Sew Distracted

The UPS Man cometh

I've been slowly accumulating a few favorite pieces, some of which I wear all the time, like the Elm pieces from spring and the Roses in Caramel skirt, and some of which will see less frequent wear but have good long-term prospects, like the spotted silk coat.

 Yesterday the UPS man brought a package from J Crew.  Mostly it contained a couple of my favorite, "perfect-fit" tees, but there was a new cardigan as well, this lovely soft mauve linen cardigan, called the "linen detaché cardigan, which has matching silk trim under the front band.   It is light and airy fills a definite hole in my wardrobe.  I have had plans to knit some soft linen cardigans, but nothing this fine, and I am happy to have found this version in one of my favorite colors.

 Here I am wearing it -- not the best photo as I was struggling with the light.  Everything is too dark or too bright due to the sun.  The best light this time of year is in the front yard which faces east, but it is unavailable for photos as the masons are working  on a new front walk and there are piles of stones and dirt everywhere, scattered in between the excavated walk and the concrete risers for the new steps and porch, which are still curing.

As you can see the sweater appears much lighter on because it is so sheer. It provides just enough warmth to protect from indoor chill, but is also light enough to take the shock of the heat once I walk out the door.  At least it works today when, although it is hot, it is far less humid than it has been.  I tend to believe that nothing is particularly comfortable when the humidity is high although linen tends to be the best option.

Flush

I'm still cleaning out the closets.  I spent a lot of time for a couple of days doing the basic stuff, things I wear every day like pants, skirts, and knit tops.  And I've worked a little bit every day since, but there are still things I am avoiding, like my sweaters.  But I've gotten rid of a lot of stuff, really an amazing amount of stuff.  

 So what I have I found in the closets?  Quite a bit actually.

I have 8 pairs of pants I can wear now, and one pair of summer pants, over there on the far left in the photo.  By summer I will need pants as the striped pair shown here are anything but basic, unless perhaps I run away and join the circus.

 Pants are perfect for right now when it is cold and windy, snowy and slushy outside and the fact that I have so many choices amazes me.

The pants are grouped by heel height, and within that by color.  I always aim to have basic pants in at least two, if not three lengths, to accommodate different heels. 

From left to right:

2 pairs of black pants I can wear with flats:  one Saint John knit pair, and a pair of slim fitting matte jersey pants, that will actually be comfortable well into spring.

1 pair of gray stretch cotton chinos.  This sit a little higher in the waist than is currently fashionable but they fit so well it is almost uncanny.  None of the problems I usually have with pants is evident in this pair.  I should trace them off and compare them to my pant pattern from November.

1 pair of yellow cords.  I need some color to keep me sane.  

Then there are two pairs of black pants to wear with mid-heels 1 1/2 to 2 inches or so.  One of these is solid, the other is a lovely suiting fabric with gray and red pinstripes.

Finally, on the right, two pairs to wear with heels, black and winter white.  As I said, I am set. 

 The skirt population took a bigger hit.  But even here I have enough choices to get me through the season.  

White with red and black appliques.

Two pencil skirts in black, one with little pleats at the knee.

My favorite turquoise plaid Pendelton skirt, which has been taken up twice and will not be taken up again.

There are several other skirts, all skirts I made in 2005 or 2006 that have been put aside as they can be easily altered and worn and still look good.  We will see if I get to them.

Otherwise everything else has gone.

Two things I have learned so far:

1.  I do indeed have a few TNT patterns, or will after a few very minor alterations.  They are all patterns for things I made in 2004 or 2005.

2.  Good fabric truly is worth the investment.  The things I own that are made of really good fabric have held up beautifully and fresh and new.  The styles may not be perfectly current, but they are classic enough and the fabric good enough that they are fine.  Things I made out of less than stellar fabric often look tired and worn-out, even if they haven't been worn that much.  They weren't worth the effort that went into them, unless I was sewing them as a quick thrill to wear and toss.

Quick thrills aren't usually my style.

Happy Birthday to Me

Today is my 51st birthday and it has been a fabulous weekend.  It has been sunny and lovely outdoors.  We swam, we watched tennis, we watched late night fireworks over the Hudson River, G gave me a few pretty baubles, one of which I am wearing to dinner tonight at my favorite local restaurant.

I have spent the last few weeks cleaning up the sewing room, taking inventory of past projects, plans, and ufo's, and although I don't have everything finished, I believe I have a workable system where I can allow myself to work in my sewing room a little  more.

The biggest obstacle now is my closets.  I have been basically ignoring them for months now, and only doing rudimentary search and find missions during the entire period where G was battling various health issues.  It had come to the point where I was literally wearing the same three pairs of jeans and a small assortment of tops all the time, and these were late-winter/early-spring outfits, and I am absolutely sick of them.

I want to sew.  I want to sew clothes I will wear.  Since I vowed not to sew orphans, and I need new clothes, it was time to tackle the closets, so I vowed to devote a significant part of this weekend to this task; I am still working on it but here are a few things I have learned.

I have several summer skirts in nice prints.  I had pulled out fabric for more cute printed skirts, but I don't need them.  However, I have tops to wear with some of the skirts I planned to make and none to wear with the skirts that are in my closet, so perhaps I need those skirts after all.  I do have TNT skirt patterns but no TNT patterns for tops.

I have no solid colored skirts for summer, and two black skirts for winter.

I have no dresses, except for winter dressy/business/board/cocktail party type of events.

I have 7 winter jackets.  5 of them are black.

I have several spring/fall types of sweaters and jackets, most of which go with none of my bottoms, and all of which are too warm for true summer weather.

I have no summer weight jackets or cardigans.

Sweaters and tees are still to be sorted through, but I can already see huge gaps, even without yet knowing the extent of the casualties.

I have started the sewing machines and have made a few very basic things for the house, things that needed doing.  I will update you as I go along.

A favorite green and purple combination

It is definitely spring here, but still a cool spring.  Although I am bringing out the lighter clothes, certain deeper, richer colors still seem right at home.  This is fine with me, I actually like the cool evenings and mornings (although I would perhaps prefer that "cool" meant above freezing, and I enjoy the opportunity to indulge in one of my favorite color pairings.

Soon enough it will be warm enough to put the stretch velvet turtleneck away for the season as well as the purple cords and boots which aren't seen in this photo.  For now I can enjoy the richness of color the opportunity to combine a wider variety of textures.

What to Wear

There has been a thread over at Stitcher's Guild lately called "So What did you wear today? Why?" which I have been following pretty avidly, even though I only posted there a couple of times.  Reading the various posts has caused me to think about what I wear on a daily basis, versus what I sew and whether I want to sew most of the things I wear (yes and no), as well as whether I wear what I wear because it is merely convenient, or if I wear what I really want.

Like all questions in life, the truth proves to be complicated and at times elusive.  I have been contemplating pursuing the question further here, but have been rather reluctant.  A lot of what I have worn lately has not necessarily been things I have sewn, but that is not really the issue.  More in my mind has been what is my view of the purpose of this blog and why do I want to post pictures of what I wear.  Is anybody interested? Probably not, but then, truthfully I never expected anyone to be interested and was rather shocked to correspond with people who actually read my words.      

Originally I started writing to help me coalesce my own thoughts and keep a record of what I was doing.  Although I also hoped that the blog would help me to keep family and friends updated on what I was doing, my main purpose force me to keep track of my own projects and hopes and desires for projects.   If my goal is to make sense of the random jumble of my thoughts in terms of sewing clothing that I will actually wear, pursuing some kind of survey of what I actually wear, and why I wear it, makes sense. 

But do I want to put pictures of myself in my clothes up on the internet for all to see?  I have always had issues with photographs;  I am not a "natural" subject tending to freeze when the camera is pointed my way, or I take the opposite tack and look like I am trying to hard.    Add to that my own mixed feelings about my own appearance as well as the role of appearance and "beauty" in society, and the whole thing gets rather complicated. 

One thing that appealed to me, long ago, before I started this blog, about some of the sewing forums was the idea that one could post pictures of what one sewed on mannequins.  This allows one to see the garment and hopefully the mannequin matches the measurements of the seamstress more or less exactly.  Using a mannequin also puts the emphasis on the garment, on the style and techniques, not on the person wearing the garment, and this appealed to me because I was able to focus on the "what" of what I made and the details of "how" it was made.  Showing photos of the garment on the person for whom it was made shifts the perspective ever so slightly away from the garment and toward the person wearing it.  I am not sure this is always a bad thing, and I understand that looking at a garment on a person is less abstract than looking at the garment alone, but I still struggle with this issue.  There is probably some perfect blending of mannequin shots and a final view of the garment as worn, but I am still working out the details.

So, as a person who thinks far too much and worries ideas to death, I wait.  I ponder.  And I get nowhere.

And then, as if there was some divine alignment of the heavens, materfamilias  wrote a post uncannily related to my own thoughts and dilemmas, except that she wrote far more coherently and cleverly than I could in my wildest dreams, surprisingly touching on many of the same questions, feelings and issues that plague me on this same subject.

So I decided to go ahead.

What did I wear this week?

I have three examples and each is telling in different ways.  It was a casual week, working around the house, going to the post office and the grocery store, acting as chauffeur for my DH who is not allowed to drive for another three weeks following open-heart surgery.

Spring finally arrived this week and so I started pulling out summer clothes.  Here you see my favorite summer sneakers.  I dearly love these things.   They are perfect with cropped pants or soft linen or cotton trousers. 

Summer has long been, in my mind at least, a time for looseness and lightness, not really for serious clothes.  In the summer I love brightly colored flat sandals and espadrilles and yes, casual canvas sneakers.  But sneakers are problematic.  They are easier to find than espadrilles in my neck of the woods, but as a person who has never learned to keep her shoes tied, sneakers present the added difficulty of laces.  It is not appropriate to run around, laces flopping in the breeze at the half-century mark, and it is perhaps nearly as embarrassing to have to double-knot your laces at this age.   Yes, untied sneakers seem to add to that air of distraction and dishevelment that seem to follow meeverywhere, but I don't really want to run around with my shoes untied no matter how much I love my Converse sneakers.  Most slip-on sneakers somehow never struck me as quite right, until I found these court slip-ons.  Now I have them in several colors. Admittedly what appeals to me is the idea that they look like they should have laces.  Even though I am fooling no one,  and I see them everywhere, I still feel like a kid who is getting away with something every time I wear them.  And what is more in keeping with summer fun?

This is what I wore yesterday.  It is one of my favorite transitional outfits.  When it is just a tad warmer I will switch from the suede mules to strappy platform sandals, but this will never be a heat-of-summer outfit anyway.

The sweater was knit in spring of 2005:  kingfisher  and although I love it and think it looks really good on I had trouble wearing it.  To begin with, being a viscose blend with nylon it is too hot for the humidity of mid summer.  Then I somehow had trouble finding the perfect pants.  The color is good for jeans but it looked terrible with any jeans I owned.  I was going through a period where I didn't wear jeans much though, and all I had were basic "work" jeans that I use around the house and in the yard.  I also couldn't get the perfect pants.  Everything was either too dressy, or too slouchy or just too something.   I have a pair of medium blue linen pants that look nice, but the linen is very summery and the sweater, although bright and cheery, is really not a summer sweater.  Linen pants look out of place on cold spring days or even on warmer fall days,  adding to the impression that I just can't get my act together.

But then, last fall I found this pair of jeans.  They are by Wörn jeans and they, surprisingly, fit me perfectly right out of the box.  I ordered them because they are cut a little higher through the rise than most current jeans.

But then, I learned that just having jeans that fit is not in and of itself enough.  They fit well, they look ok (but they are not the kind of jeans that draw "oh wow" comments from my DH, and I have some like that too, music to my middle-aged ears) but they have issues.  Namely I couldn't find anything in my wardrobe that went with them without looking dowdy or like "mutton dressed as lamb" or "aging hippie wanna-be", until I found this sweater.  Now I have the perfect pairing, even if I have only one outfit that goes with these jeans, I can also look at it is finally having the perfect outfit to wear with a favorite sweater, and therefore worthwhile.

The whole situation tells me several things:

I should make more sweaters in this basic shape as it is quite flattering.  Hanne Falkenberg's Mermaid is similar, and there are a host of patterns in this shape floating around the knitting world right now.  I should take advantage.

I really should find other long tops with this kind of fitted and flared shape so that I can wear the jeans with other things.  This is a good jeans shape for me and it always has been.  I basically, whether fatter (now) or thin, have too curvy of a figure to be a natural in jeans. So I am thinking I should try some of the more ethnic inspired floaty tops that have been around of late.  If i get the right fit through the ribs or waist with a gentle flair of asymmetrical bit of hem they might look quite nice.  So I need to find another look for the jeans, one that makes the perhaps questionable styling work for me without looking too "middle-aged matron".

It is not proving to be an easy task.

I really like the jeans.  They remind me very much of a pair I had with almost exactly the same fit and shape when I was in college. Of course, I look very different than I did in college, and I don't want to look like a middle-aged woman trying to relive her teen years (God forbid!  That is one period I most definitely DO NOT want to relive) but the jeans make me happy.  I have a picture with me and some college friends sitting around a pool in 1977 in those jeans, and these jeans somehow evoke some of the same feelings in me.

I wore this on Monday.  It was a bit chilly that day, and I was tired so I tend to gravitate toward long sweaters where I don't really have to think about how I look but I can convince myself that I am at least presentable.   They may not be my best look, but that is not the issue here.  As a person who lives too much in my head, I do sometimes appreciate the idea that a nun's habit provides a certain answer to how to get dressed and look pulled together, without really being interested in the necessary career path required.  But then, nuns don't wear habits anymore do they?

I suppose I looked a little frumpy here.  I felt pulled together and even pretty because of the bright purple scarf.  The long cardigan, although hiding any evidence that there is a figure underneath, tends to make me feel confident and happy on days when I am otherwise tired, as I feel like I just don't have to worry about things like whether my tummy is sticking out, or how I am standing if my back is sore.  I realize that long bulky sweaters make one look heavier, but I suppose that I really don't care about that issue so much.  So I guess what I am saying is that what makes one FEEL beautiful on any given day may or may not be what others thinks makes one look one's best.  But I think feeling attractive and pulled together is the key. I am wearing the same jeans.  These jeans I see tend to look kind of rumpled.  I never have figured out how to wear jeans and look crisp, no matter what jeans I wear or what I do to them.

I guess I am just not a crisp person.  Floppy is as floppy does.

Clean-UP

17 skirts
20 pairs of pants
90 tees and knit tops in various configurations

untold jackets, blouses, scarves etc.

166 clothes hangars, padded, skirt hangars, jacket hangars all lost.

We had a fire in my clothing closet.  The multi-plug that ran DH's bedroom stereo burnt.  Melted plastic, burnt carpeting, singed closet dividers.  One singed skirt..

Apparently wool does not burn well.  Wool carpeting and wool skirts helped damp the fire.  We are very lucky.

My hangars were mostly the kind coated in plastic or fabric and all need to be replaced as the plastic is impregnated with the acrid smell of burning plastic and airplane glue.  DH had the good wooden hangars.  Now I will too.

Actually the numbers are kind of embarrassing.  Although not the number of skirts, I think I am short of skirts, especially since some of those are only appropriate a few times a year. 

I haven't begun to count  the pieces of fabric that need to be cleaned.  I suppose I will be counting them as they come back and have to be put back in the closet.  Aack!

I haven't even begun the search for new carpeting and shades.  I suppose that is next on the list.

Sweaters and shoes are OK, they were in a different closet in a different room.  I consider myself very lucky for not having put away the laundry at the time of the fire.  The laundry room is on the opposite side of the house.

Iris Made Me Do It.

Well, that is not exactly true, but she did help.

You see, I had been eying these teal boots by Delman for several months over at Zappos .  They had been in my "favorites" since December I think, and I would periodically look at them and drool.  But I realize that teal boots are not a necessity, and I have many pairs of boots.  In fact I was just complaining that I have more boots than will fit into the allotted storage space and I was contemplating liberating a few pairs. I am not sure that will really happen, especially considering that I just purchased these boots and absolutely love them.

After looking at all Iris Apfel's beautiful books all weekend, and then staring longingly at these teal beauties, and noticing that they were STILL available in my size, I bought them.

They fit perfectly, they are the exact shade of teal as several things in my wardrobe, and they coordinate perfectly with a favorite skirt that has proven very difficult to match and pair with other garments.

As I placed the boots lovingly in a temporary spot in my shoe closet while I ponder the issue of expanded boot storage, I noticed that the oldest pair of shoes is also probably** a pair of Delmans that I thought extremely frivolous at the time, but which has proven to be a long term standard and favorite.

These suede flats were purchased, I believe around 1985, give or take a year. and have been worn steadily, every season since.

***  There are actually three pairs of shoes from the mid-eighties still floating around in the wardrobe, but I believe these are the oldest.  These date just before the time my feet decided to suddenly grow from a 7 1/2 to an 8 1/2, much to my shoe-collecting chagrin, or there would be more survivors.  If my feet hadn't grown I would still have the gorgeous royal blue suede and lizard pumps I wore on my wedding day.  My feet might have been in a transitional stage at the time, because I bought an 8, or they might have only come in even sizes,  because I am pretty consistently a true 8 1/2 in Delman and Ferragamo, my benchmarks for well-made, well-fitting, comfortable shoes.