What I've Made This Month

A hat my husband hates:

A machine embroidered fleece scarf to match:
(He liked this better!)

A corset muslin:

Sew Weekly

I've just joined the Sew Weekly.  Frankly, I'm obsessed with the Sew Weekly and Mena Trott's dresses and have been following it off and on since she started it.  The idea that I can make nearly everything suddenly doesn't seem so far away.  Using my fabric stash and breathing some fresh air into it is exciting.  Getting dressed seems exciting again!  I can't wait to see what 2012 brings!

January Tool of the Month: Re-used Plastic Calendar

I cut up the covers and dividers from my old calendar to used as a temporary holder for lace purchased recently.

Cut off the holes, add a slit in the top to anchor the lace.  While I wouldn't use it for long term storage of vintage or fragile textiles, it's good for short-term organization.
The effect was prettier than I imagined, and I kind of like the sentiment.  Plan ahead.

Happy New Year!!

December Tool of the Month

 This months tool of the month is this Donna Dewberry Self Healing Cutting matt from Fiskars.  It's a perfect shade of bluish-mauve.  My sewing room has been a haphazard slew of tools and colors, all which lead to my own visual distraction.  To cut my distractions down, I needed to pick one or two colors.  Most cutting mats are dark green with yellow lines.  They show most fabric ok, but they add a huge, dark green hole to a room.  I find this lavender-ish cutting mat uplifting and motivating.  I leave it up and work on it for everything.  It's fairly large, (18" x 24") with 30, 45, and 60 degree lines for cutting bias strips and other strips as needed.

 Brighten your room!

After Photos

There were some "Before" photos of my work space that were so disheveled, I can't bring myself to discuss them, let alone post.  But once everything was cleared out,

I scrubbed the floor to my closet, and organized the space more to my liking.  Come in and take a peek!

November Tool of the Month

This Grabbit Bobbin Saver by Blue Feather Products looks like one of those things that you'd never think would be all that.  But it holds 20-30 bobbins, of all makes and models, it's non-skid, but when it happens to fall in a busy work room, it hold bobbins securely so they don't fall out.  You can easily see what colors you have wound, and bobbins snap in and out easily.

 Bobbin Savers come in several colors (red, purple, blue) so you can further organize you bobbins by type, especially useful if you have an embroidery machine that uses multiple types of thread.
Plus, the Bobbin Saver fits nicely into Christmas stocking for the sewist in your life.

Tool of the Month: Binding Buddy

I recently read Nancy Zieman’s Favorite 101 Notions from cover to cover.  I found out about a few things that I didn’t know even existed and this is one of them.  I rushed right out to grab one!  

My Binding Buddy is made by June Taylor.   It has a 45 degree angle chopped off on one end, which initially sounds dumb, but what a help!  It’s made my binding cutting go much faster and smoother.  

The plastic it’s made from also resists my rotary cutter, so it won’t get sliced n’ diced very easily in the process.  The other end has a pre-formed hole to hand alongside your other measuring tools. (Not all tools have this and I look for the ones that do.) 

I recommend both the Binding Buddy and a read-thru of Nancy’s Favorite 101 Notions book.

Cheapest Skirt Ever (without flat-out stealing!)

The other day, I created this tweet in my head: 

“JoAnn’s is having a sale!  Pattern $1, Fabric $2, your new skirt = $3!” 

But could that really be done?  I purchased a pattern and the fabric to find out.

The pattern is Simplicity 2215, a Cynthia Rowley mini-wardrobe consisting of a blouse, a jumper and a skirt.  All pieces look really hip and wearable.  A solid design ‘A’.  I chose view C, the skirt.

Fabric choices at the lowest possible price point were so dismal I hesitated a moment to wonder if I could go forward with this project at all.  I could only find 2 boards marked at $4.  The bargain fabrics were discounted 50% for the Columbus Day weekend sale, so my primary goal was to get 1 yard @ $2.  

Choice #1 Magenta Poly Crepe - a nice lining for a jacket, but not skirt fodder in my book.  Choice #2: 100% cotton in medium-hued lavender printed with gold Easter eggs and baskets - a solid ‘F’ for ‘fug-ley’. Because of it’s cotton fiber, I seriously considered the Easter eggs.  I could dye it, after all, but that would add to the over-all cost of the skirt foiling my $3 plan.  My other option was to chop it into unrecognizable bits, quilt-style, and make a skirt that way.  I really don’t need a square-dancey type skirt as I’m not on my way to a hoe-down any time soon.

Polyester it is.  Yuck.  To make matters worse, at the cutting table I require 1.5 yards to cover my hips.  My total skirt cost has just jumped to $4!

Enter Glamour magazine.  The September 2011 issue featured Mad Men star Christina Hendricks wearing a Zac Posen dress to die for.  The cut is impossible, and I couldn’t find a similar pattern, but the color is identical to my skirt fabric.  Inspired, I forge on.

My next cost snag was notions.  That invisible $ipper will run you!  I decide to skip the $ipper and use these intriguing, vintage, heart-shaped hook n’ eyes, which miraculously declare that they are proud members of the National Rifle Association. (!) 

Whatever. I don’t count them in final cost because to be honest, I’ve had them for years and picked them up at a garage sale ages ago.

So, off to make my cheap-ass skirt.

I realized 2 things when cutting this pattern:

1. I didn’t really need a pattern for this skirt, as it is nearly identical to the one I made for Civil War reenactment this summer, sans pattern.

2. That this skirt has a couple of sweet pockets!  Excellent!

The next dilemma involved whether or not to underline the skirt.  The fabric itself is actually a decent-quality, skirt-weight poly crepe.  But it will still need to be worn with a slip.  Underlining will technically up the cost of the skirt, and I have black poly lining on hand.  But polyester + polyester doesn’t make a thing right.  For the sake of improving the drape, look and over-all wearability, I opted to line it with some pre-washed black 100% cotton muslin.  It brings up the final cost but keeps the skirt from just hanging in my closet or being instantly re-purposed.

In a fit of Fall 2011 color-blocking inspiration, I added a narrow black band to the hem-line from a piece of something left over from something.

Voila!  Done!

Final cost: $6.00

Pattern: $1

Fabric: $3

Notions: Muslin Underling - $2

Items on-hand: Vintage Hook n’ Eyes, Thread

Mods: Hook n’ Eyes, black hem band

Wore it to: Not so fast!  That smiling hemline needs to be un-done, trimmed properly and re-stitched!

                - J.

Featured Etsy Seller: LoveLaurie

There are some things that just send me into spasms of delight, and this is one of them.

  


When I was a very small person, I used to love things that were out of scale: tiny menageries of faux mice cavorting in their dollhouse milieu or super- gigantic tissue paper flowers on wooden dowels.  LoveLaurie ‘s pin cushion is an equally dreamy item, not so much for it’s scale as it’s texture.   I purchased this pin cushion after doing an Etsy search for “black velvet pin cushion” expecting no results.  To my surprise, there it was!  The black velvet pin cushion I’d been wishing for!  Filled with (get this!) black emery sand!  I ordered one right away and it came lickity-split.  I adore this pin cushion.  I do have 3 others, but none compares to this.

First, it’s black, which is just cool, and it’s elegantly made of velvet, my favorite material.

Then, the emery sand makes it heavy, so it doesn’t roll around.  I often use it as an extra pattern weight.  I love the sage green flossing and tomato topper and I love its strawberry companion, also made of matching black velvet.  

I love the bold, little “Sewing is the New Black!” sign post.  This small signage has a nod to a practical purpose: by fitting some flat-head pins of your own with small, hand-made signs, you can create sectors in your pin cushion for hand needles as well as machine needles to keep track of needle type (ball point, leather, top stitch, heavy) and weights (80, 90) and # of hours used.  

I included this pin cushion in my first Treasury, “Midnight Traveler” and encourage everyone to stop by  LoveLaurie's shop for a pin cushion.  There are plenty of others to choose from.  Who couldn't love Laurie?! 
    
                    -  J

The Foundry

It was pouring as I made my way down the hill to Remsen St., but the band struck up some old Zeppelin, just for my entrance!  The Foundry shindig had shut down Remsen on one end, which was pretty impressive.  The band was good, The Foundry, itself was gorgeous, as both an art and a living space.  Arched windows overlook the City of Cohoes, it was immaculate and modern and incredibly inspiring in a way that made me want to go back up the hill and give everything I own away.
When Jesse and Alana are ready, The Foundry for Art, Design + Culture will be a force to be reckoned with!  I can't wait and wish them both the best of luck!

I Go Out at Night...Too Often

I finally realized that every walk I've taken so far has been at night, for some reason.  So, when I got around to going out in daylight, I was suddenly seeing things I'd never seen before.  There is Clinton's Ditch, and historical sign-posts to tell about the Erie Canal (I had no idea, New York State History was a long time ago.)  There are houses to cry for, they are so gorgeous.  I slunk down to Remsen St on a Saturday afternoon to see if it might have more inhabitants than on my previous visits, and I was wrong.  There were no more people on a fine Saturday afternoon that there are on a dark Thursday evening.

 I stood in front of each business, trying to ascertain if life was imminent.  Satchel, open in '09 on my first visit, (and where I picked up my own Global Girlfriend handbag) seems to be by appointment.  Joe Yoga is on summer holiday.  Bread & Jam is closed.  There are any number of businesses that I so desperately want to be open, but simply aren't.  It's frustrating because the city itself is incredibly beautiful.  I did find Remsen Street Studios, which made me really happy, as I've admired the work of local artist Jon Gernon for years.  (I interviewed Jon for a start-up indie zine in the early '90's.  Puppets come to mind.)

There are gorgeous things that I dare not mention here, for fear of spoiling them.
Cohoes hides her secrets well.

I Go Out at Night

...just to see what I can see.  Tonight was an amazingly huge moon coming up over a near-by church, rising behind the ancient-looking steeple.  The clouds cooperated and I clicked into the night air in hopes of catching anything at all.  Ta-da!  Something is better than nothing.  Welcome to the creepiness!

Sketchbook Digitized!

The whole book can be seen at the Art House Co-op online.  That's pretty cool!

Moved!

We found a really strange, really old mill apartment on a hill in a really old city and moved ourselves right on in.  No central heating, ditched our queen-sized bed, our sofa, and various and sundry other furniture.  So, the living room is gone, and now I just use the whole space as a studio.  Why not?
Some things are better than our old place, other things are worse.
(No central heating?! What was I thinking?!)
The recycling here is bi-weekly, and we can't seem to get it right, no matter which refuse type or week we put it out on, but no one really cares which side of the street our car is parked on, a far cry from Albany, where that's such an issue, it kept me up at 3 am most Tuesday nights.

The morning this picture was taken, I was up at 6 am with Ash and Emmanuelle.  We were watching birds and having coffee when suddenly the most beautiful, iridescent green, purple and hot pink bird came and fluttered directly in front of the window.  It looked like a fairy princess, and it seemed to be playing.  I figured out it was a hummingbird, but which one is anyone's guess.  I know this story is boring in the recounting, but to experience a tiny, iridescent bird flapping it's way out of the bushes to hover mid-air, in front of your face at six in the morning is just, well, unexpected.

Moving!

Every book, sewing machine, corset bone, fluffy cat, pile of laundry and jug of milk must go... elsewhere!

We're not even sure where, yet!  (And that's a bit disconcerting, let me just say.)

Art House Co Op Sketchbook Project

I'm hard at work in the studio on the Sketchbook Project.  Here is a preview of page 24 of my book.  The cool thing about scanning things in is it allows your eye a break and more objective manner of seeing stuff.  Things that need to change are immediately evident in the process.  In this case, I need to work a little neater (I'm running out of time) and I need to go back over some of the yellow because I can see in the scan where they are not filled in all the way.  Haste makes waste, etc., etc...

Waugh 1901

I was very careful in cutting this one out.  I used the rotary cutter and took my time.  It was well worth it because as I pinned, the pieces folded together like a beautiful origami.  I still need to stitch it together and try it on, but it looks totally do-able.  The first pinned try-on (with the in muslin reverse, fill of pins, no busk, no boning, no grommet panel) it fit like a glove.  So, I'll have to see what happens when the mock-up is completed.  Looking at it more objectively here, I may increase the busk length by an inch.
I love this corset!
This muslin was pinned about a month ago, pre-Christmas rush.

Cording Experiment

I’d collected three different cord-like materials to try out for my 1880’s corset.  I’ve deliberately used different materials than Bridges on the Body in an effort to expand the current knowledge of what might be useful and their qualities for potential future projects.
  
[note: when I went back and read her cording post, it still turns out that we came to similar conclusions: the cotton filler is more consistent than hemp or man-made filler.  I have the idea that the blind cord may prove too thick, ultimately, but I really like it, so I'm going to give it a try.)
 
The materials did not all act the way I’d expected, so this was very much a great project.
I’d collected some hemp, some cooking twine that’s generally used to tie dead animals, I mean, meat, before shoving them into an oven, and found a length of nylon cord left from another project lying around to put to good use.

The nylon cord lost all of it’s body when run through the machine.  Therefore, for the last four rows, I ran the casings down quickly on the machine and then inserted the cord via the largest, longest upholstery needle I could find.

Grocery store solution: $1.29

The needle sliding is the more traditional method of cording and it actually worked faster than trying to hold the whole thing in place while running it through the machine. (I could have used pins, but it seems too fussy.  One really just needs to be up as close to the zipper foot as possible.) It also looked “loftier”, when I was through, not having just been flattened under the feed dog and zipper foot.

Then, I went hunting for the cooking string and realized that I’d lost it.  So, at the fabric shop I located some heavy Venetian blind cord and purchased some of that.  I’m glad I did.  It is .25 cents per yard, and went in very smoothly by just running it along side the zipper foot.  It did not flatten out against the feed dog and zipper foot but began to take on immediate sculptural qualities, which is the whole point.
 
By the time I had four rows complete, I knew the Venetian blind cord was the clear winner, but for the sake of the experiment, I went ahead and ran the hemp ding through anyway.  It smells terrible due to the dye, so that it’s immediate drawback.  It was un-even and very lumpy, had no sculptural “hand” until I ran three pieces, via the upholstery needle again, through each casing.  In the end, it has more a sculptural quality than the nylon cord, but was annoying to work with, even using the tapestry/upholstery needle for insertion.  Note how the fabric has pulled out of shape around it and looks marred, even after pressing.  I stopped after two rows, as there was no need to continue.

#2 - Venetian Blind Cord = The Winner!

Other things to note from this project:

Coutil needs a pressing cloth or it will get shiny- scorchy under a too-hot iron. 

The cord should be cut and not “wrapped” at the ends as seen here.  The doubling-back makes for an uneven start of the next run.  In fact, I believe that I’ll probably baste it lightly into place to make sure it’s even before I run the casings for it.

I initially thought that the heavy cord would alter the fabric by having it shrink a bit from the insertion.  While it must, the backing piece seems to absorb some of the bulk as well.  I used regular muslin for the backing here and they both ended up the same size against each other that they started as.  So while the piece may shrink a bit over all, due to cord insertion, front and back seem to remain consistent as a unit.  That is something to keep in mind when cutting the four front pieces: cut a bit longer and adjust them to the pattern after cord insertion.

My other concern is that the pattern seems to indicate that the boning channels run over the placed cording.  Not sure how that’s going to work.  Am considering running the channels behind the cording first, then stitching in the cord.  Alternatively, I could stitch the boning channel to the front and adjust the cords to fit into the pockets created by doing so, one segment on each side of the boning channel.

Scaling Up Waugh

Envelopes help keep things organized

Today I went to the copy center to scale up a few Norah Waugh patterns.  What I thought was going to be a 10-minute project turned into about 3 hours of me fussing with the machine and scissors, tape and paper, book and…know how you know you’ve got something right?  The task starts to sail and hum, there is actual progress along with action.

Here’s what I learned: to scale the patterns marked 1-6 inches up, 1 inch = 1/4’ in the book.  This may hold true for the other patterns, marked 1 – 3 as well, although these look smaller, but I haven’t tried them yet.  By selecting “400%”  (the max allowed by the copy machine I was using, just by coincidence) I expanded the inch unit on the pattern up to an actual inch.  That was the easy part, actually getting an entire pattern piece to print out on one sheet of paper was another story.

Anyway, after making a mess and wasting at least $4.00, I learned to make a base copy at 100% first (to avoid damaging the book) and then I cut out the tiny corset pieces.  (This was my favorite part of this process, btw.) 

Then, I lay my pieces, one by one, in turn, long-ways in the corner of the copy machine bed, (the corner of the copy machine with the arrow pointing this-a-way) selected 400% in size and legal-sized paper and voila!  A full-sized, paper pattern, one corset piece to each sheet!

Full-Sized Pattern

I did three corsets this way and purchased some manila envelopes to keep them all organized.  Each tiny corset and each full-scale piece, cut out, is now in it’s own individual corset pattern envelope with a picture and description of the corset on the outside of the envelope.  Inside the larger envelope, I tucked the tiny corset pieces into their own regular, business-sized envelope so they wouldn’t get lost.

Now that I know what I’m doing, it is, in fact, a 10-minute job!  However, here’s the tricky part: even scaled up, the patterns look very tiny, like about a size “0” or “2” in current US sizes.  Without measuring, the waist looks to be about a 22", so there’s still much work to be done.