Sew Distracted

Heavy Lifting

I'm still here, although I have yet to find much time for sewing. 

Now that G has been given the all-clear, I decided that is well past time that I started whipping myself back in shape.  And so I have been at the gym every day the past week (or at the physical therapists -- I am not yet up to gym and PT in one day).  6 days and 9 hours of exercise later I can definitely say that I am more exhausted than I can imagine, but I also have less back pain,  and less sciatica.  Yeah for me.  I also think my pants are a little looser in the waist, but I think that is more due to wishful thinking than any actual visible benefit of exercise at this point, unless I am just too tired to lift my fork to my mouth.

Going to the post office on the way home from the gym has also been a challenge this week as the September fashion magazines are rolling in:

The vogue is so heavy I have to have it flat on a table to look through it.  To think I had hopes of reading it on the exercise bicycle.  Ha.  I would have to use both hands just to hold it and would have to stop and put it down to turn a page -- not good for exercise. 

So my progress through these wish books is slow.  That is good, because I think I also need to take my sewing slowly, with a plan.  I need to sew what I am going to wear now, not what I hope to wear later in the fall, so that leaves plenty of time for perusing the mags and dreaming.

But what is that plan?  I have no idea.  I only know I am sick of the few clothes I have been wearing and am ready to dress again.  But in what?  I'll let you know if I ever figure it out, because at this point I don't even have energy to figure out what clothes I have much less what I might need. 

As to these magazines, I am still working my way through the 4 buckets of mail I picked up from the post office after I returned from a trip of a mere week's duration.  I don't think I have ever gotten that much mail in a week in my life....and at this point I only hope that I get caught up before I go away again. 

Sew Stylish Dreams

¿ ¿Sewing time, what's that.??  Just finding time to write seems to be a struggle this week.

Thursday night I met a friend at the local Barnes and Noble for what was billed as an evening of knitting but actually ended up being an evening of browsing through knitting and sewing books, drinking coffee, and talking up a storm.  Not a bad way to spend an evening at all.

When I walked in to the store, I saw the new Sew Stylish magazine and quickly grabbed it before heading up the escalator.  After that, I kind of flipped through it here and there between fits of talking and giggling, put it down on a shelf while I looked at crochet books and proceeded to forget all about it until I was leaving the store.  Then I had to go back in and buy a copy.  Of course I am glad I did because I have been hauling it around with me ever since, flipping through the pages, looking at the articles and the ideas and just generally getting a major sewing inspiration hit.

Generally I have been very interested in this magazine even though I did not subscribe to it, although I would have eventually.  I cannot be convinced that my failure to subscribe has lead to its demise, barely before it got started, because I have been down this road too many times with magazines from Taunton Press.  I have been charter subscribers to most of their new magazines, loved them, and have been sorely disappointed when they cease publication and my subscription is applied to one of my other Taunton subscriptions (like Threads, my subscription to which I believe is due to expire in something like 2011). 

But enough grousing...back to the magazine.  There are a lot of good tips and ideas in this magazine and more than just a compendium of ideas and tips, I like the way they have tied all this information together by building a collection of garments based on one pattern; Simplicity 3631:

I am actually rather impressed with the things they have turned out of this with this pattern, and if you haven't looked at this magazine, I think you should.  I would have loved something like this when I was learning to sew because it ties ideas for actual garments that I could sew now in with all kinds of useful information that I would otherwise have to search for in a bunch of different books without much confidence if I was doing the right thing when applying it to the garment I was trying to make.

This pattern is on my "to buy" list, even though I was not particularly thrilled with it when I first saw it on the website.  There was a pretty interesting discussion about it over at Stitcher's Guild but I wasn't really convinced about it until I started looking at some fall inspiration garments and thinking about a few things I wanted to make, including my plans for making something inspired by that Anthropologie embroidered baby-doll top that will be neither baby-doll nor a top by the time I am done with it.  Unfortunately this pattern was not yet in stock last time I was in my local JoAnn Fabrics before I left for Knoxville.  I continue to hope that the pattern drawers will be restocked soon.

Off to Knoxville

We are off to Knoxville tomorrow morning early to visit baby Owen, who is apparently turning into quite the mobile little person since we saw him last at the end of May.  I am not taking my computer and will be out of touch but will catch up upon my return.  There is also some promise of actual sewing in the future if all continues to go well.

In the meantime, I have been savoring a few pages each day from this wonderful book which arrived at my door last week:

It is filled with beautiful ideas and wonderful ribbons and although I live in a rather modern house and most of the ideas presented are along the lines of home decor, I remain entranced. 

I love ribbons and anything that justifies my passions with taste is fine by me.  There are certainly ideas here that are filling my brain with dreams.

Have a good week and I will back after the 14th.

Marfy order

Since the Marfy pattern book arrived, several weeks ago, I have been perusing it periodically, attempting to make some kind of decision concerning my pattern order.  But now the time has come for the order to go in and I had to make some decisions.

In the past, I have ordered at least one coat pattern each year.  This year, although I have plans to make several coats, I ordered no coat patterns.  Do I have all the coat patterns I need?  Not likely.  Still nothing really stood out.

Not to worry, there was no shortage of patterns on my list.  Here they are, in numerical order:

I really love this dress.  In fact there is a Simplicity pattern that seems similar which I had considered buying but have not picked up yet, primarily because it has yet to find its way to the stock drawers at my local Jo-Ann Fabrics.

I might even like this dress better.  I like Marfy's fit better. 

I ordered the jacket as well, although it is not really that unusual. But it goes so well with the dress and given how nicely Marfy patterns are drafted I doubt I will be disappointed.

Whereas it took a little while for that first dress pattern to firmly implant itself in my mind, this jacket caught my eye almost immediately.  I just love the detail of the angled dart in the front with the pockets and the peplum in the back.  Very simple, but very nice

.

A blouse with interesting darts.

Then there were two rather feminine, "dressmaker " style jackets as opposed to the more tailored style that often attracts me.  I really liked both but they also seemed terribly similar and different at the same time.  First I would like one, then the other.  Then I would decide to buy both, then I would convince myself that they were too similar to buy both.  Then I would quibble again as to which one was most worth buying.  In the end I just decided to buy them both.

Perhaps I am just intrigued by ribbons and bows this season, as one of the reasons I liked the above jacket was the little ribbon tie closure, and that is one of the features that I like about this blouse, as well as the gathers at the bust and the rather fitted shape through the waist.

I am also intrigued by the skirt.  I passed it by at first, and then noticed it again later when I was looking for a pattern for a relatively straight but flippy skirt for a particular piece of fabric.  This skirt is not what I had in mind for that fabric but it has stuck with me.  It seems that a lot of skirts have godets, and a lot have bias ruffles, but this pattern, as it appears in the sketch seems to be some combination of the two and I am suitably intrigued.  It is not that I couldn't probably create something similar, but that I want to see how the people at Marfy do it.

The "year of the dress" may or may not be over, but I seem to be just getting started.  There were two dress patterns that really caught my eye.  First, I have been looking for a dolman wrap dress and this one looks tempting.  The second dress has that nice soft gathering again, with a fitted band holding everything in shape at the waist. 

What is inspiring me now

[In my own truly obsessed fashion, I did not like the way this post originally showed, so I have reformatted it with new pictures.  The originals (if you saw that post) were downloaded from the Anthropologie website, but they were too small to see anything .   All new photos have been scanned from the August catalog. ]

Sewing is seems to continue to be something that continues only to exist only in the virtual reality of my dreams, hence the excitement over sewing on a button.  In a world where getting through the most basic stack of work seems to be a never ending task, I continue to be thrilled to have clothes that are clean and not held together by safety pins, and I continue to be be consoled by dreams of sewing.

The day my power dry arrived from Ressy's Co-op, I dreamt of sewing slips.  Even that bit of mundane virtual sewing was refreshing.

Yesterday, many of my spare minutes were spent dreaming of of the inspirations found in the August Anthropologie catalog.  This month was absolutely filled with inspirations

First there were the dresses:

 

The first one is definitely not for fall, and may be too youthful of a style, but what I am actually attracted to is the combination of the dramatic floral print with the color blocking and this can be easily adapted to another look. 

I love this layered wrap knit dress with the bubble skirt that does not bubble too much, but just hangs so nicely. 

And I love the shape and the idea of the last dress.  The dress is made from a sweater knit, and it is described as having "paint-like" metallic stripes.  When I look at the photo I can't tell if the hipline is gathered, tucked, or smocked ofr if the stripes are actually painted on the fabric.  I suspect they are not painted and there is some kind of gathering going on there, but one could probably fake it by simply painting stripes, angling them into the waist on the finished garment, and saving oneself a little extra bulk at the hips.  I doubt, however, that my artistic abilities are up to rendering anything as nice as the large painted flower on the skirt.  Paint by numbers anyone?

This jacket (on the right) really appeals to me, and although it is described as being made from a sweater knit, I can really see this made up in a lovely wool double knit.  I was very tempted to order this jacket, and if I did not already own several gray cardigans and jackets with dramatic and interesting collars, it would be winging its way to me as I write this.  Instead, I dream of making something inspired by this shape in a different neutral color -- perhaps a rich deep brown or even a lovely deep red.

 

The styling of the black corduroy  jacket on the left doesn't really appeal to me, but the embroidery does. You can get more detail  here.  I love the idea of this kind of dramatic detail on an otherwise simple shape.

But by far and away the item that most captured my imagination is a sweater.  It is, unfortunately not a sweater that I could find on the website so we can't zoom in and look at the detail of the embroidery yet.  Even though it is a sweater, it is not something I plan to knit:

 

"Softer than felt" they say.  Well, the photo looks almost felted but I am not going to knit this and felt it and embroider it.  I do however think this is another look that could be darling in a nice wool double knit.  The problem would be the collar.  If I made the garment out of wool double knit, it could be difficult to find just the right yarn to knit a matching collar.  I could, however, just make a sewn collar of the same double knit fabric.  I am interpreting this look, not trying to make an actual copy.

The color of this is not good for me or I would have ordered it too, and Anthropologie has the annoying habit of not stating how long the garments are in the catalog or on the website so I suspect it would be too short anyway.

I don't like the shape and length of the sleeves and I would do mine differently.  I could do the embroidery.  I used to do crewel work, but if I were going to put the time into this it would have to be something I would really love.  And it just might be.  My dreams include plans to play with a muslin of this shape, and I have a lovely soft violet-blue double knit that would probably look lovely in something like this. 

Perhaps dreaming of making something like this is a bit ambitious given the current state of my sewing life.  But hey, it never hurt anyone to have grand dreams, now did it?