Sew Distracted

collections or clutter

I tend to grumble that G is a packrack and an accumulator of stuff, and I am not.  But that is not exactly true.  Although I spent a large part of the last weekend dealing with DH's stuff, I also recently had to come face to face with some of my own collecting propensities, and I must admit that I am a collector of stuff, not the minimalist I like to pretend to be.

Of course I still prefer to delude myself into thinking that the "stuff" I accumulate is important whereas G's "stuff" is just that -- stuff.  But I am certain he feels the same way about my own piles.

To begin with, I spent the long weekend not sewing or working on patterns but dealing doing battle with conflicting filing systems.  All the files from the office had been carted home in early April but circumstances were such that I had not come to terms with them yet, or integrated them into the existing files at home.  That situation came to a head last Thursday (see this post over at my other blog, purlsandmurmurs .  Thursday I got stuff sorted into piles but those piles still had to be interfiled into the system we had at home

And this is were things got dicey.  G and I might be adoring mates, but our filing systems are completely incompatible.  I am the kind of person that breaks everything down into specific subjects and files it meticulously, routinely going through the files and matching, collating, and weeding the no longer needed or relevant.  G saves everything, every piece of paper, never goes back to weed anything out, and has a system that is best described as "insurance in the left lower drawer" and "bank statements in the right upper drawer"with the general assumption being that the things on the top of the ever-growing pile are the more recent. Something had to give, and the rule of the day was that, since I do most of the filing, and G never remembers where anything is anyway, my system won.

But that still meant I had to go through 30 years worth of comingled insurance files to determine what was important, what we still had, and what should have been long since relegated to the trash pile.  30 big lawn and leaf bags full of paper, and four days later everything has been accounted for and organized.

And I am sure that my organized file drawers could be further purged. I tend to save and collect articles on many subjects and truthfully, they are not at all frequently referenced.  But they occupy space.  I am sure, if it came down to it, many travel files and design files and files on various odd subjects could disappear without any great rift in the universe, and some day that situation may arise.  At the moment though eliminating payment receipts for insurance policies that were cancelled years ago will suffice.

But despite all this, and all my grumblings, G's stuff only takes up a little bit of the house (well most of the basement/garage, but I don't count that) whereas my stuff is everywhere.

And it is not just the yarn and fabric, which you know I collect but also books, and occasionally CDs.  I can't imagine a house without books. 

In fact there are books in almost every room of my house and although I delude myself that I like minimalist architecture, it is not really true.  I don't like a lot of furniture, or photos, or things on tables or walls.... in that sense I am a minimalist.  Some of my friends think my taste in furnishing is rather cold.  And to some extent they may have a point.  I could live in a library if I just moved in a fabulous kitchen and a bed, and the lack of other furnishings or the rows of books would not bother me -- I would feel perfectly at home among them.  I could make my bed in a yarn store or fabric store as well.  But none of these places is what most people would call "homey".

Oh well. 

The fact is, although I am currently sated on yarn and fabric, I will buy more.  And although I am also overwhelmed with books, having piles scattered throughout the house waiting for more shelves, waiting to be read, I will also buy more books.  Yarn, books, and fabric are each more than their physical presence.  They all offer potential and dreams.  I've talked alot about those dreams.  And books also offer memories, memories of pages read.  Oh I read books from the library....but I won't say what percentage of books I read at the library eventually end up on my shelves anyway because I need to continue the conversation.

As I sit here writing this, surrounded by piles of yarn and fabric, and yes books, I feel very content, and very lucky to be able to collect these things I love and surround myself with them.  And I can live with G's piles of paper everywhere, and all the photo stuff in most of the guest bathroom, as he can live with piles of books and yarn and fabric.  Although we occasionally grumble, it is an endearing kind of grumble, knowing full well that these piles are all only a little part of what endears us to each other and allows us the freedom and the peace for our more creative efforts.

I dream of a tee

Whatever I may have intimated, I have not yet abandoned the purple muslin project.

I spent some time on Tuesday morning morphing patterns.

You see there usually is a method and a plan to my madness, although it seems that I am rarely privy to the full detail when I get started.  I seem to just jump right in and then the plan evolves as I get going.  This does require time to step away from the sewing room and allow the details to float around my brain a little bit, but at the moment that is no problem as time away from the sewing room seems readily available and it is time in the sewing room that is in short supply.

I have a vision of a lightweight, loose tee in my head, one with cut on sleeves.  Yes it will be loose and boxy, but the fabric is light and airy for a knit.  I plan to wear it as at-home-wear with a pair of coordinating knit pants.

The purple muslin was made from this pattern:
It dates from 1985 and a small was an 8-10.  This was before I ever traced off patterns.  I had made view B several times, the one with the wide neck and the cuffed sleeves.  It was so big on me, and the neck so wide that I took 1/2 inch out at the center fold to make subsequent versions fit.    The fact that the purple tee, which was made from View A (same back piece, diffferent front piece), fit me, albeit snugly, was no testiment to my slimness, but merely evidence of how oversized clothes could be in the mid 80s.

But anyway, I knew I would be able to get into the tee without altering the pattern, and I was mostly interested in the neckline and the sleeves, which I recall that I really liked at the time.

Monday night I looked through my pattern collection and really found nothing much that was like the tee I envisioned.  Oh this original Vogue pattern was pretty close, and I had Christine Johnson's Three Tees pattern.

 

The Christine Johnson Pattern is more appropriate size-wise, but I really did not like the way the sleeves lay when wearing the tee, and I was not thrilled with the neckline either.

What I really want is something in between these two patterns. Once I discovered what I wanted, the path was clear:

I traced the Christine Johnson pattern in a size large (red lines in the picture above), and then I aligned the old Vogue Pattern over it to get the neckline from the Vogue pattern, which was actually a little tricky and I hope I got it right.  I  actually took the back neckline from CJ and  altered it to join up with the front neckline from the Vogue pattern.  Looking at them and taking a few measurements they look good, but only the next muslin will tell.

I then also moved the Vogue pattern out and altered the shoulder and sleeve angle on my new pattern to correspond to the Vogue pattern (in a bigger size obviously).  As you will note the Vogue shoulder sloped downward slightly more (1/4 inch) than CJ's, and there was an entirely different shape under the arm in the way the sleeve came out from the body on the Vogue Pattern.

Will it work??

I actually have no idea.  I may actually need something more in the middle ground between the two patterns.

I considered waiting to write this until I had whipped up another muslin, but I had hoped to do that yesterday, and then again today, but I see a long day of paperwork and filing ahead with little chance of a muslin appearing in the next 10 hours or so.  I shall continue to hope for tomorrow, or the long weekend.... but I am actually going to have workmen here Saturday and Sunday, and house guests, so extensive sewing time is not likely.

But now I must go back to work.  How did all the office files and accounts get so out of hand while I was out on family medical leave???? How do I ever begin to sort them out???

I'd much rather be sewing.....but the penalty would be far too high.

Purple Muslin

The problem with internet and mail order fabric shopping is that once in a while mistakes are made.  When I saw this knit fabric I thought "wrap dress".  When it arrived at my door I wondered "what was I thinking?"  The only thought that popped into my head was pajamas.  But I don't want knit pajamas.

Luckily this kind of thing doesn't happen all that often.  And now I have muslin fabric.

I made a muslin today from another old pattern that I used to love.  It is cute enough.  It needs a little work.  Look at that big fold at the bust telling me that it needs darts.  When I made this top before it was when I was a skinny minny and didn't need darts in my tops.

Ha Ha!  Not today.

I could fix it, but I don't think that the pattern is so special that it is worth the bother.

Did I waste my time today?  No.  I did something I wanted to do.  I had fun doing it.  And I learned something. 

If I bother to finish the edges of the tee I could certainly even wear it, and I would lay odds that most people wouldn't even notice that big wrinkle because I see people running around in RTW tops that do the same thing all the time.   H***, I think people wouldn't even notice if I didn't finish the edes.  But I would notice.  And I would still feel like I was wearing pajamas.

Bye Bye Purple Tee, you were never meant to be.

Rainy day activities

Yesterday I just had to face the mountain of ironing that I had been storing up for "a rainy day". 

Yesterday was rainy, and I had nothing left to wear that didn't require ironing. I also thought it would be nice to wear something out to dinner besides my gym clothes.

So there was no sewing but there was lots of time in the sewing room looking at the stack of fabrics piled up near the ironing board, thinking about what I would be doing next, taking brief breaks from the ironing board to look at patterns, and so forth and so on...you know the drill right? 

I don't usually let the ironing pile up this much, but life has not been normal of late.  I know some people don't iron their clothes, and although I can admit it would be more environmentally conscious not to iron, I can't bring myself to do it.  I don't iron my slips anymore, or my gym clothes so I think I am working my way into a more laid-back lifestyle, but very slowly.  I still iron most everything else, including my jeans.  G irons his own shirts.

I defend myself briefly by saving the ironing up until I have a pile, I don't iron the clothes for each day in the morning before getting dressed like some people I know.  Mostly this is because it is wasteful of time (I would rather sleep in a few minutes more) and energy.  The most energy is used during that initial time when the iron is warming up, and it seems a waste to warm up the iron and then use it only a few minutes.  I usually don't heat it up unless it will be on at leat an hour.  I think that is part of why I have never been good at sewing in 15 minute intervals.  I can't sew much before I need to press and I refuse to heat up the iron unless I will be there for a while.

Anyway, the circuits were configured in this room so I could use the iron with other equipment and not blow any circuits.  And the new Naomoto iron takes less energy than my old Sussman, and in fact it uses less energy to warm up than the coffee pot uses every morning.  After I blew the kitchen circuit the first few times I had to run around the house, tapping into the different circuits and measuring the actual energy use of various appliances and pieces of equipment in the house.  I am such a nerd that I found this highly entertaining.  I can iron, but I can't make coffee and toast at the same time, which sometimes requires some interesting choreography in the mornings.  In fact, if I didn't sew, I would use less energy ironing than I do making coffee over the course of a year. 

But then I do sew, and I am not going to stop.  Nor am I going to stop making coffee, although the espresso machine draws less power than the drip coffee pot for some strange reason. 

So just call me energy hog..

Pink Energy Hog.

I don't know why it took me 8 months after making this skirt to realize that I could wear it with pink.  Now it is a perfect skirt for a cool spring day, not just a fall and early winter skirt.

Duh.
.

Picking up the (pattern) pieces

Thanks to a generous offer from a dear friend to run an errand for me yesterday I actually found a few moments to focus my efforts in the sewing room. 

There is a little more fabric in residence at the moment than will fit in the allotted storage area so a few pieces have been allowed to take up residence on the cutting table.  These are knits that should fill my immediate requirements for summer  tops, a few pieces that are crying out to be made up soon, and a couple of other pieces that I just want to get off the fabric shelves and into the closets.

Then, because I had "free" time, I actually got some of the fabric washed and ready to cut and I was able to pull out the two versions of the pattern drafts I made for that last Burda knit top and start to compare what I had done, so that I can make the necessary fixes and continue my work on this pattern.  I may interrupt for a few projects, depending on mood, but I definitely want to perfect this pattern a little more, and I will definitely wear it again.

And you know what?  It was so nice to play with fabric, dream of garments, and actually look at pattern pieces and try to reassemble my thoughts after a couple of months absence.

Summer Fabric

I have been playing with fabric.  I have been re-arranging, sorting, storing and generally thinking and dreaming about fabric and projects.  Newly purchased fabrics have been cataloged and filed in the collection and a few old favorites have been brought out to perhaps become new summer garments.  At the very least they will inspire summer garments.

This is a stack of fabric that I have added to one of the cubbies in the sewing room.  They come from all periods of my collection.  The aqua fabric near the middle is the Armani fabric I posted after shopping at Leandro Fabrics a few months ago.

What these fabrics have in common is that they have companion pieces that are dancing around my head as potential outfits.  Some of these plans are quite nascent now, for example the armani jacket is still vague in my head although I do still intend to get to it this summer, probably a little later when things have calmed down a bit, perhaps as late as July after visits from step-children and others are past.

Some of these projects might be completed sooner, but none of them are on the immediate production list.  I still seem to have a few stacks of knits I want to work through, and perhaps a few skirts.  At this point simple projects seem to remain best, and I am loathe to start some epic project only to have it delayed until the point that it just becomes another UFO.

A few surprises have materialized as well.  As I put fabric away in one of the fabric closets, this set of buttons fell out:
Buttons are not supposed to be stored with fabric. In fact I wonder what I was thinking because I would never use these buttons on the fabric with which they were cohabiting.  They are awfully pretty though, large, heavy metal with rhinestones.  Somehow they don't say summer to me so they will be put aside, with the rest of the gold buttons, until the pefect garment comes along.

In the Garden

Life seems to be slowly getting back to normal, or at least this weekend has been a perfect weekend in many ways, even though I didn't actually sew.

I did spend some time reading and that was a wonderful way to get myself motivated and focused once again.  I also got out in the garden a wee little bit -- today really was a perfect gardening day, sunny breezy and in the upper 60's.  I suppose if it were like this all season I woudl live outside.  I am finally coming terms with the fact that I don't like the heat, and the sun is not good for me, but I still like a garden. Truthfully however noone would know that looking at our place this year.  It is an overgrown mess from 3 years of workmen and repairs and construction and today was the first bit of gardening I have done this spring, and here it is nearly summer.

Oh well, I know there are more important things going on.  But getting out in the yard even for the hour I spent outside today really refreshed me and helped me get back into the normal groove of things.  Actual sewing, aside from the dreams of garments to be made and the fondling of fabric cannot be far behind.

As sewing progress is still fully imaginary, I shall instead show you a few tulips.  I adore tulip season, but this year even the tulips have sat out in the garden basically ignored, whereas I am usually filling vases and bowls by the armload.  They are a little short this year.  Remember they had started to come up in January, and I am sure that false start compromised their stature a little bit.  But the flowers are glorious:

I've Got Mail

Looky Looky!  There was gold in my mailbox today!

This bounty should easily fill supply me with enough sewing dreams to fill out the rest of this week. 

Rather than grabbing them all and indulging in an evening spent wallowing in sewing ideas, I shall savour them slowly, one a day, to make them last, hopefully until I can squeeze in a little time with the sewing machines..

Perhaps I should start with the Burda.  I have been reading  about the patterns in this issue already over on Stitcher's Guild.

But then, perhaps I will start with Inspirations.  There is a magazine I always treasure even though it has been far longer since I last indulged my passion for embroidery than it has been since the sewing machines were primed and running.