Red and green, year round

Continuing my UFO banishment/destash theme.  When I was cleaning up my room, I kept coming across stacks of quilting cottons I'd pulled aside with the thought of making something patchworky, someday, with them.  In the name of wrestling some order into my room, I realized I'd better decide to either divert those stacks into a giant stack, or stick them back in the fabric bins.  The red and green stack, I put into the "get to within 3 months" giant stack.

And now, 2 pillows to go with my watermelon quilt!  I love how bright and cheerful they are, and how pillows can really change up the mood of a room.  I've been hit by the nesting impulse of late, which I guess makes sense seeing as I'm a terrible homebody, and for me there's nothing like a bit of patchwork to make the home feel warm and cozy.  Makes for a nice break from garment sewing, those little straight lines and the joy of combining colors and prints.

October Refashion Challenge // Refashion #20 :: Ashley

So ... this started out as a brilliant purple crewneck Merino sweater, plus some blue/purple floral fabric first used in this project. I love the sweater's color but rarely wear it because the color is so vibrant that it's hard to wear with anything but neutrals [or at least any other clothes I currently own], but the basic crewneck means I always felt a bit plain when I wore it. Seems like the perfect candidate for a refashion, eh?


I had originally envisioned this as a sweater-with-bib, one of those fads that was really popular 4 years ago (and isn't that the beauty of handmade? Doesn't matter how late you are to a bandwagon, you can still get your arse up on it long after the rest of the riders have jumped ship). I started by removing the crewneck, after which I panicked that the subsequent neckline was too wide to make a proper bib and, once the panic died down, hastily invented Plan B.


Enter the peter pan collar, complete with improvised drafting and numerous revisions (envision me standing with a muslim collar pinned to sweater, looking in the mirror and marking with pen directly onto the muslim. Classic.)


Somehow these photos don't do justice to the strange effect this combination has upon the resulting refashion. My dad, who normally doesn't have much of a fashion opinion, took one look at me in my new sweater and, well, convulsed. My mom uttered a noncommittal, "Interesting ..." and after several seconds of speechlessness, said, "Well, it's kind of Laura Ashley." Personally, I feel like I tried to drag the 1950s into 2010 and got stuck in 1990 instead.


Let's talk about this one, shall we? My theory, and chime in if you have a different one, is that the peter pan collar, already quite feminine, becomes over-the-top feminine in such a girly, flowery fabric, and as such begs to be paired with a girly color and fabric, something like a soft lavender cabled twinset. Like, playing up the retro look, instead of trying to drag it towards "modern." Yet the saturated purple color moves in the opposite direction, and the result is stuck in the sadly familiar "not quite a girl, not yet a woman" no-mans-land of Epic Wadders.

OK, but I do like this detail of how I dealt with the too-long sleeves. Simply tuck them under to halve the length, and then secure with 2 fabric-covered buttons. Mimics, a tad, the buttoned detailing on coat sleeves.


So now we move on to how to proceed from here. As usual, I'm torn:

1) More is better. Somehow, I tempted to think that if I just added a fabric-covered belt in matching fabric, all would be healed and somehow this entire look would be pulled together. I think that I barely have enough leftover fabric to pull this off.

2) Double the risk, double the reward/failure. I'm also tempted to think that my initial instinct was correct and that this fabric combination works better as a sweater-with-bib, in which case I would unpick the bias binding, remove the peter pan collar, and attach a bib instead. The collar would then be saved for another project [hm, eBaying lavendar cabled cardigans, maybe?]. Truth be told, I'm not sure I have enough fabric for this, unless of course I carefully match seams and piece together the leftovers.

3) MMM/SSS lessons, silly! And of course, there's that realization by many of you after MMM or SSS that once we wear our handmade "eh" pieces several times, we come to forgive their sins, so maybe I should commit to wearing this out of the house 3 times before I pass final judgment. Ali? I think you're going to drag me out of the house in this one though, because I'm not sure I can actually bring myself to be seen in public in it.


Augh! How to proceed? What would you do??? And where do you think this project went off the tracks? Would any peter pan collar work with this type of sweater/color? How do you balance factors like pattern, scale, color value, style, and retro elements when planning projects ... or what else do you take into consideration? This is super nice fabric and a super nice sweater, and I hope to 1) salvage it somehow, and 2) learn from my mistakes so that I don't repeat them.


Speaking of not repeating mistakes, here are my raw materials for this week's project in the October Refashion Challenge ...

Although I can't say I'd recommend this for long stretches of time ...

... at least this set-up finally got me in front of the sewing machine for the first time in weeks.

We'll keep tweaking. It may take another couple stacks of textbooks to get right, or yet another configuration to ye olde study room. But ... the hum of the sewing machine! Oh, excitingness.

Facing forward

This past week, I have been taking fifteen minutes to myself each morning. I make a cup of tea or assemble the components of breakfast, then bring this all with me to sit in a living room bathed in life. And contemplate. Sometimes I contemplate nothing but try really hard to reign my roaming mind back to the present and my current surroundings, to live more mindfully and less within the recesses of memory or out projected into the possible futures that unveil themselves, a hundred a minute. The warmth of tea as it slides down my throat, the texture of cereal in my mouth. That is what is important.

I am trying for that stillness. I want to be someone who lives more by her own agenda and is less swayed by the ambitions, judgments, or values of others. I always think I've found this. Then the environment changes and I am swept along once more, unmoored, and it takes me awhile to find my bearings again. It is always a disorienting process, and though I am trying to think of life more in spirals than in a strictly linear fashion, I can't help but wonder if a little intentional action on my part might not make a large difference down the road. So this time, with my most recent change in environment once more, I am gifting myself the mental and temporal space to become more rooted in myself, anchored in who I am and what I would like out of the day.



Last Saturday, Wei Jie and Kristy came over to make chocolate zucchini cake [my idea] and watch Sleepless in Seattle [their idea]. It was the perfect marriage of activities for a Saturday night. And when they showed up, they not only brought Mediterranean food but also this beautiful bouquet of sunflowers. Flowers!!! I think this makes my third bouquet of flowers I've ever received in my life.

So each morning I bring myself into the room where their flowers reside. I once read that introverts' minds are wired differently than extroverts. We have more neural pathways that link through the memory sections of the brain, making us biologically inclined to filter our experiences through memory [mmm ... this tea tastes great ... hey, I remember the first time Lisa made me tea from fresh mint leaves ... wasn't that a funny comment Lisa made in our last conversation ...]. And, correspondingly, we have fewer neural pathways connected to our five senses, unlike our extroverted companions who are very much stimulated by the present for its own value, and not through the layers of memory and association that we bring to every human contact and sensory sensation.



Regardles if that is true or not [and I've never bothered to verify the neuroscience], I do find it difficult to train my mind not to wander. So these sunflowers have been a real boon for my moments of stillness each morning. They are so bright, so cheerful, and full of texture and layers of colors and lines, that every time I find my mind slipping out of the moment and the intentional space I've created [which is quite often], I just turn my attention to the flowers in front of me. Trace my eyes over the stalks or watch the petals as they unfurl. Feel grateful for the friendships I've made here in Boston, especially the support and laughter of the two girls who brought these flowers into my life, helped me move all my stuff into this apartment, who made the cake I'm currently eating for breakfast, and who, most importantly, are there for me, no matter what. As I am for them.



Thanks to these morning moments, I've been able to watch these sunflowers progress in beauty through the week. In the first couple days they slowly unfurled their petals, relaxing back from the tight forward-facing clusters you see in the photo above. One by one, the stems have changed to a pale celery. A week later they are still going strong, but I can see by the color in their stalks and the loose hold of their petals that they will not be with us much longer. Still, for the inaugural week of Stillness, I could not have asked for a better companion. And were it not for this new morning routine, I would not have appreciated the small details of change and beauty these flowers have undergone. Life would have passed by, and I would have walked in one morning to brown stalks and muddy water, and realize with shock that I had missed out on the beauty of this gift.

Just like I would have missed out on the beauty of the gift of each day.

Disjointed

I have been laid up with the strangest illness. It came on strong Friday night, that tickle at the back of the throat that you realize you really can't ignore, no matter how much you'd like to, because pretty soon you'll be sneezing, body aches, that soreness behind the eyes if you stupidly try to do your hundreds of pages of reading despite being bedridden ...

Oh, but I'm being melodramatic. Still, on a weekend I was worried I'd have to cram in tons of homework because I'll be out of town next weekend, it was really nice to relax, although in a very exhausting sort of way.


Some of Abby's prints, up on my wardrobe. Little bits of soothingness to greet me each day. I've got my eye on a couple more in her shop. Hm ...


When people would ask me what I did for spring break, I told them I stayed in Boston to take care of all the little details that escape me when I'm flying madly through papers and finals and group projects. Little things like making my bed properly.

Statements like that elicit a barely suppressed wince from my mom [I know they do mom!], and either a very awkward silence or a huge burst of laughter. Personally, I favor the huge burst of laughter, but I understand where the awkward silence comes from.


I limited myself to a reasonable number of bags when I came here, and I'm proud to say these all get used with great regularity. Except that I hate lugging things over one shoulder and would much rather use my backpack any day. I don't quite know what I'll do when I get a properly dignified job that means no more schlepping backpacks to work. And that goldfish bag there? Still my favorite ever. Still get comments on it all the time. That and the dots one, my China Bag.

Trading Spaces

It isn't that a great view from the window sill that doubles as my ironing board? Sort of an improvised situation, but there really isn't a ton of room to set up a full-fledged crafting corner. I am here to learn and not to craft, after all.


But as you can see, crafting is never too too far from my mind or too far out of reach. And my apartment looks out on beautiful, tall, leafy trees. I'm on the fourth floor, to give you some perspective. When exams seasons hits [and it's always hitting, let me tell you] the table gets a little messy. Sometimes I take my computer in to my bedroom and work at my desk. Often both surfaces are overrun with papers, textbooks, binders, folders, pens, highlighters and lots and lots of scratch paper [such a big fan of scratch paper, I am], not to mention the couch and my bed. It's no use, my living space just tends towards atrophy. I've never been good at fighting the principles of physics.


But I do like to make do where possible [these glasses came furnished with the apartment]. And it's really nice to have sunshine filtering in as I work, on crafting or schoolwork or other such projects.