Procrastinating again....

The twins are tucked up having their nap, although judging by the occasional chirp audible on the baby monitor Isabella is spending more time chatting to Soggy Bunny than napping. (Soggy Bunny is a very cute stuffed bunny. He acquired the "Soggy" bit from me, after I surreptitiously popped him in the napisan to soak for the squillionth time, since Isabella likes to suck/chew his leg. Even she calls him that now.

So I have about an hour and a half to myself before waking them, giving them lunch and taking them to Kindy (which gives me another hour and a half!) So in time honoured fashion I'm procrastinating.

I could be working on this dress for Isabella, the pattern for which came from a magazine I bought last September. The dress has been cut and partially assembled for weeks (probably months) and came to a grinding halt because I couldn't be bothered to cut facings. It'll only take a couple of minutes to trace facing patterns from the dress pattern (the original is double layered so didn't need facings) and cut them out, but I can't be bothered. And it's been languishing in a pile on my desk ever since. Hence the dire need for it to see an IRON before I take it up again.

Or there's this dress, which is the first iteration of a design from the grey toile from my previous post. I haven't abandoned the idea of puffed sleeves on something else, but not with this fabric. It's lines came from a rough sketch in my sketchbook (well, everything in my sketchbook is rough!) I've tried the bodice on Isabella and I'm happy with the look and fit, but she wasn't in the mood for a photoshoot.
I love piped edges! This one came to a halt because I ran out of piping cord. The waistband will also be piped. (Although since the bottom edge of the waistband is at the waistline, it's probably more accurately a midriff band.) And it also needs a really good press before I start working on it again. I love this crossover back design. Isabella often wears the pink dress I made a while ago (another prototype of course!) and I find the cross over back just brilliant - easy to get on and off with two domes holding it closed, and the back flaps far enough over that it doesn't open where it shouldn't, and it gives her plenty of room to move (handy when you're climbing onto the slide at Kindy) It is so helpful to have her test wear my designs to see how they work in use on an active toddler! Nicholas is less useful as a fit model since he's so tiny that I have to custom make his clothes in "Nicholas Size" rather than according to any size chart!

Oh, and there's this.
And the terrible reason I'm not feverishly working on this one? I've borrowed Seasons 1-3 of Mad Men from my sister and will be watching while the twins are at Kindy this afternoon. Handwork goes very well with DVD watching.

And of course the lavender dress from my last post hasn't been touched since I hung it up after taking it off Isabella. All it needs is some embellishment. Haven't decided what image or technique to do, so it's hanging there, eyeing me forlornly, another in-progress project.

Still waiting for the Hotpatterns. I'd have to check with Keely for the exact details, but it's been WAY OVER the 28 days it should have taken since she placed the order, and her emailed query was answered vaguely - not addressing her specifically worded questions. Delays are frustrating, but they happen. What is irritating me is that the response from Hotpatterns came across as giving her the runaround. I imagine that as a small company they're pretty busy, but I do feel that if a customer asks you a direct question as to the status of their order you should either give them the answer or say that you don't know for whatever reason.

And since I'm really trying to avoid doing anything productive, here's a question for you - if you see a tutorial on the web somewhere in which a strip of fabric very clearly cut along the grain is described as being bias, how much would it bother you, and would you comment a tactful correction? I saw this a few days ago, and it really really bothers me! The tutorial is written by a homesewer, for other homesewers, probably with little experience. I didn't comment because I don't want to look like a snobbish know it all belittling her efforts with a trifling correction. (Although since the strip in question was binding a neckline it would have worked a lot better had it actually been cut on the bias, so maybe not so trifling?)

The fit model

I think I've mentioned before that Isabella is a very willing and cooperative fit model. However, she is 2 3/4 years old. Enthusiasm is fantastic, willingness to take direction is brilliant. Ability to hold a pose for longer than a millisecond is non-existent! Add her small twin to the mix, wanting to get his hands on the camera, and you get photoshoots like this - dodgy focus, less-than-ideal poses, but at least it's quick!




The bottom 2 photos are next to useless for evaluation purposes, but I did have a better look when I tried it on her. Even over a dress and t shirt it does meet easily (it's cut from a bodice block, not an overgarment block) and the sleeve works just fine. So this design gets to go another round. I wonder what the final design will look like? Thank you Beangirl for suggesting a jacket - I'm now imagining a cropped, puffy sleeved jacket similar to this one I made before. I love drafting - endless possibilities!

And really all of this is just to distract me from waiting. I piggybacked on Keely's Hotpattern order and all I can think about is the 3 Graces top (the cowl necked cross over one of course) which is very very slowly winging it's way to me now. (Well, actually it's winging it's way to Keely, but I'll get it right away! 28 days from her order was Last Sunday. Sigh....) I feel like I'm cheating on my 80 hour top - I'm working on that but thinking about the new pattern.

Stuff in progress

Yet another motivation to blog - friends who give me a hard time about not doing so! Why they complain I can't understand - I brought my top to our fortnightly craft night last night, so they could have taken a close up look if they'd wanted to!

This one is progressing considerably slower than the red and cream one because I keep having to do other stuff. A couple of shirts for a friend of David (broad of shoulder and chest, slender of waist and neck, poor guy can't buy a shirt to fit, so was very pleased with a couple of custom made shirts). I may have shot myself in the foot with them though - David now knows I can knock out a shirt in a day or two (when fit has already been worked out). Oops.

I also made another bubble dress for a market next week. Kahlia is having a stall and offered to sell my designs on my behalf. She is so much better at marketing me than I am, and shortly starting her own website to sell the reusable lunchbags and other things that she makes, along with other products for kids. Since I'm not doing anything else with my designs at the moment it seems like a perfect fit to me!
And I figured it was about time I got back into some pattern work, so here is my work in progress (so, J, K and M, you can stop giving me a hard time about not updating my blog - this is what I'm up to!)
I got Helen Joseph-Armstong's pattern drafting book out of the library last week (I'll do a post on the bodice block when I've toiled it - it looks odd to me!) and the drop shoulder idea took hold. Above is my first go at it. The sharpie line is where I think I'll add a princess line. I've no idea what the neckline or skirt of this dress will look like yet, (I think it'll be a dress) but I wanted to try the gathered sleeve before I commit to further work on it. I got this far before I took the twins to kindy, so I have yet to try it on my house model.

And there's also this dress, another prototype of course! This one is intended to be for Isabella.

I loved the pleat/belt combo from a dress I saw somewhere, and it's an easy feature to do, but unfortunately it doesn't give enough fullness to the skirt. Again I have yet to check on the house model, but I think the skirt will look a bit skimpy. I haven't decided how to deal with this yet for the next version, but this one may just get shortened to tunic length. Since I'm not sure, I haven't added any embellishment to the dress. It's just hanging around, waiting.

So there you are - several projects in various stages of completion. I'm capable of intense focus and prolonged dedication to a project or idea, and also of having the attention span of a gnat.

Not obsessive, really

Sometimes I've been motivated to blog because I really don't want to see whatever photo is at the top one more time when I log in. This has been pretty much the opposite - I didn't want to get rid of the latest one!

So I decided to make another eighty hour top.

Navy with hot pink underlayer (since the crafty girls' consensus on Monday was to go with this rather than the grey I'd had in mind first). Paint and stitching will be grey.

It's a different rose stencil, in three sizes to mix it up a bit. (A very small bit).

Meanwhile I finally got around to making the Oliver+S ruffle halter which I have wanted to make forever, and printed out months ago. (It's available as a free download here.) I'm not a big fan of halter necks for small children because they don't tend to stay sitting nicely when playing, especially if you layer them with a T shirt (I live in Dunedin - we layer a lot, even in summer, sigh...) So I made a full back. Deciding just how I'd do this was the reason for the procrastinating. In the end I just made the back exactly the same as the front (since the ruffle makes it obvious which is the front!) and traced a facing which went to the inside, but was otherwise constructed exactly the same way as the front.

And Isabella wore it on Monday to her first day of Kindy.

Front, two prints from the same range, so identical colours.

Back

Eighty hours later

It's finished. I don't really know what else to say about it after I spent what I estimate to be eighty hours making it, all by hand. (I even did my hair for photos - that's the level of respect it gets!) I was right about the binding - it just brings everything to where I want it to sit.

It might sit better across my back if I wasn't trying to quickly get into position before the timer went off on the camera!

The binding is sewn on with rosebud stitch. I spent a very frustrating time with google trying to find an explanation of rosebud stitch after seeing many examples on the Alabama Chanin Flikr group. So many people referred to it that I figured it had to come from one of the books and was probably also known as something else. An hour or so of fruitless searching later I gave up and sat down with a needle and thread in front of a photo on the computer and had figured it out in approximately 30 seconds.
I didn't want to bind the hem, but I worried that the areas of unstitched red would curl up too much once washed, so I did the same stitch around the hem to finish it off.
My fear now is that the knots will come undone in the wash. I was a bit nervous anyway because my thread (Molnlycke Goliath) is 100% polyester, not the cotton cored, polyester wrapped thread used by Natalie Chanin. (If I ever find that I'm buying in bulk!) A discussion thread on the flikr group covered this topic - someone using the same type of thread had had half her knots untie in the wash. As I told Keely, there are not enough swear words in the world to express how I'd feel if that happened, so I quickly did a few lines of stitching onto the sample I'd made of the rosebud stitched binding so I had several knots and tossed it in the washing machine. To my intense relief none of them came undone, so I'm hoping for the best.

So close!

Not that I get obsessed or anything, but it really is amazing how much you can achieve when you put in at least six hours a day on one project. (And your husband is on holiday to play with the twins!) Pricked fingers aside (don't like wearing a thimble) I have loved every single slow second of this project. And now I've finished seaming it.

Interesting tan lines acquired sitting outside in the sun while I stitched. (Note to self - improve posture in photos)

I still have to bind the neckline and armhole edges , which will take a while as well, but in a couple of days I will be wearing it! I reckon it'd look fantastic with old denim......

Seeing it on myself reminds me that I should have gone with the smaller size (this is size "M"). I was worried that the lesser degree of stretch would make it too small, and that the sewing would further reduce stretch. Well, I made very sure as I sewed all those roses that the fabric would still stretch so that isn't an issue. Further, once I'd snipped out the motif centres the pieces eased out a bit as well. I didn't sew the seams as described in the instructions because I thought that might be unwieldy to stitch flat, and too bulky (visually "clunky", if that makes sense). Instead I sewed them as lapped seams, (which also added room, requiring little or no cloth allowance) so I just overlapped each one a smidge more than indicated. I think I should have overlapped a little more, as this is a little bigger than it should be. The shoulders are a little wide, but binding the neckline may bring it in a little. Since it's cotton jersey I'm going to wash it before I start taking it in! I suspect it will have a tendency to grow in wear and shrink back in the wash. (I did preshrink the fabrics before I started.)

Maybe I'll just have to make another one in the smaller size, hehehe.

I hadn't realised until I got into the project that the two layers would retain so much suppleness and flexibility - normally sewing two layers of fabric together like this (by machine) would make the resulting unit considerably stiffer, but this method doesn't - yippee! The layers give each other support and body, but the garment is soft and flexible. I'm really curious to see how it wears.

And to answer a couple of questions and comments:

Joy, my machine is a Globe 550, which I understand was marketed by but not made by Bernina. It has run like a dream since I talked my father into buying for me when I was 14. (That's 27 years) One model up from entry level it does everything I want (unless I get a really good machine that does embroidery, sigh.....) Oh yeah, and I have yet to teach it to make me coffee.

Karen, I love the spirals on your top! I know exactly what you mean about enjoying the contemplative nature of this sort of sewing. (I'm probably hooked now.) And how something will go into your head as one thing and emerge as something else!

Keely, I'll bring it tonight so you can pass judgement :-)

Slow Progress

Actually I'm making pretty quick progress on my Slow project! It took me about a week to do all of the running stitching on all eight panels of my corset. I've been putting in 6-8+ hours every day on this because I'm so fired up over it.

Now I'm snipping out the centres of the motifs. (Very, very carefully) So far I've done this much:

I'm thinking that I'll leave the red-stitched rose un-snipped. Not yet decided.
I love how it looks from the inside when held up to the light.

I took this photo with the tri-pod and timer, just for fun. I spend so much of my time at this desk (ignoring the mending pile on the chair beside me, hehehe) and have pretty much no pictures of myself thus occupied. (David has just come over to see what I'm doing and commented that this is the view he has of me all the time. Um, yeah, that'd be right!) Headphones in, listening to David Gray, engrossed in what I'm doing. The few photos in which I feature are family ones - when I'm old (and when I'm gone) this sort of thing will show my children and grandchildren what (besides them) I'm passionate about.

Oh, and so will this - I'm often interrupted for this sort of thing.

One last shot of the twins with their books - each open to their favourite pages.

It is incredibly gratifying to see how much they love them. Nicholas will ask for his "book!" (he's a man of very few words) and hug it to himself as he wanders off to play with it.

An appreciation for slow

(Yes I know I should have said "slowness"). Anyway, I have now completed the outlining of all the stencilled shapes on one (of eight) garment pieces. By the time the stencilling was all done (which took about six hours to paint) and the stencils peeled off I was completely in love with the colour. On my computer screen it doesn't show up very well at all - the colours are richer in real life.

The instructions have you only basting the layers together at neckline and armhole edges, but I like more security than that so I basted around each section in it's entirety. Then began outlining each stencilled shape with a running stitch. That's where "slow" really takes hold. I know it took me over 6 hours to do this section, which is one of the two largest. That's a lot of time to conteplate what you're doing. I find that this sort of contemplation quiets my racing mind and relieves stress. It takes so long that there is no sense of rushing to finish, the slow sewing aids the slowing of my mind. I'm not good at explaining this, lets just call it the best stress antidote there is!

So this is what one of the side back panels looks like. The rose that looks unstitched is actually stitched in red. I like interest on the back of a garment - we only see ourselves from the front, but the rest of the world sees us from all angles, so I feel that clothes should be interesting from any angle. This rose will be slightly tucked under my left arm, just peeking out.


Here's what the inside looks like. Bad photo unfortunately, but I love the effect.

This corset is a celebration of the handmade and the unique - all the work shows, every single stitch. I couldn't exactly duplicate this if I wanted to.

Alabama on my mind

After the mammoth effort of making the twins' books and then after Christmas doing bunch of mending and altering for a friend of my sister (for which I will be paid with her professional services a a massage therapist - can't wait!) it's high time for MEMEMEMEME. So it's time to get on with the corset from the Alabama Stitch Book. David made me go to Spotlight for fabric a couple of days ago when I discovered that one of the maternity tops I planned to use was too narrow in the shoulders. Love that man. And dress fabric was 30% off that day.

So, it'll be red with a cream underlayer. Here are the front pieces. (They'll all get a cream underlayer.)

And here's the stencil I've decided to use. Roses, how surprising, hehehe. I'm cutting them from freezer paper. I still need plenty more to make an all-over pattern.....

I suspect that this will be the "Foundling"/"Draw the Line" corset. David gave me David Gray's latest album (Foundling) for Christmas, so naturally it's on my mp3 player now and being listened to All Day Long while I work on this. I found "Draw the Line" on sale in K Mart yesterday (which was meant to be my birthday present last year, but we never got around to it. With five kids there's always a higher priority!)

Whenever I hear certain songs from one or other, or both, Finn brothers I think of making my wedding dress because that's what I listened to while making it. Does anyone else have certain music evoke certain sewing projects? I can think of way worse associations!

In the meantime my sewing time has been highjacked because in our house it's time for this:


And as I've mentioned before Nicholas has the smallest bum in the world. I kid you not. He wears cloth nappies, and the cover is intended to fit a baby up to four months old. I will never find undies small enough for him. (I did look, just to prove it to myself). So it's another thank-goodness-I-sew moment. I bought Jalie 2327 some time ago. (With the best of intentions to make the trunks for David, Cayden and Oliver. They're still waiting) Anyway, I figured it'd work well for Nicholas. When I measured his hip circumference and compared it to the size chart in my drafting book it turned out to correspond to about newborn to three months. Yeah, thought so! Anyway to size the pattern down I simply traced the size 2 and drew on the stitching lines, then scanned it into the computer and scaled it to 75% of it's original size. Print it out and trace it again, adding back the seam allowances and voila - undies that fit Nicholas. They look like doll clothes! I have a stack of eight pairs to sew for him......


And just to show what Christmas looks like in our house, here are a couple of my favourite pics. I love this one of Nicholas on the table with Isabella's book.

Although this is more like what he looked like.

David took this one of our annual Christmas Eve Gingerbread House Decorating Session. (No points are given for neatness of decoration or economy of lolly-usage. Creativity is encouraged.) I love this photo. Even though it reminds me that I really should do my hair more often.

Our Christmas Day looked in part like this. A picnic with my family at Brighton Domain on a gorgeous hot, sunny, windy day. Isabella and David on the slide. She's only wearing a cardigan because I couldn't find the sunscreen. (I added some new and interesting tan lines to my shoulders personally) That's my Dad walking past below. I really don't know about the bright blue Crocs.

There was also some eating.......

Isabella's book

Thanks for the lovely comments yesterday! Just for posterity, here's Isabella's book, pristine and new.

Tie my shoe, to match Nicholas' book. Sometimes twins need one each of something.
Clock. Once again, yay google and photoshop!
Dress-up doll. The pocket holds more clothes. As time permits I'll probably make more clothes. This dress is made from leftovers of one of Isabella's dresses. The doll has velcro "undies" to which her clothes attach.

Another double width alphabet page. (That twin thing again).

Fairies in the dell. I combined and adjusted craft patterns from the same designer for this one. The fairies are made the same way as the dinosaurs from Nicholas' book. Isabella likes them, so they'll no doubt be pulled off to play with.

Barn, template from here. Scarecrow and fence from a craft magazine.

Inside the barn and hay bales (the idea for having hay bales came from a 12 year old neighbour!) are these finger puppets, designs from a library book. (Apart from the horse on the left, which I designed myself.)

Under the sea/in an aquarium (depending who you ask!) Have I mentioned google rocks?

The flaps hide these guys. Georgia points out that this was her idea. (I was going to do a fish bowl with clear plastic and have the fish loose.)

An early page, counting. Isabella likes to count.

And me hoping they'll remember me fondly when choosing my nursing home!

Phew, that was a lot of work, but so much fun. I will not be repeating this effort till I have grandkids.

Now I'm off to finish cleaning the gingerbread dough from under my fingernails and enjoy the aroma imparted by a morning's baking with my sister. Tomorrow we'll take it all to her house and deocorate it. Yuuuuuuuuummmmmmmmm.