Sew Distracted

Holiday Wishes

I am off to indulge in holiday festivities, savoring pleasures both adult and childlike.  In between I shall indulge myself by reading about the frivoloties of the fashionable life.

See you again in 2007.

Trying to find a fiber-balanced life.

I had some time this weekend for some fiber-related activities and it was difficult to make a choice.  I really wanted to work on the jacket and finish it.  But I also wanted to finish up the sweater I have been knitting so it was really difficult to make a decision. 

That always seems to be my biggest problem, deciding what I wish to work on.  It is actually quite a luxury, having the leisure to decide what interest I wish to indulge on any given day; the issue is not really that there is no time, but that there are so many options to fill that time. (well perhaps there could be more time as well)  I really don't stress about this a lot, until I get too many unfinished objects on my plate, a situation I have been approaching again recently.   I think I have finally come to terms with the idea that I am not a particularly focused person.

Long ago I accepted the fact that I am never going to be one of those people who is focused on a career, a person who defines herself by what she does for a living.  G is one of those people, and I actually know quite a few of them and admire them greatly.  They have something in their personality that I just don't possess.  I get all wrapped up in whatever I am doing, and whatever job or career I am pursuing until I get bored and then I move on to something else.  I don't regret any of the choices I have made in my professional life and I have never been one to define who I am by what I do.

By the same token I don't really define myself by my hobbies.  They tend to be longer lasting than my interests in various careers, but they too wax and wane.  I actually am interested in sewing now, although I know you have heard more thoughts and dreams of sewing than you have seen concrete results.  Part of this is because it is easier to make time for knitting -- I can do it sitting with DH in front of the TV, whereas sewing requires that I isolate myself more.  I feel like I am focusing more on the sewing even though I did not get any sewing time in last week due to the general combination of seasonal activities and the resurgence of construction on the deck, including more meetings with contractors, more errors and oversights, and further changes in the plans.

The sweater needed to be finished because I want to wear it to Christmas Eve Dinner at our neighbor's house.  But I also wanted to work on my jacket.  I had hoped that I would be able to wear the jacket into NYC when I meet my friend Mary on Tuesday.  But that was beginning to look less likely.  Aside from the fact that I haven't cut the lining yet, the weather does not look promising for that jacket.  Despite the warm weather we have been having, it will cool down some, and it will not be warm enough to wear the jacket as outerwear.  The cut of the jacket is not really meant to be a suit-type jacket under a coat, and I don't think I have an appropriate coat to wear over it.  So that is out.  What a relief.

Oddly enough, in many aspects of my life I work very well under pressure and deadlines, but not with my sewing and knitting.  Perhaps because this time is for me also a creative and relaxing period, and pressure is not relaxing, nor does it allow the mental freedom to channel whatever little creativity I might possess.

Finishing the sweater was the right decision for me this weekend. I am wearing it as I write this and it makes me very happy.  I am still trying to find ways to balance my knitting and sewing time, but at least I am free of deadlines and I can be inspired to work on whatever catches my fancy.  The jacket is still high on my list, as are all the other projects I have started this year and never finished. But there is no pressure.

Lessons Learned

No sewing yesterday.

There was, however, lots of thinking about sewing, mostly thinking about sewing successes and failure and about the writing and posting about sewing successes and failures. Have I mentioned that I think FAR too much?

I finally took a pile of old clothes to the donation center yesterday, and in the process I got rid of the green coat. It has been much on my mind. Why, you might ask? Why fret and dither about a coat that doesn’t fit and is more of a sewing failure than a success? Why even post a picture and discussion of a coat that is not up to par, and in fact was not quite up to par at the time it was made? Why two posts about the same misbegotten project? Well precisely because it was misbegotten. Hopefully I have learned from my mistakes, but I also need reminders here and there, and my posts are as much about as what I need to remember as they are about what anyone might want to read.

I might prefer to remember only the success stories in my sewing journey. And a reader might prefer to read about fabulous stylish garments that they can dream of making (not likely here though.) But sewing is also about mistakes and lessons learned, or not learned, and sometimes the failures are as important as or more important than the successes.

Hence the green coat. Again.

The biggest problem with the green coat is a construction problem. It is glaring and I am sure that all you astute readers noticed it right off and are too polite to point it out to me.  This is not the shoulder problem, which really varies depending on what I wear under the coat. It is not the little wrinkle in the hang of the left sleeve, which is actually caused by the excess padding I stuffed into the left shoulder so that the coat did not collapse like a deflated balloon (and this accented the problem with the right shoulder as well).

The problem with the green coat is the front closure:

I have blown it up here to remind you. You can scroll down two posts for the full coat.

The front band pulls where I have attached the hooks. The coat obviously needs more structure here to support the weight of the hooks and the bulk of the bands I used to attach them. I obviously needed a different or more interfacing in the front of the coat. I did not fuse the front coat pieces to a fusible interfacing like Textured Weft and this would have helped considerably. This was obviously a lack of planning. I could have reinforced the area later by taking it apart and adding interfacing to add strength to that area.  I could have remade the tabs or the bands. I didn’t because I already saw other problems with the coat, and had decided it wasn’t worth the effort.

And yet I still wore the coat and even loved it despite my discomfort with it. Why? One reason is I loved the color of the fabric. The color makes me happy. Also it was warm and light. Thirdly it passed the DH test, who loves it, despite its errors which he noticed, but said “bah” As he pointed out, most of the droopy, saggy, cheaply made wool coats I see in my town all winter bag and sag and look pathetic within an hour or two of being worn the first time and this coat did none of those things. An attractive scarf draped over the front hid any imperfections, which probably only I noticed anyway.And lastly it is good to be reminded of our imperfections.

Even though I have finally given the coat away, there are things I want to remember and learn from this coat, aside from the obvious things like thinking out the construction and interfacing in advance, planning design details (like overlapping the front bands so that air didn’t come in the front of the coat, and accommodating figure variations.

Lessons from Green Coat:

1.    Don’t be afraid to use good fabric. This coat was good alpaca/wool coating. I don’t regret using it even if things didn’t turn out the way I wanted. Using good fabric saved the coat and made it wearable. Also, using fabric you have is better than buying more, especially buying something you don’t really like because you are afraid to make a mistake. Fabric that is not used is wasted. Fabric that is used is not, even if the garment fails. There is always something to be learned and I don’t mind learning even at the cost of good fabric. Strike it up to the cost of education. Failure is being afraid to try. If the coat had turned out perfectly but I had hated the fabric it would have been even more of a disappointment and would have still been a failure.

2.    Don’t take complicated detailed projects to sewing camp. This should perhaps be lesson #1 for me. It is not that a beautiful tailored garment can’t be made at sewing camp. I know plenty of women who have done it. But not I. When I am working on a project like this, I need to lay out my materials and dance around the project. I need to play with different interfacings, I need to hog the press and the ironing board, pressing and leaving things to cool and dry. I need time and space and a clear head. There are people who jump right into a sewing project and made decisions on the fly, turning out very successful garments as they do so. I am not one of those people. I think too much. At sewing camp I share cutting tables with 9 other women. We share ironing boards. I don’t bring my full interfacing collection, and mostly there are 9 or 10 other brains thinking and contributing and adding distractions. Those distractions are PRECISELY what I love about sewing camp. I come back inspired and I look at things in new ways. But when I have made tailored jackets, or this coat, the garment is nice, but it is not what I would have done at home in my own sewing room, and so there is always a little bit of disappointment there. When I have made simpler, less structured things, I have been much happier with my results. I need to learn from this coat and plan accordingly. There are lots of things I can sew at camp and I always come back from camp revitalized and ready to try new things. Sewing camp makes me more free-spirited. I need to plan my projects accordingly.

3.    I need to think more about the style of what I sew and what I really wear. The biggest disappointment with the green coat is that it is too classic. I find it boring. I thought I really wanted a classic coat; I thought that too many of my coats made statements, I though I needed a quiet, classic, timeless coat. I was wrong. The coat is most definitely not me and it would not be me even if I fixed the errors and altered it to fit; I suppose that is why I never bothered. The coat goes with everything and yet it doesn’t fit in. It reminds me of a time when I was dating my husband and he took me to meet a bunch of his old friends. He said I was always “too dressed up” and that everyone always wore Frye boots and LL Bean. So I tried to dress accordingly. I wore Frye boots (I actually did own a pair) and a very preppy button down shirt, Shetland sweater and cords. I looked like everyone else. And even though I was still painfully shy in those days and I would think that I would have been happier looking like everyone else and “fitting in”, I was miserable. I didn’t feel like myself. As a result I couldn’t act like myself and was even more reserved than usual.

I am 48 years old and I am still learning how to wear what I want, not what I think other people want me to be. I need to think about this when I sew something. I need to ask myself is this really what I want? Is it really what I need? Or is it what I think I am supposed to want and need?

Black and White

The outer shell of the Simplicity jacket has been completed.  I need only to cut out and assemble the lining before finishing the jacket. 

It is turning out quite nicely.  Here is a little teaser, a photo of the black and white trim between bodice and the peplum of the jacket.  No little surprise of color here.

Goodbye Old Coat

I have decided to add a new photo album of older garments that I made pre-blog.  In truth I  don't have a lot of them.  The garments from my 20's are long gone and I haven't done as much sewing in recent years, although I am trying to sew more.  Still I want to save pictures of a few things while I still have the opportunity.

This coat was made in February 2004 while I was in San Francisco at one of Sandra Betzina's sewing weeks.  At the time, I wondered if I was being silly sewing a coat in February when I could have been working on spring things.  As luck would have it a major snowstorm blanketed the east coast a few days before I was supposed to fly home and I was lucky to have the finished coat.  I wore it home and then I wore it for the next 3 months.  We had snow and freezing temperatures on Memorial Day weekend that year which is very unusual.    In fact it was still cold as late as July 4th that year, in the 40s, after which we it became brutally hot. 

Boy was I glad I made a new coat.

But the coat doesn't work anymore and so I am going to donate it.  I wore it for that first extended winter and all the next winter.  Last winter (2005/2006 I gained too much post-menopausal weight and it was too tight across the upper chest and upper arms.

This year it is no longer tight, but it doesn't fit.  Perhaps it never did, perhaps I have just shifted enough that the problems are more noticeable.

First of all it is considerably too big across the front chest.  That could be taken in.

But it is feels too tight through the upper back and I have trouble moving my arms.  I have checked this, it is no narrower than coats that fit comfortably so it must be something else. 

When you look at the photo you notice the wrinking and pulling at the right shoulder.  That is because my right shoulder rolls forward.  When we made the coat, we moved the shoulder seams forward, but I did not yet know how to redraft a shoulder shape and corresponding armscye to accommodate that kind of shoulder shape.  I don't have enough room to move my arms because the ease is in the wrong place.  This is not so easily fixed without redrafting the coat and I have no extra fabric.

The problem is not noticeable in a coat that is a little broad through the shoulders and I have the height to pull that off but in a more fitted coat, like this Fashion Sewing Group pattern, it is a definite problem.

This was also the first coat I had made in several years, and I used some new techniques and abandoned some old ones, I am not sure all that successfully.  I am happy I made it, it has garnered many compliments, but there are definitely things I learned and things I would do differently if I were making it again today.

(The only reason the left shoulder looks good is I stuffed an extra shoulder pad and some batting in there because it is now so loose over my chest the coat just collapses. Then I had to push and prod and pull to get the coat to even begin to hang naturally.  Believe me it did not originally look like this. And Matilda needs liposuction again, but has decided to wait until after the holidays, so the coat pulls on her in places it does not pull on me.)

Here is a detail of the front hooks:

Musings on Digital Patterns

There has been a discussion on one of the sewing boards about a company that produces patterns to be downloaded and printed at home.  When someone commented that a digital pattern should fit better, my mind started whirling and I started pondering.

I have always thought that the idea of digitally transmitted, downloaded and printed patterns is wonderful. But having worked with computers for many years, and having written CAD programs and programs that do 3 dimensional modeling and problem-solving, I am well aware that this is not as easy as one might think.

First of all there is the issue of getting the measurements. Four, eight, or even twelve measurements are not enough to adequately reproduce a human body. Then, everyone takes measurements differently. I suspect that if you have 4 people measure you, the results will be different. When we fitted out our dress forms last winter I had three sets of measurements of myself, taken by my mom, my step-daughter, and my DH. They were all different and I do not believe this is unusual, even if you use people who sew regularly to take the measurements.

So if people aren't accurate at measuring, who is? Well people can be trained, but different body types are easier or harder to measure.

What about digital scanners or whole body measurement systems? I used to think these would be the wave of the future but they have been less than successful. First of all, for manufactured clothes, you lose all of the advantages of mass-production if you have to cut garments individually. Things automatically become much more expensive. Secondly even digital body scanners may or not be all that accurate. Each person’s measurements may appear different depending on the way they are standing when they are scanned. Also, different undergarments or lack thereof will affect they way the body is measured. And last but far from least, the amount of body fat will definitely affect the fit of the garment. This is probably why these systems have been most ineffective with larger clients. In order to measure accurately measurements must be taken in reference to some structural point on the body (shoulder point) etc and on a human body, these usually relate to the bones which make up our sub-structure. But body fat can make it very difficult to find the underlying structure, even when you are measuring by hand and are able to palpate the body for its underlying structure. A scanner, unless it is also an MRI (not likely) will not be able to determine how the person is padded referable to the underlying structure. Human bone structure comes in a very small set of variations compared to the variations in human bodies because human bodies have a widely varying degree of padding. If you have a total measurement of body mass, but you don’t know how that mass is distributed relative to the underlying bones and joints, you are still going to have trouble making a pattern to produce a garment that fits that person and is able to move with that person.

Once you have a set of numbers representing a person's measurements, you get to the entire issue of producing patterns from the measurements. This takes a highly skilled programmer with experience in three-dimensional modeling and converting complex mathematical systems into working programs. It also takes a highly technical understanding of the human body and how the measurements you have taken actually relate to the body and the way it moves. Thirdly you need outstanding pattern making skills to understand how to make a pattern to fit that body using all the other mathematical data you have incorporated.

Sounds impossible doesn’t it?  It is not, but hopefully you can appreciate why we don’t have anything that does this yet. A program that would work, say even 75 % of the time, would take thousands of thousands of man-hours of work by highly skilled and therefore highly expensive people. It would simply cost too much, and it would probably cost too much for most manufacturers to implement the program and provide custom–fitted clothes because most customers would not want to pay the price. And I am not convinced that you can really model all the extremes of the human-body spectrum. But with a population in the billions, even the relatively small percent of people at the extremes can number in the hundreds of thousands or millions. You can’t get custom fitted jeans for Wal-Mart prices. And I think even $100 for custom fitted jeans is too cheap once you figure in the overhead and time spent cutting, sewing, shipping, selling, etc. It is just significantly cheaper to cut large quantities of the same thing. And most people want good salaries and cheap clothes. In this case it is a lose-lose situation. This would be even more true for sewing patterns, which are a smaller market.

Years ago, when I was writing CAD programs my DH thought I should write a program that would model my body measurements and create patterns. I thought about it briefly. But I realized that I don’t have the pattern making skill to write a program that could translate any desired shape of garment into a pattern that would fit me. Most importantly it would take me a LONG TIME to write such a program because you would have to write all the possible variations and allow for them to adapt to future design ideas and body shift/weight change. OK CAD programs are more advanced now and I wouldn’t have to do it all myself, but even so it would require more programming that I want to do. I figured I can buy a pattern for a shape I am not familiar with, alter it to fit me, even with muslins, and make hundreds of garments before I would ever get that program perfected, and I would probably be tinkering with it the rest of my life. Leave these things to the people who live to program….me, I’d rather be sewing.

Promises, Promises

I had a good weekend overall preparing for the Holiday season and puttering about with several projects.  I also resumed work on the jacket, later than I had originally anticipated, but I don't regret the delays; I was having fun with other projects.

I didn't start until after dinner Sunday night, probably around 9, so I did not finish construction of the outer jacket. The bodice is constructed and hanging (loosely) on Alyssa Rhiannon, who is currently hiding in the closet guarding the Christmas gifts:

I decided to interface the peplum of the jacket although the pattern instructions do not call for this.  It just seemed a little floppy without the extra support.  The peplum pieces are all interfaced and ready to go and I should be able to attache them in my next sewing session.

I am determined to continue working on this regularly, and to make time for sewing a priority.  I know I have said this before, and it hasn't gotten me anywhere, and I also realize that the Christmas season may not be the best time to begin a new schedule, but it's worth a shot.  Worst comes to worst December can be my practice month and by January I will be fully geared up and ready to sew.