camera with me all the time.

Speaking of hems, I finally pressed up the hem and the sleeves on my black eyelet dress last night and started handsewing them. Hemming is the only type of finishing I know how to do pretty well, so that it looks neat on both sides. This is because even before I started sewing much from scratch I frequently had to hem things to fit my short self.

I handsew all my hems unless it specifically seems that machine stitching will add a good design element, which is pretty rare in the styles I like anyhow. First I press up about 3/8 of an inch with some stitch witchery (that sticky iron on stuff, you know) and then another 5/8 to 1 1/2 inch or whatever seems to look good to sew. I usually use either the slant hemming stitch as seen about halfway down this page of hand sewing stitches, or more often, an uneven slipstitch as illustrated slighly further down the same page. I prefer the latter because it really is almost invisible, but the former is faster for when I'm feeling lazy, and easier if the fabric is tightly woven and hard to push the needle through. Or if I put the stitch witchery too close to the first fold I pressed up, since the stitch witchery is hard to push through sometimes. In fact that's a good tip: don't put your stitch witchery right up into the fold! I'm gonna have to remember that one.

There's one little trick I use that I'm not sure where I came up with, it may be really obvious but I'll share it anyhow. Even though the stitches are very tiny they still show just a little bit on some material in the right light or from the right angle, so I want them to be very evenly spaced. So I use a pen to mark two little lines on the tip of my left thumb (I'm right handed) so that when I grasp the hem to sew I can make sure the needle comes out by one mark and goes back in at the other.

See, if I had a camera phone I could take a picture of my thumb which still has some residual ink from the marks I put on last night. Because I know everyone out there on the internets is just dying to see my sad chewed up little thumb.

On Summerset Banks's Pins and Needles blog, she asked: do you have any particular "go-to" garment, the one that you wear all the time for all types of purposes because it's just that versatile/comfortable/ awesomly stylish/whatever? OK that's a paraphrase. Anyway, I don't, but I sometimes have in the past, and I'm hoping that something that I make in the next few months will become that go-to piece. I'm musing over the idea of a dress made of sweatshirt material (I saw some thin sweatshirt material at Fabrix that I almost bought some of and will probably go back for) that, if I pick the right pattern, could be a go-to dress, since it will be relatively warm for the SF cool weather, and as a dress it can be dressed up, but as sweatshirt material it can be dressed down. It will also match with almost anything I'd bet, be comfy, and not wrinkle easily. Ooh, and best of all, now that I think of it, it will match some fab chartreuse and red kitten heel peep toe shoes I got from a friend but have never worn out because I don't have anything to match them! So now I HAVE to make it. I'm also loving all the canary yellow accessories that seem to be in this season, which will also go with sweatshirt grey.

Anyhow we'll see, and I'll try to remember to revisit the question at some point in the future as more of my projects get completed.

The hair always wins

I bought a pattern to go with the red stretchy fabric I posted about buying the other day: Butterick 4789. It got decent feedback on Sewing Pattern Reviews, and it was pretty cheap at Joann's so I went for it. I'll work on it after I finish the approximately 30 million other things I've got going on right now.

I'm also bidding on some honest to goodness vintage patterns on Ebay right now, since I love the vintage look but don't actually own any vintage patterns yet. Since I am cheap I may not win any good ones, but we'll see. I'll post pics if I get any.

I posted my questions about finishing the insides of garments on Craftster and got a lot of useful feedback. Several people DO finish, and a few even say that they would never NOT finish. But, I'm still lazy, and I'm still pretty sure I will never start lining things that don't call for lining, or learn how to do french seams for anything that I don't have to finish. I may however start zig-zagging my seams to finish them, because another craftster made a pretty good case for the fact that things will probably last longer if they're at least marginally finished on the inside. Plus I guess I can use the practice.

Maybe I'll zig zag the edges of pieces before I put them together if that seems workable, because I'm really bad at zig zagging or otherwise neatly finishing seams that are already stitched, since it's such a small space to stitch on and a little hard to work around if it's not just a straight line.

I may be willing to learn flat fell seams, because they look sort of cool on the outside too, but again, I'm too lazy to start doing them all the time.

Anyhow last night I was too tired to stand at the ironing board and turn up hems on the wrap dress and the eyelet dress to finish up, so I started an easy knitting project instead. I wanted something I could do without thinking, while I'm waiting for things or riding in the car or watching TV or whatever.

I'm going to need a white wrap or sweater of some sort to go with the shirt dress that I hope to do next. I always always need a wrap. Mostly because it's always sort of chilly at some point in the day in San Francisco, if not all day every day like lately, and like it will be all summer most liekely. And even if I go somewhere warm, then I freeze indoors from the air conditioning. I used to hate that about going places in Texas during the summer, you could catch pneumonia just from the extreme temperature changes from sweltering outside to teeth-chattering cold inside.

I've been saving Uncommon Threads on the DIY network to my DVR to watch every day and picked up a few good ideas for projects. Recently I saw the episode about making shrugs into other, more complicated garments and really liked the idea of the "shracket." Actually I hate the name because it's hard to say and sounds a little like a combo of shmuck and racket (I imagine some mealy mouthed gangster saying, "That shmuck fell for the numbers racket we ran last year!" or something. Whatever that even means. Can you tell I watch too much film noir and gangster fiction?), but the garment itself seems easy and pretty quick and cool looking. I didn't want to crochet it though because I don't want the stitch to be so open so I'm going to do a knit version instead using some Bernat Baby Boucle yarn in white I got for $2.99 a skein at Joann's yesterday.

Here's how I'll make it. I'm knitting a long rectangle in regular stockinette, long enough to reach from one elbow across my shoulders and back to the other elbow, and wide enough to wrap snugly around my upper arm. I'm using a size 7 or 8 needle (I don't know which it is but I'm pretty sure it's one of them). Then I'll stitch up the sleeves almost to the armpit on each side to make the shrug. I'm thinking of making it so that the purl side faces out, because it looks less directional than the knit side and might make it less obvious that this thing is just a glorified shrug. There's nothing better than a design that's easy as pie to make but looks like you put lots of skill and time into it!

Then I'm going to switch to larger needles, probably around a size 10 since I seem to have about 4 size 10 needles for some unknown reason, and pick up stitches all around the opening in the middle. I'll knit that in 2 by 2 rib, or maybe a fancy twisted or eyelet rib if I'm feeling ambitious, until it's long enough to fold over into a collar on the top edge.

I'll then pick up stitches with the same size needle around the sleeve openings and knit the same rib stitch into cuffs that I'm hoping will sort of bell open to the wrists. I love bell sleeves even though I usually have to be careful not to just drag them through a plateful of BBQ or pasta when I wear them. I hope the sleeves will open out like this without shaping because the needles are bigger, but if not I'll just cast on extra stitches or increase evenly by trial and error until it looks like I'm envisioning or I give up and just let it do what it wants.

This by the way is the same philosophy I use to fix my hair: trial and error to make it look like some gorgeous movie-star idea of a hairstyle I have, ending with my giving up in exasperation and letting it do what it wants to anyway. It's an ongoing battle, and you'd think I'd learn the truth eventually: The hair always wins. Always.

The haphazard sewist

I sometimes joke that I need to have a cable access cooking show called The Haphazard Cook because although almost everything I cook comes out pretty good, I rarely use a recipe and I throw things together in a totally random, unplanned, and extremely messy way. I'm one of those people who changes the "recipe" in the middle because I don't have oregano but I do have cumin, and uses every single dish in the kitchen because I suck so bad at estimating sizes and amounts, and ends up with a light dusting of flour on my cheek and batter on the tip of my nose and sauce down my blouse like a clueless 1950s I Love Lucy type sitcom wife, only much less cute. And probably not in as adorable a home-sewn dress and apron either!

It's just my personality. I don't like to plan ahead, and I like to get things done quickly so that I can enjoy the product of my labor.

I can't be quite so haphazard in my sewing though because I need to follow patterns, and as I learned from the black eyelet collar debacle those little dots and clips and things on the patterns actually, you know, matter and are there for a reason so if the tailor tack falls out or the chalk marking smudges away it's not going to work to just be like, oh whatever, I'll just eyeball where it's supposed to match up and all will be fine, la la la.

Still though there are ways in which my sewing is a bit more like my cooking, especially because I don't like to finish anything on the inside because I am lazy and no one's going to see it anyway. So I don't trim seam allowances unless I have to, and then I do it kind of crazily and raggedly, and I don't do any seam binding or anything like that. I'm really not even that careful about pressing seams open or in whatever direction the pattern calls for; I do press them because that is important, but I do it sort of willy-nilly if it seems like it won't really make a huge difference in the finished garment. On the outside of the garment anyway.

But I feel a little bad about it sometimes, because so many other sewists (or sewers? I hate that term because it looks so bad, but sewist is sort of annoying too but I don't have any alternative so anyway...) seem very detail-oriented and I imagine that even the insides of their garments are beautiful and neat with lovely little Hong Kong finishes or seam binding from charming floral scrap material they cut and folded and stitched themselves. I remember in the Little House books (or was it Little Women? something like that [gosh I'm feeling awfully parenthetical today, aren't I?]) someone was taught that the back of your sewing work is supposed to look as nice as the front or else you just weren't good enough or something like that. I don't know. On the other hand these are the types of people that graded our poor sewing forebears down for stupid things like not using a thimble on an otherwise adorable finished work, so why should I listen to them anyhow?

Since I probably only have about 4 readers if that many on this blog, I think I'll go ask somewhere else, but I'd like to hear about others' philosophies or experiences on finishing the insides/backs of garments. Does anyone else even bother? Is it really as big a pain in the ass to do as it seems to me? Do the insides and backs of your garments just look better than mine to begin with because I'm still a sort of beginning sewist and I don't really care all that much anyway if the cutting lines are a bit ragged or my thread gets a little tangled where I first started sewing a seam?

Maybe I'll gin up my courage a little bit and post some actual pics of the disgraceful state of my garment guts so that you can see what I mean for real. I'll show you mine if you show me yours.

What, a finished project? REALLY??

Yes, I finished something. Not a sewn something, but something nonetheless. I made a big crocheted beret with a knit band out of some black cotton yarn a friend gave me when she was cleaning out her stash. Whenever I need a really quick project fix, so that I can truly feel I've accomplished something, I crochet a hat or scarf.

I've been crocheting longer than I've been knitting or sewing, and I don't need a pattern to make most things I want to make. And since I live in San Francisco there's a need for hats and scarves year-round, so they're things I can actually use. Not like for instance the halter dress I'm almost done with, which is fab and retro and all that but not exactly something I'm going to wear on a weekly basis.

That halter dress by the way was basically all finished till I sewed on the hooks and eyes to fasten the halter on the back of my neck, and realized I sewed them on all wrong. Which would be easy enough to fix but I REALLY sewed them on, really tightly, really securely, so after I spent from midnight to 12:20 Saturday night trying to rip them off while there was nothing on TV but a history channel tie-in to that 300 movie about Thermopylae and I wasn't feeling nearly testosterone-y enough to put up with that, I gave up. I'll do it sometime later this week when there's something decent to watch to distract from my frustration.

Also over the weekend I set the sleeves in my purple tunic and they came out all right. Well enough that I am not embarrassed to wear it, which is really my only criterion for success in sewing at this particular point in my learning process. The picture here is of the neckline when it was still all messed up; I just folded it under another time and fused it in place to fix it, but no pics yet of the finished project. I still have to hem the ends of the sleeves before I can model it.

The best thing though is that I re-did the neckline on the black eyelet, and without the collar it came out fine! Now I'm hanging it up over night to let the bias set, and I'll hem it tomorrow and tack down the facing which is sticking out a bit, and model it soon. If it ever gets warm enough I'll even wear it out somewhere. Joy!

I told myself I wouldn't go to the fabric store again till I finished something but of course I did. I got some black cotton with white line drawings of flowers that I think I'll use for the Burda shirtdress from my previous post, instead of the plain black which I am using for the Butterick 4790 instead. I think that it will be my Easter dress since the other fabric is pink flowers. I also got some stretchy red fabric that I don't know yet what I'll do with, but it was a gorgeous shade and only $1.99 a yard so I had to have some. This was all from Fabrix, natch. The lady at the cutting table asked me, Anything else for you today? And I answered, God, no, I have to get out of here quick before I spend any more money! So I paid my $12, and disappeared into the early afternoon fog.

Sweet sewing dreams

Actually, it's a little more like insomnia, but I have this thing that I do when I'm trying to fall asleep at night. I make lists. I'm an obsessive listmaker, I do it as much for fun or to occupy myself as for organizational purposes.

The things that I list vary over time according to my current interests... ok, obsessions. But there are a few things that I come back to again and again. One is a list of names. Even years ago, before I ever thought seriously about having kids, I'd make lists in my head of baby names I liked, mostly girls' names, but sometimes boys' if I really wanted a challenge. I'd go through the alphabet and have either one name per letter, or as many names per letter as I could think of. Sometimes they'd have to be names I actually liked, and sometimes they'd have to be names I really really hated.

Most recently I gave myself the challenge of listing one girl's name and one boy's name for each letter, and every one had to be unusual or uncommon, but still something that I would consider naming a kid without feeling like I would be traumatizing the poor sprog for life. For example, D might be Dahlia, because that is both unusual and pretty, but not Dorcas, which is just unusual and old-fashioned but not suitable for today's public school playgrounds.

Anyhow the other things that I always like to list are articles of clothing. In this case it's not just a list of words, but a list of images in my head of outfits I'd like to wear. Sometimes for a particular occasion. Sometimes I restrict myself to new combinations of clothing pieces I actually already own, or to new pieces added to complete outfits of things I have already.

My absolute favorite is to mentally plan what to pack for a trip. The restriction I put on myself for that is to take the absolute minimum amount of clothing necessary to be stylish and ready for every anticipated activity on the trip, so mostly everything has to match and be interchangeable and layerable (I know, not a word, but whatever) and probably all go with a single pair of shoes that I can walk in, or maybe one pair of walking shoes and one pair of dress shoes depending on what's planned for the trip.

Lately though I've added to my list making: I'm now making mental lists of all the stuff i want to sew. Again, always with challenges/restrictions, either the same ones as with my other wardrobe lists, or the newest one which is that it has to be stuff I can do either with the patterns I have already or with the fabric stash I have already.

Anyhow I'm beside myself with joy over my current bedtime listmaking possibilities because not only do I have a sizeable stash of patterns and fabric, but I also have a trip to plan for! To NYC, in April! Can I sew most of my wardrobe for the trip? Probably not, but that won't stop me from trying.

Anyhow I'm posting the pattern envelope pics for my latest two acquisitions, both Burda, which I've never sewn before. The shirtdress will be in all black, with some darling little mod black and white buttons. The wrap dress will be this stretchy brown and blue sort of crinkly chevron stripe pattern stuff I got on my last trip to Fabrix. Only the black is likely to go to NYC with me though, so I'll probably start with that.

I'm still not done with the tunic dress because I need to pick up some elastic, and get up my courage for setting the sleeves in. I'm not so good at sleeves yet, I haven't practiced much. I could leave it sleeveless but really don't want to because I have farmer arms right now (you know, glaring white at the top and sort of tanned on the bottom) plus I need to tone up to avoid the dreaded upper arm jigglies.

The black eyelet is on my schedule for this weekend; I haven't gotten around to ripping out the disastrous collar yet because I've been hemming a halter dress in the hopes of actually, you know, totally finishing at least SOMETHING sometime soon. I save hemming and/or ripping to do by hand in front of the tv while I watch my shows, most of which are on hiatus right now because of the basketball championships or something.

Also in the planning stage: a nice big chunky stylish beret type thing I want to knit or crochet. I need more decent-looking hats for bad hair days now that my hair is growing out and doesn't look as good with my short-hair hats from before.

And seriously, I'm going to get some decent pictures of my own up soon. I really don't care as much as my boyfriend does that they're perfect, so I'm just going to do it myself and stop counting on him to fix them for me, at least for the blog where it doesn't matter that much as long as they don't totally suck.

(oh, and I'm so excited, I actually got a comment! a helpful one! yay, I'm not totally posting into the vast wilderness of unread internet space!)

Not a good sewing night

Last night I didn't have any extra work to do, and I got done with the work I did have earlier than expected, and there was nothing good on TV, so it was a good time to get some sewing done. Too bad I couldn't get anything to go quite right.

First of all, I've been working on a Vintage Vogue pattern for a dress with a sort of weirdly shaped neckline, that forms into an almost sort of triangular opening in the front, with basically 3 points. I can't find an image of it online and I don't have it handy to scan, but it looks a little like this pattern, but without the gathers on either side and straight lines, not curved. (And honestly, I guess I should be happy that it's not more like this picture... this looks even harder!) It also has an option for a collar attached to it, and I wanted to make that version since it seemed a bit more casual looking to me, and I had visions of wearing this to some outdoor singing gigs with my red cowgirl boots and red lipstick, or to summer daytime parties with footless tights (even summer is cold enough for tights here in SF) and red ballet flats.

I'm making this out of black eyelet, which I love, but that caused some problems with attaching the interfacing that was called for in the collar and in the neckline facing since my interfacing was all white and would show through the eyelet lace. So originally, I put the interfacing on some black muslin and used that for the interfacing on those pieces.

Well, I just couldn't get the collar and neckline facing to assemble correctly. It looked terrible. And at first I thought that it was because the black muslin and the interfacing attached to the pieces was just too thick and was keeping it from bending into the right shape. So I ripped it all out, and bought some black interfacing to use instead. Last night I tried to reassemble it all with this version, and it still wouldn't come together right! The points weren't clean enough, the back of the dress was sort of gathered and wrinkled in a bad way, and the collar didn't line up right.

I'm really bummed because I love this material and I don't have enough left to do an easier dress with. So tonight I'm going to rip it out again, and give up on doing the version with the collar, and hopefully I have enough eyelet to cut out the neckline facing again and this time I don't think I"ll bother with interfacing, but just use the material plain or maybe with a black muslin backing to it. And if THAT doesn't work I may have to give up entirely and just make a skirt instead of a dress.

I also worked last night on this tunic dress, Butterick 4920, that I originally saw in blouse form (you can do a blouse or a dress with it) on a couple of blogs including Stacy Sews and Cat Fur Studio. The blouse would probably get better use, but I decided to go for the dress just because I had a ton of fabric for it, a pretty and smooth dark wine colored jersey that I got at one of my favorite SF sources for cheap cheap fabric, Fabrix on Clement Street. I chose the burgundy color as a replacement for black. I'm trying to get away from wearing too much black, and since the other dress that's giving me fits is black eyelet, and I also have a bunch of black poplin for a sort of mod shirt dress Burda pattern I just bought, I needed to branch out. This color is dark and deep enough for evening or for a more somber occasion (I have a wake to attend in NYC in April, and I might wear it for that) but isn't the same old black.

Quick word on Fabrix: I love it because it's so inexpensive, I always find (metered, but still) parking when I go by, usually on Monday afternoons on my way back from therapy, and the fabric is all on huge bolts at least 60" wide so you get lots for your money. The drawback is that they have very little in the way of notions. Well, that's not totally true, since they have a lot of ribbon by the yard, and a huge bin FULL of buttons, but you have to sift through the buttons for, like, hours to find all the matching ones you need. You also really have to look for a while to find the good fabric, because it's all sort of piled up everywhere and some of it is not only cheap (as in, inexpensive) but what I like to call cheap-ass (meaning tacky and not well-made). But I love the process of digging through lots of stuff, I find it entertaining and even calming, so that isn't really a drawback to me.

But back to the tunic dress. I shouldn't complain too much because it did come together mostly pretty well, and the fabric drapes beautifully, but the finished edge on the front modesty panel neckline gapes, isn't stitched straight, and looks yucky. It's because I'm not good at sewing details on stretch knit. I think I'll have to fix it by turning it under once more and somehow blind stitching it down in the hopes that the stitches won't show.

So my bad sewing night last night wasn't all bad I guess, because the frustration just made me more determined to come home tonight and fix it all. I hope it works out. I really want to make enough items to wear mostly things I made myself on my trip to New York, so that's an ambitious goal that I can't meet if I have to keep ripping stuff up and starting over again. My next adventure: learning to make buttonholes, so I can make some blouses (one from white lace, another from a sheer black with pink roses) and that shirt dress! Maybe this weekend if I don't have to work! Ooh, and I want to make an Easter dress too. More on that later.