Blouse Sloper, Part 1

As Ali mentioned, we took a class together over the long weekend to make a bodice sloper. Rather than learning to draft from scratch, the teacher brought in standardized muslins that she customized to our bodies. We then transferred those alterations back to a flat pattern, and were ready to get started!

So I headed home and pulled out a thrifted mens shirt, a cotton/poly blend in a vibrant blue, and got to work muslining out my new sloper.

Not bad. Not sure what's up with the rippling at the bottom, possibly due to the fact that I was basting this together at 6AM on 3 hours of sleep (another restless, insomniatic night), or perhaps my lack of ironing? It has about 3" of ease at the bust, which I like for a loosely fitted blouse look. I do, however, feel like a bit of a rectangle in this.

(I think I cut this crooked - for once, it's not my slanted posture!)

Oops, missed a button! I decided to keep the buttons in the back for a vintage-esque look. I'll probably swap them out for buttons a different color. I like the fact that I don't have my usual swayback issues. I'm wondering if this is because the sloper is cut such that it does not decrease in at the side seam towards the waist - instead, all the back waist shaping is via darts. I've never seen that done before! However, I have something of a broad back and well-built deltoids, so I'm wondering if I should really be leaving all that waist shaping to darts.

Think I need to scoop out a bit more at the front darts in the blouse bottom? I need to lower the front darts by about 1" as well. And, my nice muscle-y arms are going to require wider sleeves and more of an armscythe scoop-out, as my arm movement is currently rather restricted in this current iteration. In all, not bad. I'll tweak about a bit more and show off the results - soon, I hope, though of late "soon" for me as meant "weeks" and not "days".

Finally, in honor of Me-Made-June (I'm not participating formally, but I'm with you all in spirit!)


Handmade shrug, refashioned dress. Shoes DIY'd ala Mom. When I bought these flats, they were nude -- nude, as in, the exact same shade as my skin. SO not attractive. So she dabbed brown shoe polish on them and now they are 1 shade darker than I am. Much, much better. (If you were curious, we bought them with the intention of darkening them. They looked so ... sickly ... at the store.) That Mom, she is the queen of DIY improvisations, is she not?

It runs in the blood. She may have no desire to sew her own clothes anywhere, but she's still got the spirit.

Refashion Co-Op - Come join us!

So ... you may have heard but there's a new collaborative refashion blog in town ... the Refashion Co-Op! Ever since Wardrobe Refashion shut down there's been a huge void in the eco crafting community, so seven of us got together to try to fill that hole a bit. We've got a great crew of contributors so far and welcome you pop by for some inspiration or to find like-minded crafters. And of course, if you refashion then consider contributing to the blog!


This here is a skirt that I refashioned from a larger pencil skirt (a favored trick of mine). I put up greater details in my post over on ReCo (hehe, as we nicknamed it during the planning stages), so pop on over there to take a gander!


I hope you'll join us! (And yes, this skirt will definitely be making appearances in MMM. It's a perfect work piece - formal and conservative enough so that the wearer can be taken seriously, but with its own unique flair and detailing, and neutral so that it can both go with just about anything and be worn quite frequently in an inconspicuous manner. I have taken to calling this combination S.E.W. - Simple yet Eminently Wearable, which is the name of this 26th skirt, 24th refashion of mine. One of these days, my refashions will outnumber my skirts. Re-Co will help me towards that goal :-)!)

Warm Things for the Neck, part 2

Whew! This weekend sort of got away from me. I meant to post on Saturday ... and then ran out of sunlight for taking photos. Then I meant to post Sunday ... and wound up taking longer than expected to drop off some stuff in my new apartment in San Francisco. And then on Monday and Tuesday night I was crashing with a friend and didn't get a chance to upload photos. But finally! Here I am.


One of those ever-popular infinity scarves. I was equally inspired by Ali and Wardrobe Refashion - I can't find the link to the exact post, but I'd seen a couple people cut up wool slacks to make scarves, and when I spotted this really great pair of wide-legged wool pants at my local thrift shop, I jumped on the opportunity to marry my inspiration sources. I know I've blogged about the great offerings at my local thrift shop before, but wow. This was a pair of lined wool suiting slacks, really nice quality wool suiting, that looked like they had never been worn. Holy crap! And they even almost fit me. That would've been doubly exciting.


This is about 55" long and a little over 8" wide. I lined it with a quilting cotton that vaguely reminds me of a reproduction fabric. I love the contrast between the formality and masculinity of the wool suiting, paired with the graphic florals and bold colors of the lining. It's pretty lightweight but warm, and I have a whole leg left! Perhaps a second infinity scarf.

And then ... I went and did more knitting. (And even more knitting, show you next time) Remember this shrug? Well, this is actually the same pattern, but transposed onto a scarf and knit up with laceweight yarn on size 5 needles.


It's a pretty simple cascading pattern. But pretty! And I love this yarn. It's amazing stuff. I'll try to look up the yarn tag when I get back to my parent's place and post it up on Ravelry, if you're curious, but man ... I gotta use this again in the future. And the color. Gotta use it again in the future. See, this is what happens when you engage in non-selfish crafting. You wind up making double of everything.

Refashioning Handmades

You might recognize this skirt from a few posts back. It's one of my favorite refashions of all times, and one that hasn't been properly documented here, I don't think. Best of all, it proves that you can resuscitate the (hopefully few) handmade items that get made but never worn.


This started out as two skirts: a thrifted bias-cut blue and brown plaid wool skirt that was tea length and just tight enough to warrant the wishful thinking "if I lost 5 pounds this would fit perfectly!"; and Skirt #2, never blogged, a navy fine-wale corduroy skirt traced off my favorite denim skirt at the time - fitted through the upper hips, then flaring out slightly to an A-line, with cute patch pockets in the back (the denim version bought from a Japanese department store in Taiwan, so you know the detailing was nice!). Unfortunately, Skirt #2 suffered from that hip-bubbling-incorrect-petite-length problem that all my fitted-at-hip skirts experience, and never got worn.

Initially I had just planned to refashion the wool skirt, so I cut 4" off the top and then improvised some asymmetrical pleats in the front and 2 pleats in the back, one over each, er, cheek. But when I tried it on it looked all wrong. First of all, I got that puffy bum look going, and moreover the asymmetrical pleats in front needed something extra to prevent them from looking like pleats that were mistakenly placed to one side only.

Enter Skirt #2. I carefully unpicked those patch pockets and slapped them on over the pleats, effectively tacking them down and reusing the little buggers that took me forever to make! Then I put in a faux pocket patch on the front to tie the look together:


Still not yet satisfied, because the pocket patch looked a bit random from the front, I decided to hack off the bottom of one skirt and attach it to the lining of the second. I'm pretty sure there's a better way to do this, but I just made a straight cut across the bottom, basted it to the lining, and then used a piece of bias tape to cover the raw edges:


And tada! A completely reworked skirt. By now you can see that the corduroy is starting to show signs of wear because I'm always reaching for it.

As a sometimes-quilter, I often find myself making little stacks of coordinating fabrics. In this case, the contrasting textures of the corduroy and plaid wool drew me in, and I loved the contrast in scale between the pin dots in the brown quilting fabric and the plaid. Mixing fabrics in dressmaking can be challenging since you're not just matching fabrics, you're also matching them to a pattern, matching drape and print scale, and then matching the finished garment to the rest of your wardrobe.

As much as I love the effect you can get from combining fabrics in a single item of clothing, I find it pretty challenging to make it work ... and to not get the "hm, a patchworked vest, interesting" vibe (although I firmly believe that patchwork can work in clothing, but it's tricky!) I think all the mixing and matching here works because the skirt has a pretty streamlined A-line shape, it's visually interesting with just enough "funky" to keep me satisfied, and the navy and brown are both neutrals which makes it easy-ish to match.

I wonder if I'm the only person who fights this urge when they sew clothing? Or if other people are veritable fabric-matching-junkies like me, how do they incorporate these into their garments?

Fauna

*Squeak!* I was supposed to have a fourth and final sweater refashion for you by ... yesterday, at the latest, but eek! I had some supplies on backorder which didn't come through until today. In the meantime, I was all ready to get snip-happy with a gray crewneck sweater I'd recently thrifted (and believe me, the concept is in my brain and ready to go!) when I had a little reality check that, crewneck or not, this 100% wool, nicely fitted gray sweater was probably a perfect neutral and layering piece for cool weather. So the new plan is to give the sweater one season to see how much wear it truly gets. And to give it the best possible odds of survival, I tinkered with some accessories to help me get over my aversion to crewnecks because of their supposed "boring" factor.


Hm. Definitely a pop of color, but I think I would want something else fun to pair with it (funky skirt? earrings? a scarf? hat?) ...


Basically, I cut a rectangular strip out of a felted sweater and rolled it up to form a rose, stitched it atop a deep green yoyo, and added a pair of leaves in a lime green. It was a ribbed sweater, so I cut along the rib lines to keep my edges straight.

Been watching a lot of baseball this past week, so all this handsewing has been the perfect companion to the World Series (oh, we are long-suffering fans here in San Francisco. Believe me, I've seen lots of bad baseball games here. Football, too. And lets not even start with basketball!).


Yeah, I got a little enthusiastic. This is a wool blend from Joann's and an ivory thrifted cashmere/wool/nylon cape. I do love mustard yellow, but truthfully have a hard time figuring out what to pair it with (other than gray), so this sweater seemed like a good opportunity to try out some flower fascinators. I've had this idea for wearing more fascinators in my daily life (I have a peacock headband from San Francisco) ... big clusters, fun clusters. This may need some tweaking, but I like what I see so far. Although this makes it tempting to go out and buy more wool felt ...


So yes! Accessories! A good reminder that a sweater needn't always be chopped up to be worn more often :-). And a versatile way to add a splash of color to many outfits. Versatile yet eco-friendly ... score, and score.

October Refashion Challenge #1 // Fiber #18: Amarynth

First up in this October Refashion Challenge series:


A dark blue pullover sweater that's sat in my closet for several years now. It's a very soft and lovely and warm pullover, but several sizes larger than I normally wear, and it turns out that I'm not terribly fond of crewneck sweaters. After a lot of handstitching and crocheting, my new cardigan:


I plan to put up a brief "how to" over the weekend, but essentially I slit up the front center of the cardigan, turned those edges under and finished them with ribbon, folded the sleeves up to make them 3/4 length, and then handstitched a bunch of crocheted flowers onto the front and back. Add 3 decorative buttons with snaps underneath to hold it closed, and voila!


I found the buttons in a jar of vintage buttons that my mom gave me, and the yarn is leftover from my latest knitting adventure [photos coming soon, I promise!]. I had originally thought that bright red buttons would be fun, but on second thought decided that keeping it a blue-on-blue theme would increase the overall versatility of the sweater. I was trying for an Anthropologie-esque feel with the oversized flowers and random placement, but the jury's still out on whether that was achieved or not.


Yes, if you look closely the 3 buttons are not evenly spaced [sigh, what was I saying about listening to Farmer John and measuring???], and yes, if you look closely those sleeves are not exactly the same length. But my current motto: as long as it wouldn't stop you from wearing it, (and I stand so lopsided that most people probably wouldn't notice), then I would rather spend the time on a new project, rather than unpicking an old one!


Speaking of new projects, here's the second on my list for the October Refashion Challenge. Stay tuned ...

The summer of non-sewing

Ugh. Greetings from Waddersville. Here I present my latest failure, which I like to call Not quite a tunic, not yet a nightgown: caught somewhere between the 60s and 2010.


Here it is when I pinned it on to do a quick double check. I was sitting in my apartment, getting ready to foray out into the Boston Harbor Islands when I had this massive piece of inspiration to make myself a summery dress: lengthen Simplicity 2614, throw in a pintucked waistband cuz I'm just cool like that, and do it refashion-y style with this great mens shirt that I'd thrifted and hung onto for the longest time because I didn't want to mess it up: gorgeous blue stripes, really soft and worn-in fabric, just perfect, you know? It would be all striped and blue and French and light and airy and summery and eco-friendly and perfect, you know?

Well, HA. Waddersville supreme. Check it out.


First off, there's that major ease in the back. Why, you could fit another half Jessica in there! Also, look down and notice how gracefully the side seams miss each other by oh, I don't know, a good 2.5"? The view from the front is already a good 2" shorter than I'd normally wear, but that side view?

Do they offer prizes for poorly conceived sewing projects? Seriously, I need to enter this monster into a competition!

So then I tried tinkering. Hm ... well the bust seems awfully low. What if I just raised it by a couple inches? Looks better, eh? Waistband hits at a more flattering site, too. Except now it's even more painfully short. Like I'd ever step out the house in this.


Oh and hey, check out the back. See that completely mismatched front and back waist seam? Oh yeah, DEFINITE intentional design element there!


Ugh. Talk about a major sewing mojo killer. Maybe this is why I've been soooooo much more into knitting this past year. I should just listen to the universe and stop trying to force the sewing thing. It's like I once read in somebody's writing memoir, the reason college freshmen write such painfully clumsy sex scenes is that to really write something, you have to love it so much that you almost hate it. I feel like when it comes to sewing, if I feel like I have to know my shit so well I almost hate it, in order to really, really know it, then it's time to take a break.

More handknits, anybody?

Refashion #13: Two-Button Cardigan

I've had this turtleneck for awhile now. It's a beautiful brown color. It's terribly soft. I never wear it. The turtleneck is too high and it's a bit boxy and shapeless, and somehow the proportions never work with any of my skirts.


What I do not have much of, however, are cardigans. I've seen the sweater-to-cardigan look numerous times on WR, but I didn't just want to leave the edges raw or flip them under, since the original sweater is quite fitted as it is. This is probably why I often let my WR membership lapse -- I'm such a picky refashioner and consequently make much additional work for myself through detailing, that if I had to rely on thrifting and refashioning alone I wouldn't make it through all 4 Bostonian seasons. Or so I tell myself.

Anyways. It finally dawned on me that if I could use bias tape to finish off the raw edges, I might just have a cardigan that I liked.



I picked up 1/3 yard of fabric from the homespun section of Joann's, made my own bias tape, put on the sweater and marked the areas I wanted to chop, took a giant breath, and cut. Boy did I feel like I was living dangerously! And I will say that this is not the original look that I was going for. Note to self: if you're wearing a sweater with negative ease, don't expect V-neck lines to stay the same once you cut that baby open!

But luckily, I am not one who shies away from slightly off-beat or quirky. In fact, that's what I'm all about. I think I may actually even like this version better than what I'd originally planned. The buttons are attached to snaps, and if I get really, really nitpicky I may go back and move the bottom button 1/8" so that it lies perfectly flat, and add another hidden snap to hold everything in place better. But I like to think of this as version One Point Oh, i.e. good enough to wear out in public. OPO. Kris and I are trying to become better friends with OPO. Because TPO may never come into existance, but I kind of want to wear my cardigan now.

Stash-y Grocery Bags, Take II

I actually pulled out two stacks of fabrics back when I made this, but didn't get around to cutting out the panels for the second bag until after I moved into my friend's place for the summer. And then, of course, ladida I got distracted with other projects, until one night when I gave the first bag away to Jamie along with some produce [I was headed out of town for the weekend and needed some other mouth to feed my CSA share to].


The bag dimensions are the same as before, and it is uses the same improvised technique as the last time. Really am trying to use down the stash here, the green corduroy is leftover from a skirt I made this past fall. Pardon the lumpiness and unpressed condition of the handles, this bag had already received some lovin' by the time it got to work its magic for the camera.


If possible, I may love this one even more than the previous [although I've still got so much of the blue vintage fabric left, I may hack away at it again]. And I've got a request for a third one, so more to come ...

Did I mention it would be irregular posting?

Dang, sorry about that. It's just been crazy busy, I flew back from China and hurried around visiting people while unjetlagging, spent all day Sunday flying back to Boston, Monday - Wednesday started up at one of my summer internship placements, Thursday had to get my internet fixed and run errands and pick up my first CSA dropoff!!!, Friday went back to work, and now here I am, finally.

So I have a mini update planned for my recent travels, but I wanted to pretend to myself that this here still passes as a sewing blog, so here are some refashion-y pillows I made for all 3 lovely people I recently saw in China.

For my parents:


They wanted some cushions to sit on. I browbeat them into accepting patchwork, although there is a tad bit of quilting in them to make them sturdier. Notice how I make good use of my overdone penchant for matching-but-not.


Aaaaah, so there's the refashion-y part. Can you see the pocket in the upper righthand corner? I managed to salvage it and love that detail, although I wish I could've maneuvered to have it a leeeetle farther down the back of the cushion. No need to create fancy back fastenings for cushions for me!

I love the story of this plaid shirt. My mom originally got it for me as a Christmas present - this was back in sixth grade, the like one year where it was fashionable to walk around in giant oversized plaid shirts or to wear them wrapped around your waist [did I go to a weird middle school? Does anybody else remember this? It would be circa 1995]. I always loved the color and feel, but eventually got tired of looking like last last year's fashions to my classmates, so my dad happily accepted the donation and wore it for a decade, after which he decided he, too, was tired of it. At which point I fished it back out of the Goodwill pile, sensing some refashion-y potential here. And I've used it here and here, though this is my favorite use of the fabric so far, probably because it goes back to the two people who gift/regifted me with the shirt in the first place.

This is a t-shirt my brother received for his birthday in college that he absolutely loved. I remmeber him showing it off to me and cracking up continuously. Anyways. With multiple ways it shrunk in the awkward way [short and fat], so he didn't wear it anymore and I rescued it from the Goodwill pile [this happens a lot in my family, I think we need to communicate better] with the thought that I could eventually salvage the front panel for something.


Tada! It's waiting for him on his bed when he gets back from China. And I don't have to worry about him finding out ahead of time on my blog, cuz I think China's still got the block on Blogger. The coordinating fabrics are mostly salvaged from SCRAP: shirting samples, home decor samples, a really nice soft placemat that I used for the back [the plaid]. The rest is stash.

Oh yes. And the postcard swap! Zonnah sent me the most beautiful postcard, please check her post on it here because it'll take me too long to get a photo up of her lovely creation. I also forgot to snap a picture of my postcard to her but you can see it in her post as well. I love, love, love her applique and the perfect embroidery and handstitching! And you can't see from her photo but she put in tiny red beads, which is such a nice detail. As I told her, I couldn't believe she'd actually given it up and mailed it to me! Wow.

And here's the postcard I gave Rita:


Image adapted from this one [scroll down to the free image]. I know she likes embroidery so I tried to satisfy that wish. I also brought her some blue and green fabric and she gifted me with a stupendous amount of fabric and scraps in return [cuz she knows I hate cutting large pieces of fabric]. I am, once again, behind in the karmic crafting circle with this girl. Rita: 5. Jessica: -3 or so.

And on a completely unrelated note, I have a stupendous amount of lettuce from my CSA. One giant head, but consider the fact that I. do. not. like. salad. Well, I'm now teaching myself to like it, so today I threw in some Asiago and blueberries and contemplated that strange combination of salty and tart [the sale blueberries were very unripe], while letting the fiber, I mean the lettuce, wash down as unnoticed as possible.

Tada!!!

Final exams: Check.
Refrigerator excavations: On the to do list.
Line up something for summer: In progress, but ~2/3 done.
Clean the apartment: Started. [But only because I couldn't find my keys, so instead of working on my paper I spent a frantic hour combing the apartment and putting things away to figure out where in the heck they could be. In the interest of self-disclosure, you will note that this is the second time in the space of a week I've lost the keys entirely, and that in the same week I 1) walked out the door without keys, ID, wallet or phone, 2) walked out without ID, 3) walked out without keys the very next day, 4) am pretty sure I've been without phone at least several of those other days. It's been a good week. Even more ironic, one of my group projects focused on how stress decreases working memory. Working memory is your ability to hold a piece of information in your head and work with/manipulate it. i.e. where those darn keys went. Living and breathing proof, my friends.]
Working down the fabric stash ahead of pending move: Slow progress. [Also, pending move is right down the street, so while multiple granny cart trips in 80F/50 humidity are not my idea of a fun time, it also isn't quite as much incentive to use down the stash as, say, flying cross country.]

So here's that skirt I had been working on, Take 4 [yes, I spared you the rant about my third failure.] I probably would've given up on this a long time ago if it weren't for that public accountability and then Antoinette's comment to show that somebody actually paid attention! Did you know you had so much influence ;-)? [or more correctly, that I'm so impressionable?]

Anyways. Given my apparent love for all things pleated, I tucked some pleats into the front and back of the skirt, added on a 2" waistband, and used my machine's buttonholer to add on a couple colored buttons for fun:


Looking at it now, I'm not so sure about those mismatched buttons. Then again, I hardly go around with my shirt tucked in, so maybe it won't bother me so much. I'm wondering if I want to swap one of them out for another color [but the 2 are already slightly different sizes, which complicates matters], or if I want to add in a couple decorative buttons in between the white buttons down the rest of the skirt, which you can't really see anyways. I'm thinking yellow and maybe another orange? I dunno. I never had an eye for details like this.

Oh yes, and the waistband facing:


Heather Ross!!! Who doesn't love tadpoles hidden at the waist? Fabric courtesy of my favorite Rita [have you checked out her creations? Go do so! The girl is talented. She can also dance like crazy. In fact, that's how we met ~ graceful Rita, and Jessica trying not to trip over her own feet. She helped me up a couple times.]

OK, but to be honest about this skirt, I'm not thrilled with how it looks from the sideview. I wonder if I need to weigh the hem down a bit. Or maybe I'll toss it into the moving boxes and let it settle for a bit, and then when summer really hits Boston I will not care that my bum looks huge because I'll be wearing something breathable.

Happy Friday to you!

Would it be a stretch to say we're all at risk for becoming bag ladies?

I know I am. It's one of the dangers associated with knowing how to make your own bags. It's just too hard to stop. And then you turn your friends into bag ladies, and it's all good. Or you could use it as a screening tool for bosses [very effective; the 2 bosses I've had and liked have both been bag ladies, the one I was lukewarm on was not].

So. Inspired by Alicia's lovely Jane Market Bag and this pressing need to use down the stash before Memorial Day weekend, when I am squeezing the contents of my one-bedroom apartment into my friend's studio that I'm subletting for the summer and the less I need to move the better, and also because I am desperately in need of a new grocery bag because it is shameful the number of plastic bags I have accumulated, I hunted through the scraps and larger pieces I transported from CA to MA, and found myself a nice little blue theme.


The center panel is a vintage curtain from a lady who was selling her mom's old textiles on Craigslist, also used here. The corduroy was salvaged from when I chopped up Handmade Skirt #2 (a.k.a. Failed Skirt #1) to make this skirt, and I think that's the last of it which is GOOD because it had the slightest bit of stretch that drove me nutso every time I worked with it. The rest is miscellaneous Joann stash and i have to say, this is one scrappy bag. I did all sorts of random piecing improvisations as things didn't quite turn out the way they were supposed to - I wound up cutting something an inch too short, or my math got fuzzy, or I forgot that I had left raw seams somewhere.

And after all of that, I still didn't make a lining. This exterior was already one of my better shots at getting a cohesive, large amount of fabric to work with. There was no way I was going to piece a lining as well. So I finished the edges and hoped for the best.


But happily it holds quite a bit! The pockets are the perfect width and depth for my wallet, the boxy size is great for stacking all sorts of yummy foods and oddly shaped bits of produce, and I really love the center fabric. Which is good, because after this test run I'm thinking I may need to make more of these. Of course I do. If I'm moving apartments, I need something to carry my stuff in, right? And less fabric to transport, right?

You can be sure it will be as scrappy as this one.

In Need of a Redo II

Oi. o_O. So I resewed up the side hems and fiddled around for a janky solution to the inner waistband facing refitting of the first Oi Moment, and here's what I came up with:


Which looks pretty promising, right? Ah, if only my waist were that tiny. [Although I have to say, and don't ask me how but I stumbled across this yesterday and was HORRIFIED. Stuffing yourself into a 6" diameter corset??? When your waist is already 22"??? Good heavens, Barbie herself has a 19" waist and we KNOW how normally proportioned she is (hint: if she were a real person, she would fall over, she's so top heavy). I hear bones cracking every time I look at that photo. Ugh. HOW could that be attractive???]

Anyways. Back to real life. Here's the best "on the body" shot I could come up with, and it was clearly a mistake photo, which is what I get for setting the timer function to 2 seconds to save on batteries.


Hello Runners Calves.

I love the fabric, its this great waffle-y textured-y seersucker-y summer-y plaid, very lightweight and comfy with the slightest bit of stretch. Perfect to pad about doing laundry in, or sit at the computer and stress about the survey that was not writing itself [ugh], or to get up multiple times and make myself whatever health/comfort foods could be scrounged up in the fridge. This is a thrifted L mens shirt and I'm now understanding why people don't try this unless they are 1) impossibly tall and skinny, or 2) they have a XL or XXL shirt to work with.

The real problem with this skirt, I've decided, is that this skirt doesn't have a wide enough hem diameter, so that the elastic waistband bunches and bulges in a funny way and doesn't get the chance to drape properly. I have this strange Perfectionist 80/20 Exception Rule where sometimes that first 80% of effort will only net me 20% satisfaction because the details are off just enough that I know I'll never use the darn thing, so the comfort vs. aesthetic inner struggle was bothering me for the longest time until I remembered this skirt and if memory serves, the dimensions of the 2 skirts are actually about the same. So there might be even more pleats in my future. But I think I deserve a one week armistice before I go picking out the inner facing and figure out what to do for a waistband.

In other exciting news, happily geeking out to public health articles and excited about the geekingoutness of it all. I love nerdiness.

Redo I

Argh Moment: cutting down and re-sewing the side seams of an elastic waistband skirt. You can see a peek of the inside waistband portion, it's that orange at the top near the rotary cutter.

Crafting Green

No, not a post about Betz's new book, although it looks fabulous and has been garnering great reviews so far and is definitely on The List, but her blog tour post over at Craft Sanity got me thinking about crafting green and how it relates to crafting, for me, in general.

I remember China and how much it changed my life, to peel back this side of me that loved creativity and narratives and humanity and watching people, after a long 16 year sludge through schooling and all sorts of achievements that were oriented towards larger society's definitions of success and value - things like money, prestige, the number of letters behind your name, your occupation - and my subsequent return to the US and falling in love with the crafting blogosphere.

The love stemmed in part, I think, because of the beautiful photographs and the personalities of the women behind those beautiful handmade objects, in part because of the beautiful handmade objects themselves, and in part because they represented a continuity in my life of those values and joys and beauties, the ability to take a small moment and savor humanity.

Smorgasbord of handmade napkins.

The beauty drew me in. But what has kept me has been the way that crafting intersects with numerous values I hold dear. For me, crafting is an expression of creativity and my personal aesthetic, it is a way of connecting with my inner child and my inner world, a way to connect to friends through craft or to give handmade as a way of expressing to my friends that I am thinking of them, even if we are separated by oceans or by the thin walls of apartments and floors between us. It is also about making do and remaking old into new, about reducing my impact on this planet through reuse and creation of reusables, about innovation and ingenuity and new ways of seeing old or familiar objects, about stepping out of a monetized value system that holds short-term profits over long-term well being for ourself, our societies, our planet, and all the other creatures who coinhabit this planet with us.

And, through sharing handmade, to share these values with others.

As mentioned before, I do need an apron. But really, I don't absolutely need an apron. I can make do.


Just tuck one of 'em napkins into the waistband, and there you go! Of course, this doesn't help my top half so its only a partial solution, but really, I should've stumbled upon this a long time ago. That's OK though, I'm content with this solution for now. Napkins that are eco-friendly, have multiple uses, are pretty, increase small joys of meals ... and best of all, its just the tip of the iceburg. In so many ways.

Conscious Clothing Week: Day 4-7

Sorry for the delay ... school is really starting to pick up again!

Day 4
Sweater: thrifted [I love the little green detailing! I think this sweater must be from Hong Kong or something because it's labeled as an XL]
Jeans: Arizona
Shoes of Awesomeness II: Keds


I mean, how perfect are these? I think my first reaction when I saw them was, "That's ridiculous!" Ridiculous ~> you couldn't find a pair of shoes that are more Jessica if you tried. I wonder if I could somehow magic patchwork onto a plain pair of Keds ... that would make me immeasurably happy. Immeasurably. I might just have to start trolling eBay for lots of Keds if that were the case. Let's not even contemplate that right now.

Day 5
Sweater: thrifted
Skirt: refashioned by me!
Boots: CK

Day 6
Sweater: thfited
Jeans: Arizona
Shoes: Shoes of Awesomeness II
Gloves: Delia's, circa 2000. Seriously, one day I am going to make good on my threat to replicate these, but fingerless, and in a different colorway.

And no, I don't own exactly one pair of jeans ... although that was two for the longest time. These don't even fit all that well, but I did the stupendously brilliant trick of threading elastic through the back waistband to make them fit better, and it feels like magic, I tell you. So I've been wearing these every chance I get to test out that the elastic magic really does hold up through multiple wearings.

Day 7
Sweater: thfited
Skirt: made by me
Boots: CK
Scarf: rescued from my mom's Goodwill pile.

Hm ... I'm noticing a trend here. 1) Apparently I wear these boots everywhere. 2) I own more thrifted sweaters than I realized. 3) I really like to pair neutrals with neutrals, apparently, or everything with neutrals [well that one I knew].

This has been a fun week. Instructive. I've definitely had fun with it, and it's motivating me to both finish up the sweater I've been knitting forever [to knit a sweater forever, it helps to rip out a sweater 10 times over, I swear], and get to more skirt refashions! Oh yes, and find some boots that will stand up to New England winters ...

Assuming I can make it through a New England winter, that is.