west 38th

zip zip

2012-01-15T17:09:00.001-05:00

Should I just start every post here with "OMG, so busy!!"? ;) The year has been flying by far too fast for us so far.

It was sadly time to put away the Christmas tree - see you next year, Santa Clauses.

I did manage to find time to make up a little outfit for Kate - an Ottobre Tshirt and a little white baby cord skirt. Since she loved the slip from her 1950s dress so much, I layered this one with some floral quilting cotton to make a "slip" that could show. The skirt has a little waistband that has elastic running through it.

The t-shirt fabric was bought off Spoonflower a while ago (here). I wanted to try out their organic cotton knit, and I was pleasantly surprised that it's a nice knit! Has some horizontal stretch, and it's just a smidge thick but very soft. Good stuff for kids clothes.

Here it is on Kate.

One last shot - I snuck in a quick visit to the Metropolitan Museum of Art the other day. I finally have a membership so I can slip in for a short visit and not feel guilty about not getting my money's worth from the visit! ;) Here's a quick view of one of the schmancy french rooms they have. Those are always interesting to walk through & imagine living in such fancy surroundings.

Happy sewing!

2012

2011-12-31T07:49:00.001-05:00

This is a tea towel with a 2012 calendar on it:

One of the ships on there - look at the month of April - just so happens to be my Sailor's ship. ;) The other ships are regulars around the NY Harbor. Being the nerd that I am I found the Tugster blog last year, which led me to Bowsprite, who paints gorgeous pictures of the NY Harbor area. In November, Bowsprite designed a 2012 tea towel for a Spoonflower contest & I had to jump on a chance to order it to make up some awesome tea towels for my Sailor's mom, my mom, and myself.

Here's the yard - four tea towels! - from spoonflower:

Well. Guess what, I was a bit rusty on how to get the nice mitered corners and I certainly didn't want to goof these up! Sew Mama Sew came to the rescue with a great illustrated PDF guide on sewing these corners. I followed along -

Put on the 1/4" quilting foot and sew one line around the tea towel, 1/4" in from the edge. Then lift your foot and sew another line, 1/4" inwards from the previous one.

Next, draw a diagonal line across the boxes in the outer corner you've made so that the outside square gets snipped off:

Fold in at the corner of the inner square you marked:

Now fold the edge at the outer stitching line:

And again at the inner stitching line, which will.... MAGIC... give you a mitered corner shape!

Stitch along the folded edge, and all done! Isn't WTGB-109 looking pretty awesome here in April? :)

If you, too, would like a 2012 NY Harbor tea towel, you can order it on Spoonflower on Bowsprite's Spoonflower page. I have my eye on the Semper Paratus fabric, and I think you might be seeing a skirt from it here shortly. ;)

(For the landlubbers, the name of the fabric, Semper Paratus, is the US Coast Guard's motto, it stands for Always Prepared. Every time the sailor laughs at me for lugging around a big purse with band aids, a water bottle, my evdo, a granola bar, extra socks, the kitchen sink, and so forth I tell him "Semper Paratus!")

A small jumper

2011-12-28T14:29:00.001-05:00

Here is the Chopin dress from Ottobre Summer 2010 again, but without the front pleats.In this incarnation, it's a little jumper for Anabear to wear to school. I bought the fabric at JoAnn's last year and originally thought I might make it into a dress for Kate. However, I realized that the print is a bit juvenile for her (OMG, my smidgen niece is EIGHT. how did that happen?) and Ana might be more appreciative. Ana is also super attached to her family's cats, so she should enjoy this.I love the full, twirly skirt. I'm picturing this with a little white peter pan collar blouse underneath and maybe a white cardigan on top.

Christmas Sewing

2011-12-24T06:44:00.001-05:00

Most years I try to sew a bunch of presents, as I'm very lucky to have family that really appreciate hand made coats or tote bags and whatnot. This year I managed one nightgown so far. Um... yeah. I will claim extenuating circumstances this fall- I was in a car accident, there was that huge attack of hives, and now I've caught some ick of the sore throat-fever-horrible cough variety. I give up, everyone gets home made presents for New Years this year. ;)

We did get a tree up with all our Santa ornaments on it. (Our tree is nothing but Santa ornaments. True story, I had friends whose parents put up multiple trees each December and one was only Santa ornaments. It blew my small mind and I promised myself that when I grew up, I'd have a tree of all Santa ornaments. And now I have one of my own every year and it makes me super happy. (; ) Here are a few of my favorite Santas that I photographed last year right before we put it away:

This one was a gift from my family when the sailor and I got engaged. One of my all time favorites.

Washington state ferry.... I am so homesick this December.

Sweet tooth Santa!

Anyway. I wish I had gotten some better photos, but Kate wore the 1950s dress and slip I'd made her 2 years ago to the Nutcracker this year, and it still fits her! That kid is a skinny minny. Here is the post from 2009 where I originally made it for her. Kate's favorite part is the petticoat with all the netting, so I've promised to make her another one soon. Her mom says that there is always a big fight when she wears the dress because she thinks the petticoat should go above the dress so that everyone can admire it! So cute. So here she is wearing it at the ballet, totally absorbed in the web browser on my phone.

What size is Ana?

2011-12-03T14:48:00.001-05:00

Miss Anabear is rather skinny and long, so she's been a little tricky to size for a while. I made up a simple white dress to match her sisters, but I got rather worried when it was done that it was too big for her!

This is a size 6 Simplicity 2989, the same dress I love making as seen in One Hardworking Pattern. Again, I used some leftover silk shantung for the fashion fabric and lined it in silk crepe de chine.

It's a very simple style here, with lace on the hem and puffed sleeves. Love the sheen of the shantung.

But I kept holding it up & feeling like it was just a little too large for the teensy bear, so I decided that since I still had oodles of silk left, I'd make something a bit smaller.

So here is my very first Ottobre! It's dress #25, "Chopin, rose patterned twirly dress" from Summer 2010. I left off the roses & the belt, but I did like the tucks on the bodice, as it adds a nice little touch. It's originally sleeveless, so I added in some little puff sleeves edged in lace. Same as all the others, it is white silk shantung lined in white silk crepe de chine... soooooo much fun to sew up! This stuff is like a dream to sew.

And of course I had a good laugh when I was done, the two dresses are nearly the same size! Oh well, she will wear them at some point if they are too big right now! And until I see the nieces, I have a pile of silk dresses on my chair:

a christmas dress

2011-11-27T09:55:00.001-05:00

This will be mostly wordless. I broke out in hives all over, likely due to eating...something? Current fore runner is some chicken tikki masala, which kills me as that's one of my favorite dishes! So this post is brought to you via Blogging On Benedryl.

Thanksgiving: (By the way, we went with a sausage stuffing recipe that was AWESOME. thanks for the suggestions!)

And post Thanksgiving sewing - I knew that I had ordered way too much white silk this spring when I made my wedding dress, but I figured it could be put to good use making Christmas dresses for the nieces. So this weekend out came some of the white shantung and silk crepe de chine from Susan Khalje's store.

This stuff was a dream to sew and press and I spent a lot of time just holding the silk up to the light and petting it. I'm not the only one who has the sit and fondle the fabric before diving in, right?

I used New Look 6907 for Kate's dress. My sister asked for a plain white dress so that they could add different colored sashes and get more use from it. My favorite part was picking out the laces to use.... I have a weakness for going into MJ and buying lace "because I'll use it someday on little dresses for the nieces."

Here's the insides... I just zigagged the armholes where the lining met instead of using more bias binding. It is just a kids dress, so I didn't want to go TOO crazy.

Good luck to all those starting up on Christmas sewing - may your sewing machines be quick and the mistakes few! ;)

happy thanksgiving

2011-11-19T15:38:00.001-05:00

Happy Thanksgiving! Today is military family (& my-kid-sister-is-going-to-the-inlaws-thursday-and-her-little-kids-can-only-do-one-thanksiving-at-a-time) thanksgiving! ;)

That's ok, we like to spread out the holidays.

Have you seen the excellent Minoru jacket pattern from Sewaholic? I've ordered a copy, and I think it might be pretty neat made up in one of the coating cottons from BJs. This year I might end up making up the Artisan's Square SWAP, since it's got a good setup this time around. Very tempting! And of course I still need to sort out the muslin from my vintage coat pattern. It's still sitting in the closet, gathering dust.

I'm off to make more pies, so here are some closing pictures.... I was in the NYC subway yesterday and took these little cell phone pictures of the hats in the 23rd st R station - always one of my favorite subway art displays :)

happy veteran's day

2011-11-11T15:52:00.003-05:00

happy veteran's day everyone! Seemed like an opportune moment to sneak in more wedding pictures. ;)

Ever so proud of my sailor and the wonderful job he does

photos by Stephen DeVries

My coat is currently stalled. I tried on the muslin, and it's HUGE. I need to sort out how to take it in, which is made a bit tricky by the back darts and the side panel. Seems like if I just pinch in on the sides, I will mess up the armhole shape. Hmmmm.

In the meantime I've been thinking a lot about Thanksgiving baking & what to make. We need an interesting stuffing recipe, as I haven't really liked any I've made in past years. I had marginal success with one two years ago which had apples and cranberries in it. Anyone have a great stuffing to recommend?

Lattes

2011-11-05T22:02:00.001-04:00

You know what drives me bonkers about NYC? A good latte is nearly impossible to find. This week, however, has been full of tasty lattes. I've been at my company's "mothership" in the gorgeous city of Seattle. I have been so homesick that I leapt at the chance to come out here for a work trip and then squeezed in an extra day today to enjoy my hometown. (For those of you new to my blog, I lived in Seattle for about 8 years, and I met my husband out here. Once he is out of the Coast Guard we plan to move back... but that's a few years away yet.)

Since today was an "extra" day out here with no work, I set off to meander around and visit all my favorite places downtown. I had an apricot croissant and a REAL coffee in Pike Place Market. While I was there, I slipped into the little quilting store in the market and picked up a fat quarter set to make a Christmas table runner or some pillows.

Then I walked down to Kinokuniya bookstore in Uwajimaya and bought a book I've had my eye on for a while, Simple Chic. It has some gorgeous dresses in it & the instructions are fairly clear (think Ottobre magazine style drawings!) so I might actually make something from it.

My poor husband got text message updates on my adventures as I poked around. "Hey, I'm standing right where we had our first kiss!" "Hey, I'm having the awesome pad thai we love for lunch!" and so on. Poor guy. ;)Sadly, I have to fly back to the east coast tomorrow. See you soon Seattle, I miss you!

Snow day knockoff

2011-10-29T12:48:00.000-04:00

This is west 38th's 300th blog post! Wow :o)

Like the rest of the east coast, we are currently getting some very heavy early season snow. It's been pretty heavy all morning and the wind is really picking up. I'm glad that it waited until this morning to snow, because last night was Lady Liberty's 125th birthday, and we enjoyed a great fireworks show for it. Here is the very very snowy view out of our window right now.

Since it's too snowy to drive to see the nieces get their Halloween costumes on for a party (which is likely cancelled, anyway, given the amount of snow we are expecting.....) I decided to break out a project I've been mulling over for a while.

I found this Derek Lam coat in a magazine at the end of the summer and loved the combination of yoke seam, powder blue, and pockets.

Then I found a similar Derek Lam coat, in an ad that has been in a few fall magazines.

Isn't it fantastic? Can you believe it's $2,000? Really?

At the NY Garment District weekend get together in September, I found some fantastic blue wool coating at Kashi's for the crazy price of $12/yard and I remembered the vintage coat pattern I had bought and then lost last year. It's longer, but I am in need of a longer coat anyway. But otherwise it's fairly similar.

And so I am working on a snowy day muslin. One interesting feature of this pattern is that there is a side panel with the pockets set into it, so you don't have to do welt pockets! And the seam between the side panel and the front, which has the pockets, is a 7/8" seam allowance. I've never seen that on a pattern before. I assume it's there so that you have room to slash in at the pocket corners.

Well, I am off to work on the muslin with a nice green smoothie. I am drinking these a lot for lunch: frozen banana + frozen pineapple + 1/3 cup OJ + a few handfuls of fresh spinach leaves. I am terrible at getting enough dark green leafy veggies and so this is a good & tasty way to get them in.

Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, the jacket, take 2

2011-10-22T19:00:00.000-04:00

Last year I made my niece Kate a little grey boiled wool military trim jacket.

Well, guess who now fits it as well & loooooves stealing it from her big sister? ;)

Miss Anabear !

She had it on while we were washing the cars, which meant that there was a big puddle forming at the end of the driveway. Which, of course, her four year old little brother found. ;)

I'm happy to report that the Ninja costume is ALL DONE! I stopped off at Pearl River Mart in Soho this week and picked up a little pair of redembroidered slippers to complete the look. She may not be very stealthy with all the red, but she sure is rather cool looking. They're off to a Halloween party next weekend, so I'll try to get some nice pictures then.

Beware the fierce ninja!

2011-10-16T13:36:00.002-04:00

First, there was yet another pattern change. I was concerned about the jumpsuit & fitting a warm jacket underneath, as well as how unweildy it would be get in & out of. So I poked around on Etsy and came up with this pattern. I made view D (the mandarin collar top & pants view) in the black cotton fabric I'd already bought.

It was pretty straightforward to put together - the pants are one-seam pants, which are zippy! And the sleeve is an interesting drop shoulder design which meant that the sleeve was attached flat and then you zip up the side seams. Of course, I might be sewing a quick Halloween costume, but I did have slip in a silk organza snippet to reinforce the mandarin collar!

Next the patches were ironed on & then sewn down....

The back has a phoenix on it:

and the front has a little dragon:

Behold! The fierce 8 year old ninja!!

We will finish it off with a red belt & a ninja hood. I made a size up so there's room for some winter underwear and fleece underneath. We wouldn't want a frozen ninja!! ;)

I have to say, I'm now eyeing the kimono pattern that this came with. How adorable would a teensy kimono be as a cute addition for their dress up trunk?

Shower Curtains

2011-10-12T21:57:00.000-04:00

Things I have not done: Finish an 8 year old's ninja costume. Figure out a decorating theme for my hatchback for said 8 year old's school Trunk or Treat extravaganza in school parking lot. Sew myself a new autumn coat. Sew myself a new black skirt.

Things I have done: dropped a bottle of pink nailpolish in my bathroom, ruining my white terry shower curtain. Discover that Amy Butler makes shower curtains (!!!!). Purchase a replacement shower curtain. Rejoice that it fits in perfectly with my bathroom - look, it even nicely coordinates with all the artwork I have in there!

Which reminds me, another thing I have not done - sort out a decent wide angle lens for my camera.

And one more thing that I have done, which is purchase two new blouse patterns from Colette Patterns. I'm working on embracing sewing for the wardrobe I actually wear, which given that I'm a software engineer is "jeans and a top". So my plan is to sew fewer dresses, which I never wear, and sew more tops that can be worn to work. Right after I finish that ninja costume!

2011-10-08T08:23:00.000-04:00

Two years ago I posted about a silk 1980s Liz Claiborne dress that I was un-assembling for some refashioning. Here's the dress top, sitting on my dressform in 2009.

And.... I finally finished it up! Here's me with my new tank top. I added a band at the bottom that's some nice purple and black floral that I bought at Elliot Berman at the re-scheduled fabric shopping trip.

It has little buttons on the shoulders:

In those two years, I took off the puffy sleeves, folded under the armholes and stitched them down, re-did the side seams, and attached the hem band. Am I the world's slowest re-fashioner or what?

Next up, the Ninja Halloween costume for my niece! Supplies are trickling in...

The City Quilter

2011-09-29T17:13:00.000-04:00

NYT features The City Quilter in a sweet little article on the store:Where Novices and Artists Indulge the Quilter Within

Flower girls

2011-09-16T19:57:00.000-04:00

I realized I never did show proper pictures of my nieces in the flower girl dresses I'd made them. The girls wore Oliver + S dresses that I made from turquoise silk taffeta (Kate) and navy blue silk taffeta (Ana), along with yellow rose flower crowns and carried (more like twirled and bounced around (; ) pomanders that I'd made.

The dress pattern is The School Photo Dress from Oliver + S. Definitely one of my favorite patterns! If you ever make it, it has one of the most ingenious ways to incorporate an invisible zipper, a collar, and a lining. I've followed this method of assembly for a few other dress patterns now since it works so nicely!!

pictures by Stephen DeVries

The girls LOVED the flower crowns. They were definitely the big hit with them. All the time I'd spent picking out cute blue hair bows on etsy.... they just wanted the crowns on!

The dresses were actually very easy to sew, but I'd made this pattern a couple times before. I still adore the little kangaroo pocket it has, although the girls were busy with the flowers and didn't end up using the pockets much that day. We had matching white cardigans and little lacy white socks for them that I found on sale on jcrew.com. And adorable little black maryjanes. I definitely had a lot of fun picking out their little outfits. It made the day really enjoyable to have the munchkins around. They were interested in what was going on, got really into dancing after dinner, and stormed the reception in their PJs before going home, which was just too cute.

I'm thinking that Christmas dresses this year might be white silk School Photo dresses. Maybe with some red piping across the front yoke seam?

More Quilting

2011-09-12T19:46:00.001-04:00

What I did with my weekend... I worked a little on a quilt:

Kate was very very busy running around playing space wars with her little brother, but she did consent to show off the dress I'd sewn her. She allowed that this was a nice pattern and I could make another one for her. ;)

And I missed my friend. I took this picture in 1998 with a twin lens roloflex medium format camera - if you were my friend in college, you had to sit for frequent portrait sessions for my photography assignments and art shows. This is my friend Esther, putting up with me needing another portrait again.

I didn't post this weekend about why the 10th anniversary of 9/11 is so incredibly painful to me. A few days after it happened, my dearest friend Esther was killed in a car accident. We met in college in 1995, and when I was living in Seattle in the summers working at internships, and she was living with her grandma in Portland, we drove up and down the coast to see each other. We lived in the same dorms in college. We took computer science classes together, hung out in the photography studio together, and most of all we baked and cooked dinner together as much as we could. We cooked so many Thanksgiving dinners together in those years, always with lots of college friends around. We had grand plans to grow old together.

The weekend before 9/11, she stopped by my apartment in Seattle with her dad. We sat around on my sofa and chatted about nothing in particular. I think I'd just made a blueberry coffeecake and we were eating it and talking about the recipe. I never saw her again - a few days later her father called me to tell me that she had been hit by a car and died. She was 25 and I was 24. So there you go - I really flinch every year when 9/11 rolls around, because it means in a few days it be the anniversary of losing her. She loved quilts and sewing. She would have gotten SUCH a huge kick out of the sword arch surprise that my sailor pulled off at the wedding. Brian and I were talking that day about how much she loved boats and would have loved the waterfront wedding we had. I miss her to pieces.

keys

2011-09-09T22:04:00.000-04:00

Aren't these Sandi Henderson prints gorgeous? I bought a half yard of each recently from Pink Chalk Fabrics with the idea of making some new cloth grocery bags. Most of my supply of cloth grocery bags has been swiped by my sister, my nieces, and my mom! I do need to pick up some more canvas webbing to use for straps for them when I get into the garment district again. Hopefully soon.

I really love all the prints in this line, and I'm debating buying a jelly roll or some more half yards, but then my "to make quilts" box is already overflowing. Hmm....

Next, you may remember from my wedding day write up that my sailor had a big surprise to me at the ceremony. My uncle recently sent me this little video clip he shot of me walking out with my dad & seeing the dress whites for the first time. The sailor has been getting a big kick out of watching my reaction here. ;) I will warn you if you click play, there are some VERY LOUD BAGPIPES in there. My family is scottish, you have to have loud bagpipes at the wedding or it isn't a real wedding!

The tenth anniversary of Sept 11 is in just a few days, and since we live just across the river from the WTC site it's been a bit unescapable. Looking at the wedding video and seeing my best friend in it reminded me of that day. In the early 2000s my best friend (who was my "Man of Honor" at the wedding) and I were sharing an apartment in Seattle, since we both worked as programmers for the same Seattle dotcom. I was up extra early the morning of Sept 11, 2001, for work and saw the whole thing on TV. It was unreal. I'd been to the observation deck of the towers & been through the PATH station downstairs many times as a kid, and I remember at first explaining to him what the area was around the towers as they showed commuters pouring out of the buildings. Then we saw that something happened to the Pentagon and got really worried, because both his parents worked there. I remember we were unable to reach them for hours, which was just terrible. We eventually got them on a phone landline, and they were fine. Neither of them had ended up going to work at the Pentagon that day because their jobs sent them elsewhere for the day. They were lucky.

It was... well, weird, being on the West Coast but having grown up so close to NY, and watching TV all day. At some point I remembered that I had to walk my dog, and we went out to go around the block. The dissonance of doing something that normal - just strolling down the sidewalk like we'd done hundreds of times - and what we'd seen on TV all morning - it felt so disconnected. And of course I never in a million years would have imagined that 10 years later I'd be married to a USCG captain who worked in NY Harbor, or that I'd be living only a few hundred yards away from the towers. Life is crazy. We will be having a quiet weekend- I'll be trying Kate's new corduroy dress on her and helping my dad around the house. I hope you all stay safe and have a quiet weekend with those you love!

Pear Dress

2011-09-05T16:35:00.000-04:00

This is a little dress up day at school dress for my niece, Kate. I used New Look 6907, view A and some adorable baby cord fabric from the Lisette fabric line at JoAnn's. It's got little green pears mixed in with the blue polka dots... so sweet.

Other than the corduroy and the pattern, everything came form my stash. I used a tan colored invisible zipper and lined the bodice with some quilting fabric scraps. The sleeves were hemmed with some bias tape scraps and the trims are all from my big "ziploc bag stuffed full of random trims" stash.

The assembly was pretty straightforward so it went together quickly - no fussy leaf shaped pieces to cut & sew for this skirt, unlike the Tinkerbell costume yesterday! Just a very simple A-line dress for Kate to wear to school on dress up days when she doesn't have to wear her uniform.

Seeing Green

2011-09-04T16:15:00.001-04:00

It's that time of year again... time to visit JoAnn's during the Labor Day sale and purchase sparkly cheap costume satin.
Fight with wiggly polyester...
And sew up Halloween costumes for the nieces!

Here's the pattern I used:

Ana asked to be Tinkerbell this year, so this is Simplicity 2872, a Disney fairies pattern. Honestly, I didn't look at the directions other than identifying which pattern pieces were necessary for view A. I ignored their facing pieces and fully lined the bodice. I'm planning to sew in a snap or two at the neckline to close it- the mantra here was "costume not couture!!" which I had to keep reminding myself of. The "leaf" shapes in the skirt were a little annoying just because there are eight of them and the poly kept threatening to melt onto my iron. And of course the crystal bits stuck to the underskirt made sewing the underskirt a massive pain.

The costume calls for sewing a green belt, but I'm fairly certain that my mom has some green grosgrain ribbon floating around, so I'll find some of that to use as a belt. And instead of sewing wings I will be buying some cute Green Pixie Wings for $6 from amazon. I figure that's worth it to not fight with wing construction!

Kate has asked to be a ninja - I might just make her black leggings, tshirt, and a ninja hood.

Irene visits NYC

2011-08-29T18:45:00.000-04:00

Well, that was exciting. Some of you may have noticed that we had a small weather event run through NYC recently. ;)

I first heard about it on Tuesday when my sailor called and said "Make plans to go to your parents house this weekend." We watched the news as it became more and more likely that NYC was going to really get a whallop, and I did end up clearing out, which was good because my neighborhood ended up with an evacuation order. I brought along my friend who lives in Hoboken - the same friend who sewed her wedding dress last October - and we had a fun weekend in the rain that was like an extended camping trip at times.

Let's see- I baked up chocolate chip cookies for the guys on my sailor's ship and dropped them off at 6 AM on Saturday AM. I hear they were gone before the ship even pulled away from the pier, so next hurricane I'll bake a double batch, I guess. ;)

Then we put my fish into a ziploc bag, packed some snacks and bottled water, drove out to northern NJ. My dad has decided that my fish's name is Anchovy (it's really Horatio, but that's my dad for you!), so the weekend became "Operation Anchovy Extraction" as in "operation rescue the fish from the huge storm!!"

Here's my dad checking on his sailboat before the storm starts:

We lost power early on, and a dam near by broke. And so here I am checking on the sailboat in the rain to make sure the lines are secure:

The lowlight of Operation Anchovy Extraction may have been the 5 AM run to get more ice to put into the fridge and freezer. Nothing like loading massive bags of ice into the back of your subaru in the rain at the crack of dawn. At least the place we got ice from had hot coffee! Our coffee making method this weekend was pretty convoluted: Send someone out into the rain to turn on the gas grill. Fill camping pot up with water, put pot on grill. Ready french press. When we thought the water might be boiling, send someone outside to check. Commiserate when the water wasn't quite there yet. Check in a few minutes. Boiling! Carefully carry water inside and pour into french press. Drink coffee and listen to the radio some more.

The sailor is back on dry land and busy grumping that it was just a large rain storm, to which I've been countering that anything that prevents me from taking a shower for two days is more than just a large storm! I hope you all had a safe & dry weekend!

weddings, earthquakes, and other stuff

2011-08-23T21:32:00.000-04:00

I did not finish a dress to wear to my cousin's wedding. Instead I wore a Tahari dress and took a bunch of pictures of family. Can you believe this is only a few of my cousins? We were joking all weekend about how crazy huge our family is.

My parents also celebrated their 40th wedding anniversary the night before my cousin's wedding. Happy Anniversary, mom & dad!

So, did all you East Coasters feel the earthquake this afternoon? I was sitting in our company's cafeteria, eating a late lunch, when I felt the floor and the big wooden table I was at start shaking, and I KNEW what it was. Honestly, it really freaked me out. I was on the 9th floor of a very old brick building in Seattle in the 2001 Nisqually quake (6.9, baby!), and saw the building get trashed around me - broken pipes, air conditioning ducts ripped out of their mounts, collapsed shelves, broken glass, all that fun stuff. My mom called this evening and asked if I had felt the quake, and then asked if I was OK. I had to tell her that I really had hoped to never experience another quake again in my life. This one was pretty tame, though, other than the crazy surge of "oh no not again" it produced in me. ;) In fact, after our building was evacuated, I may have sounded like one of the jaded West Coasters in this NYT article.

shack attack!

2011-08-13T12:50:00.000-04:00

The sailor and I headed over to the World Financial Center Shake Shack last night, since he's leaving Monday morning for work & will be gone most of the rest of the month. Nothing to send you on your way like an awesome shack burger, so off we went. We're very lucky, it's just 2 blocks and a ferry ride away from our apartment. The Madison Park location often has 2 hour long lines for burgers, but since the WFC one is newer and still hidden under some construction scaffolding the lines are usually not long at all. They're famous for super tasty cheeseburgers and REALLY good milkshakes and ice cream.

It was PACKED when we got there, since I guess word is getting out about the new location, but we managed to find a small table and had just sat down when Elizabeth, of Sewn Blog walked by! OK, is NYC not the greatest sewing town or what? You go out for a burger and bump into fellow sewing bloggers out doing the same thing. ;)

We ended up eating shack burgers and fries together and subjecting the sailor to talk about Jonathan Embroidery's button hole sewing hours and how lazy we have been on the sewing front. I may have challenged myself to start sewing a dress on Monday to wear to an upcoming wedding at the end of the month!

This morning I was up early so I started sewing up a little quilt for one of the nieces:

Just a small attempt to get ahead of the "OMG I have three quilts to finish on Christmas Eve" sewing rush that happened this past December.

And finally, here's the full moon rising over NYC when we got home:

The city can be so pretty sometimes.

summer

2011-08-10T11:51:00.001-04:00

Bonjour blogging world!

What has everyone been up to? Are you all sad that it's August & summer is almost done? I'm not particularly looking forward to chilly weather that's just around the corner.

I'm sad to report that I still haven't done any sewing lately. All the fancy hand sewing for my dress must have burned me out far more than I wanted to admit.

The dust needs to be blown off my sewing machine soon, though, because I have Halloween costume requests from the nieces (Kate would like to be a ninja and Ana would like to be Tinkerbell), a cousin's wedding coming up that I'd like to make a dress for, and in October we have a formal USCG dinner coming up. The sailor will be in his super fancy uniform with a bowtie, so I think that occasion calls for sewing up a Little Black Dress. With that in mind, I've been looking through the new Vogue patterns.

The dress version of V 8755 looks kind of interesting - the lines are kind of neat, and I could see it made up in a black silk faille.

What have I been up to in the last month? LOTS of work. Late summer is the start of our Christmas season gear-up. And we re-did our bedroom, by which I mean we have LAMPS in there that are not $10 halogen torchieres from Target and we no longer sleep on a mattress on the floor! Yeah, we're in our 30s and we were living like college kids. ;) I've been reading a ton, too. The book I'm in the middle of at the moment is How Italian Food Conquered the World. I'm really enjoying it, and as a nice touch it has recipes at the end of every chapter. Mmmm yum.

Would you like another wedding picture or is that too much? This is our favorite, and now hangs in our living room.

Sewing recuperation

2011-07-05T19:58:00.001-04:00

I still haven't sewn ANYTHING since finishing the blue satin evening coat for the wedding! I think my dress + the coat + my sister's dress + 2 flower girl dresses just did me in. ;) So instead I'll distract you with lots of pictures of random things.

Last night we had some fantastic seats for the fireworks as my sailor's ship turned their July 4 mission into a dependents cruise as well.

Up on the roof of the ship waiting for the sun to set

Watching the small boats enforce the perimeter around the fireworks barges

Finally, the big show!

And my niece Kate turned eight years old - wow!

We went to Babycakes in NYC for some gluten free cupcakes. She was so excited to be at a bakery where she could pick out whatever she wants - celiac is hard on kids, she understands she can't eat a lot of things, but that's tough to deal with as a small child. Babycakes is almost entirely gluten free (they do a few things with spelt flour), so she quite enjoyed being able to get a bakery red velvet cupcake.

And finally, we got a few pictures back from our wedding photographer!

by Stephen DeVries

by Stephen DeVries

more pictures

2011-06-17T12:18:00.000-04:00

I'm still in California, but via one of my friends.... a handful of gorgeous pictures he took of our ceremony. Can you believe he's just a software engineer like me? I think he should go into wedding photography full time. ;)

My sister juggling two bouquets and my flyaway veil!

My best friend

surprise

2011-06-13T17:39:00.001-04:00

We are married! Oh wow. I'm taking a few minutes to rest while my HUSBAND (wow!) takes his mom to the train station. One of my good friends told me to pretend to write a letter to a relative who couldn't make it to the wedding while the night was fresh in your mind, describing everything, so you could read it again in years later and remember all the details. I thought well, that's a great idea, but instead of pretending to write to a relative, I would write to all of you. ;)

I woke up super early from excitement and didn't know what to do with myself for the next four hours, so I baked a simple lemon yogurt cake and bounced around the apartment until my sister arrived.

We went and spent three nice hours getting our hair and makeup done and then came back. During that time the moms and some friends had turned all the flowers floating around our apartment into some GORGEOUS centerpieces of yellow roses, white carnations, greenery, and yellow stock. I was in awe of the amazing creations they put together. The white milk glass vases looked perfect, so sweet & simple!

After my mom left to drive over the centerpieces to our venue, a fire broke out in our apartment building a few stories down! OMG. Because it's a highrise, we were told to not evacuate our floor immediately, so we sat there, wedding dresses at hand, ready to run down thirty some flights of stairs. Thankfully the fire was put out quickly (we believe it was just a kitchen fire) without any serious damage.

After everyone finally got dressed, it was off to the ferry!

We made a small procession through Paulus Hook four blocks over to the ferry dock and caught the little ferry across the canal to Liberty State Park, where we hung out and took pictures.

At this point, my mom called. She had gone back to the apartment to pick up some stuff and locked herself out! Thankfully we have doormen who rescued her.

I had a little point and shoot camera with me, so most of these pictures are from it. During the whole day the camera was in my dress pocket- my photographer kept laughing that I was shooting him back. The pockets were wonderful! I carried around the camera, my cellphone, and a few little things. The skirt on my dress was so poufy that you couldn't tell I'd stuffed the pockets as full as chipmunk cheeks.

We eventually decided to crash the marina and walk right out onto the docks for photos.

After that, we went inside to rest up as guests started arriving.

The sun had miraculously been shining all afternoon, but some clouds blew in for the evening and it got a little bit chilly before the ceremony.

Some of you may recall my mentioning here that the sailor wanted to wear a tux for the wedding. I was a bit sad that he didn't want to wear dress whites, which meant that we wouldn't have a sword arch at our wedding, but there you go.

Well. He certainly knows how to pull one over on me - I thought I'd had this wedding perfectly planned and all sorted out, and super under control, but apparently not. Behind my back he got in touch with the minister, my dad, and our wedding coordinator to pull a HUGE surprise on me!

I'd seen him earlier in the day in a tux, with his groomsman, all spiffed up in tuxes. They had picked them up, got dressed, and took pictures in them, then snuck away to change... at that point, the name of the game became "Keep the bride away from the groom", although I didn't catch on and couldn't figure out why all of a sudden people had pressing things to talk to me about and dragged me off to sit in a little room by the kitchen!

So ceremony time arrived and we assembled our little flower girls, my best friend, my sister, and Tom the ring bearer! Up we went to the deck where the guests were assembled.

So at this point, I thought Dan was up there in his tux. However, when we got upstairs to the deck, and the bagpipe started playing and my dad stepped out with me to walk down our aisle... my sailor was down there with his dress whites on. I don't even remember this, but my dad says I just stood there and said "OH.My.Goodness." for a full second before I (sort of) recovered.

It was incredibly windy during the ceremony and my looooooong veil kept whipping around, so my sister and best friend ended playing "capture the veil before it mummifies the minister" duty the whole time. It went by in a blur- I remember my brother in law doing his reading, our rings went on, and we were married!

At the end of the short ceremony we turned to walk back down the aisle, and all of a sudden out the doors came four of my sailors friends. All also Coast Guard lieutenants, all in perfect formation.

They stopped, drew their swords, and there was my sword arch! I could not believe my eyes that he had really pulled that off without my having ANY idea whatsoever that this would happen. Here I am in a picture taken by my friend, getting the biggest shock of my life!

If you've ever seen a sword arch, you walk up to the first set, and they drop the crossed swords in front of you, and you must kiss to pass. You advance through each set of swords with a kiss and lots of cheering from the crowd, and after the last one, one of the guys taps the new bride with a sword and says "Welcome to the Coast Guard".

I was beaming the rest of the night... it was so magical, all our family and friends gathered together for an incredible dinner, lots of loud irish dancing music, and the NYC skyline sparkling in the background. Wow.

I even got to wear my coat out on the deck when it got chilly!

t-1 days

2011-06-11T21:34:00.000-04:00

Busy day today! We picked my best friend and his wife up at Newark airport late last night night, so this morning we decided to go into NYC.

They live in Seattle, and had somehow never had cannoli! So the three of us, along with my sailor's mother, went up to Bleecker St in Greenwich Village and went to Rocco's to acquire some sweets. It was a nice little distraction for the morning!

Here are the three of us on 7th Ave in the west village:

Here are a few shots I snapped inside Roccos:

Then it was back to Jersey City and go go go go! Family arrived in town, my mom had last minute wedding checklists, and we all walked two blocks up to our favorite restaurant for a huge family dinner. I'm off to an early bedtime... we are looking at a 70% chance of rain & thunderstorms tomorrow, so I hope that it will somehow clear up a little bit for us.

t-2 days

2011-06-10T15:33:00.000-04:00

Today is Floral Friday - our bulk ordered flowers arrived and flooded my kitchen! It took about two hours to unbox all of them and get them into big vases & pots. Tomorrow we will actually make the arangements, although I did make two little ones:

You might recall I originally wanted to do hydrangeas... well, I did a trial run with them, and they all wilted far too quickly. So I decided I could either pay a florist $$$ to do the original idea of hydrangeas, so switch flowers. I talked to one of the online floral places & decided to go with white carnations, yellow roses, and yellow stock, since they are all very sturdy.

Here's my dining room table:

That's only a small portion of the flowers! Here's another view of a few more sitting in vases, waiting to be trimmed. The pot in the picture is a FIVE GALLON POT. Just to give you a hint of the size of all this nonsense. ;)

It feels like our apartment is a florists shop today. ;)

Buying good floral shears was key. I also bought bulk flower preservative, and collected lots of vases and vintage glass frogs to hold the flowers in the vases. Some of the vases won't work with frogs, so I bought a few blocks of floral foam as well. The key with bulk shipped flowers is to be there when they arrive and rush them into water as quickly as you can so that they can re-hydrate and rest from their long trip.

Here is my dress on the hanger, waiting...

t-3 days

2011-06-09T21:12:00.000-04:00

Quiet day today because I'm still sick.

In the morning, we scoped out potential picture taking spots over at Liberty State Park. Then I went and got my haircut, and we dropped off a few more things at our venue like the cake topper and our sailboat shaped tealights.

And I finally pulled pictures from Tuesday - we had dinner at South St Seaport that night. Here's the deck we ate on:

And here is the view of the Brooklyn Bridge we had as we ate!

So, while we're eating dinner, several ships went by in the east river. At one point, a motor boat went RACING down the river, revving its engines. I turned to the sailor and said "that can't be legal" -just as he said "where is one of the small boats when you need one?" Very funny, little did he know that his racing along was right under the watchful eye of a coast guard captain. ;)

Tonight the boys are at the Yankees - Red Sox game, which I'm guessing is in a bit of a rain delay due to the huge thunderstorms rolling through here. Hopefully they're staying dry! They are all Coasties, so they're very blasé about huge rainstorms. ;o)

t-4 days

2011-06-08T20:22:00.000-04:00

Today we discussed the cake with our venue. We'd already picked out our flavors (chocolate cake with mocha frosting) and today the pastry chef is starting the decorations! This is what it should come out looking like, mocha cake with cream frosting - just an example we found online & liked.

Lunch was Shake Shack:

And I got my nails done:

Then we got home, and I got really sick. Argh! I'm curled up on the sofa thinking positive thoughts & hoping that this is just a 24 hour stomach flu.

t -5 days

2011-06-07T16:03:00.001-04:00

Today I printed menus:

And discovered our guest count was two too low, ie we had forgotten to include ourselves in the count. Ingenious!

And I went swimming (aaaah.... so nice!), and I read some more of the WWII history book I've been working on for a while, Winston's War by Max Hastings

Lindsay commented that I seemed extra calm. She should have been in the living room when I discovered the guest count issue!

t -6 days

2011-06-06T20:28:00.000-04:00

6 days to go.

Today I wrote escort cards:

And printed our programs (the paper is pre-folded & pre-gilt printed, from Wilton):

They have a crossword puzzle in them, so as to get the various guests talking to each other:

(the font we used is Alana)

And I ate lunch over at WFC in NYC. Lunch was a mozarella and tomato salad from le pain quotidien, one of my favorite NYC chains for lunch. It came with a slice of bread and a little container of the freshest, tastiest pesto I've had in ages. It was the kind of pesto that just explodes summer in your mouth. Mmmm yum. I sat near the koi pond with my kindle & lunch and just enjoyed the sunshine for a while....

In the evening we walked through the venue with our Day of Coordinator and scoped out the setup.

Tomorrow, I'm making our menu cards, so I need to go to Michael's in the morning & have a look at their cardstock options. So far we're thinking 8.5" x 11.5 inch cardstock, then trimmed (paper cutter may be the best DIY wedding tool I've bought so far!) so they're tall and skinny, maybe 4 x 10?

Navy Blue

2011-06-05T17:43:00.000-04:00

Are you guys going to laugh at me if I confess that I am in serious silk sewing overload? Couture exhaustion? Dreaming of sewing Kate a very simple cotton sundress -itis?

When we first got engaged I had this vision of wearing a floor length navy blue silk evening coat over my dress on the way home... and I kept coming back to remembering that idea and decided I'd bite the bullet and make it. So I woke up EARLY this morning, fished out some navy blue duchess satin and pulled out the coat pieces from Simplicity 6192.

I will admit at grumbling at marking and sewing YET MORE DARTS. And seriously getting frustrated at the shifty organza. But I guess it ended up OK, I have my evening coat! The pattern was pretty straightward, actually. It has front and back french darts, and as a nice touch, darts in the back shoulders and two elbow darts on the sleeves.

Here we are on my dressform:

I found some navy velvet ribbon in a drawer and used that to fasten it. The pattern originally called for you to sew a sash, but I think the ribbon is not too bad.

Front pinned shut so that I could position it:

And after sewing:

Can you see how the front french darts are curved? Kind of neat! But a big pain to pin and then press, especially because this satin does NOT like steam.

Back with the ribbon belt

Are you guys in wedding dress overload yet? I put it on to make sure all the pieces were all set, and my mom took a few pictures.

Back:

Not a great picture, but the dress under my coat:

Next, here's a better picture of my sister in her dress. It needs pressing, but you can get the general idea. She had to get into the "let's play dressup!" action too. ;)

And finally, Anabear being cute:

We have one week to go. Yikes!

A bridesmaid dress

2011-06-03T19:27:00.000-04:00

Here is my little sister, in her unhemmed bridesmaid dress:

The fabric is navy blue dupoini silk underlined in cotton voile so it's a bit, well, not "stiff" but it has some body to it. My mom and I had a little back and forth with her about how body hugging it should be. She's used to lycra & spandex in her dresses, and dresses that hug your curves. However, well, this is a 1960s pattern, and they really didn't design dresses to do that back in a day. Especially with this material, you can't really make it stretch closely over your curves without it looking a bit weird. You can see in the pattern that it skims:

So. She thinks it's "boxy" and "too loose" and we think it's fitting just fine. I am not much of a bridezilla but I've said "it fits like this for the wedding" and she can get my mom to take it in further after the ceremony. (I'm also getting into sewing silk dresses overload. I've got a nice cotton sundress for Kate lined up to do soon as a couture palate cleanser!!)

I do love me a nice stretch knit dress (see this GORGEOUS one that robin just made), but if I was making one like that, I'd use a pattern designed for a close fit and a stretch fabric. What do you think?

And one last shot... two flower girl dresses and a wedding dress all lined up:

More life in pictures

2011-05-29T21:23:00.000-04:00

Making my sister's bridesmaid dress. Navy blue dupuoni silk, underlined in cotton voile. Lined just on top in silk habatoi.

My neighborhood in Jersey City

Remember how I accidently made three back left bodice pieces to my dress? Here is how I recycled the extra pieces- into a ring pillow.

And a sneak peek... Kate in her flower girl dress and a rose tiara! We took pictures with the kids early so that we don't worry about them being, well, kids on The Big Day. Smartest part of the wedding planning I think we've done so far! ;) It was also a nice dry run for getting everyone dressed and to the park, we figured out who needed what and how to get everything organized.

buttons

2011-05-24T21:02:00.000-04:00

Picture post! Because my brain has turned into a wedding stress marshmellow. We have 20 days to go....

18 buttons covered in taffeta

A sample of my wedding day bouquet from my florist... the pink is tissue paper she wrapped it in to protect it. Yellow roses for military wives mean "always faithful to your soldier" - I think related to the old tradition of "tie a yellow ribbon" when they would deploy. So I asked my florist to come up with something modern, but using yellow roses, and she did a *gorgeous* job.

My dad. Learning how to use his new iphone. Welcome to the modern age dad! He is so excited about learning how to text from his new phone. ;)

My sister's new kitten! Her name is Sophie.

turquoise

2011-05-21T18:03:00.000-04:00

One flower girl dress is nearly done!

Here were are, sans hem, and with the silk flowers just pinned in place. This is the Oliver + S school photo dress, in size 7. The material is silk taffeta, from Mood. I know that the girls love this pattern with the adorable hidden pocket, so they will be pretty comfortable. They have white cardigans, white lacy ankle socks, and black maryjanes to wear with them.

Ana's is up next, and I think I'll make hers in a navy blue silk with more of the white flowers on the yoke.

And finally, some lilacs from our dinner table. They smell so nice! I wish they were in bloom longer. These are from the Union Square farmer's market early early this morning.

holy cow

2011-05-14T19:27:00.001-04:00

I think I may have made a wedding dress.

Much still left to finish up, but there you have it. I ended up pinning the pleats in the silk shantung and realizing that they really had no "there" there. So I went just with the taffeta which is rustly and kind of neat. I need a floor length slip so I may turn the shantung into that.

(without heels, so the skirt is laying a bit funny)

Still left to do:

proper zipper insertion. What you see here is basted, and also not closed the whole way up. I can generally zipper myself into any dress, but this one is a little too tricky to do when it's only basted, since I didn't want to tear the lace. I am thinking of doing a zipper underlay as shown in the Couture Sewing Techniques book.
Make the sash
Hemming! My mom has volunteered for this. thank you mom!!
hand sew down the bias binding on the armholes
hand sew down the silk habatoi bodice lining to the waist
make a ton of teensy covered buttons for the bodice center front and attach them. you might be able to see the loops sitting there... these are purely decorative, since it really closes with the back zipper
steam and press. again, my mom has volunteered for this one ;o)

The general overview of the dress construction is that the skirt is silk taffeta (from Mood) underlined with silk organza (from Susan Khalje). I marked the pleat lines on the organza and hand basted it to the taffeta. The selvedge of both the organza and the taffeta is at the hem so it will be very easy to just turn up and stitch the hem in place. The bodice is three layers - lace (from Mood) basted to silk organza and a silk habatoi lining. Then the neckline border lace was hand stitched over the dress's neckline and the excess cut away beneath. The cap sleeves were attached to the armholes, and then I used bias strips cut from the habatoi to finish them. Viola! Sounds so simple written up like that. ;) If only! In any event, I am loving the fit. I can wear a simple bra underneath, and I don't need to squeeze myself into spanx. I can move my arms freely, the pockets are in just the right spot, and it feels very comfortable! The pockets are going to hold my cellphone (for picture taking (; ) and my great-great grandmother's lace handkerchief that all the women in my family have held at their weddings. My sister pinned it to her slip, but I plan to fold it up into the pocket to keep it safe. It's been a continuing "something old" for a few generations now, so I'm very happy to carry on the tradition. My something blue will be the slip- I bought some ivory colored lace with a baby blue ribbon woven through that I'll attach. Something borrowed will be my mom's fancy white evening purse that I'm borrowing that day. Something new are the bangles (choora) that my friend bought me from Kerela. You're supposed to wear them for 40 days after the wedding- I may only make it until I go to sleep that night. ;)

Finally, Carolyn asked a few posts back how much muslin I'd gone through on this epic pattern selection and fitting trip. The answer is two bolts of about 10 yards each. Yikes, that's a small amount of muslin sacrificed to this dress!

Couture Books

2011-05-09T21:26:00.000-04:00

I got home from looooooong day in the office today to find a package waiting from my best friend and his wife. They sent me just the perfect birthday present - the newly re-issued classic "Couture Sewing Techniques"! It's now sitting on my sofa with 5 different post-it notes poking out from various pages on lace seams, zipper underlays, etc. I love the original and this new one seems to have way more gorgeous photos in it & lots of excellent couture content.

One of the interesting things in this book is a two page chart at the front of book on "couture" vs "high end ready to wear". Aka, clients can choose to customize fabrics, garments are made to fit the customer exactly, seam allowances are vary on different pieces, vs RTW's smaller, precision cut pattern pieces that are put together with edges matching.

I was thinking of the comparison as I flipped through the rest of the book, because it really does cover "couture" aka hand-sewing intensive techniques, garment underpinnings, things like that. I happen to also own two other recently published books that purport to be "couture techniques" but really seem more like "high end RTW techniques".

The Dressmaker's handbook is very beautiful to look through, and has some extensive coverage of how to bind necklines, nice photos of how various underlinings (flannel vs cotton voile for example) affect the drape of skirts, and some other really good information. It is largely oriented to machine sewing, though. I found the diagrams and instructions to be not as clear as your average sewing book, which frustrated me because some of them, especially the neckline bindings, looked interesting but were very unclear.

The Couture Techniques book is one of three garment sewing books recently released in the US by Peg Couch. I bought her Illustrated Guide to Sewing: Tailoringbook first, and its strength led me to purchase the other two. This one has wonderful directions on how to assemble dresses, make blouses, and so forth, but they are very high-end Ready to Wear oriented. I wouldn't call any of the sewing covered here "couture" - not to say it's not valuable information. Just that it's the type of information I'll use when sewing myself a new blouse for work, not sewing up a lace bodice for a wedding dress. ;)

There is a definite time & place for the garment sewing guides of the latter two books, and they have been nice additions to my sewing library. But there's nothing like feeling adrift with a pile of lace and silk organza in your hands, attempting to create something that looks like a lace bodice, to make you realize how valuable the Godmother of couture sewing books is. ;) The "Applying Couture Techniques" chapter of Claire Shaeffer's book is amazing, and I'll be referring back to it often.

So, I hope this helps folks looking to add to their sewing libraries. If I had to pick the most useful day-to-day reference book I might well go with Peg Couch's Couture Techniques,but if you plan to do any kind of evening or bridal sewing, or want to try taking your sewing to next skill level, I'd go with Claire Shaeffer's Couture Sewing Techniques.

with taffeta

2011-05-08T18:29:00.000-04:00

Here we are with the skirt in taffeta. VERY unpressed and very unfinished etc etc

This weekend I:
* made three back left bodice pieces before I managed to make a right
* had a complete meltdown when my (very $$$ and not old at all rowenta) iron burped up brown gunk on white silk
* literally burst into tears over the music being played in our sewing room/office... this is when you know you have a guy who is a keeper, when he looks at you like you are NUTS as you stand there crying and then comforts you anyway
* ate a wonderful hazelnut cupcake from my sister (today is my birthday. sshh! spent it sewing (; )
* hand stitched and hand stitched and hand stitched and decided that I need sharper needles
* ended up with something that is starting to resemble a wedding dress instead of just a white silk organza explosion

lace!

2011-05-07T14:40:00.000-04:00

I am doing my own crazy method of marking the seamlines. I pinned the muslin pattern pieces (with no seam allowances) onto organza, and then machine basted right at the edge of the muslin. Viola, marked seamlines.

After that, I lay the muslin pattern piece under the lace, cut out well around it, and then hand baste that to the organza in the seam allowances. Here is a bodice front, with the lace basted to organza

Here is the taffeta I'm thinking of using for the skirt:

I also have some lovely white shantung, but I feel like the taffeta will work better with the pleats. I'm planning to underline whichever one I choose with silk organza, so the shantung would pick up some body although it would be a soft body as opposed to the very crisp body of the taffeta. Anyone want to chime in with thoughts on the two? I am thinking I might almost just make a skirt from each and see how they feel.

And finally, turquoise taffeta... I'm thinking of doing one of the flower girl dresses in turquoise. So maybe one niece in navy and one in turquoise? One in white and one in turquoise?
We don't really have wedding "colors" as such, beyond doing many things in either white or navy, so a bright blue could be really pretty. I'm planning on holding a bouquet of yellow roses, and I keep thinking how those two colors would look together. Hmmm...

side seams

2011-05-01T17:53:00.001-04:00

You might recall from way back in January, when I first made the muslin of this pattern, that I was going to have to solve the Pocket Problem. Aka, this skirt pattern had no side seams... just a front panel, and a combined side/back panel. I'm happy to report that I have inserted a side seam now, which means I can have POCKETS. The skirt line did look lovely without a side seam, but no pockets is a dealbreaker for me, so our wedding guests will just have to suffer the horror of seeing seams down the side of my skirt. ;)

And here is a quick shot of what will be the lace top attached to the pleated skirt from the vintage Simplicity pattern. My right side, which is the left side of the photo here, has all the adjustments I've made so far. The dart is running a bit too high here, so I'll lower that, and make a few more small tweaks.

When this project was started, all the modifications were being transferred to the paper pattern. At this stage I've been tweaking directly on the muslin, and so it is now my pattern. After I took this photo, I took a seam ripper to it and extracted the right side. Then I cut on my last seam line to cut off the seam allowances, and this will be the pattern for the lace top.

This is Vogue 2979 on the top, with the cap sleeves. The bodice will be lace underlined in silk organza, lined in silk except for the sleeves.

To sew the top, I'll cut front and back bodice pieces out of silk organza and the lining. Then the organza pieces will be laid under the lace and I'll cut out the lace, probably cutting around the motifs to do applique seams on the side. Here's my lace again- the rose motif is pretty large, so a regular side seam might look a bit weird.

muslin muslin muslin

2011-04-30T19:40:00.000-04:00

Hello wedding dress saga followers! ;)

Today has been bodice fit day. Tweak the neck, take in the shoulders, tweak the neck, take in the sides, re-draw neckline, tweak the armhole, etc. My original plan was to use the original dress bodice of the vintage simplicity and have the vogue lace overlay be removable... but that doesn't work, since it won't stay in place even with a sash over it. Also, the shape of the simplicity tank-top style bodice under the high neckline of the vogue looks a bit wonky. So now I'm planning to attach the vogue dress bodice directly to the skirt of the Simplicity, and line the bodice front and back with light white silk habatoi, instead of just underlining in organza. This is why you do practice runs, I suppose!

I made all the adjustments just to one side, and it really looks SO much nicer on that side now, which is a very gratifying return for the hours with a seam ripper.

And the pleats. Once they're sewn, the pleats do give a gorgeous tulip shape to the dress. But marking them, and sewing them, is.... aRgH! They are three deep, sewn at angles, and all kinds of fun. Here's a little peak at the instruction sheet for them:

Yeah. going to be fun marking these on white silk- I think that tailor's tacks in various colored threads (white, ivory, light tan, etc) is going to have to be the way to differentiate the A,B,C, and so forth pleat lines. Do you feel my joy thinking about marking and sewing these? ;)

You can see the deep pleats (in the orignal version with the simplicity bodice) here:

Wedding dresses!

2011-04-29T09:23:00.000-04:00

Did you all wake up at the crack of dawn to watch the royal wedding? I LOVED her dress. It's such a pretty, updated variation on Grace Kelley's classic dress.

from the Globe & Mail

Here is Grace Kelly's dress:

Of course I LOVE that she chose this style since I'm kind of echoing Grace Kelly's bodice style in my dress as well. ;) It's a really flattering look for a lot of body shapes, I think, since you get some coverage but it still looks very elegant and fancy.

thread basting

2011-04-24T15:37:00.000-04:00

This is only a practice dress, not the real thing.

I've cut the bodice pieces out of lace and silk organza, thread traced the darts, and basted the layers together. Next up, assembly.

The munchkins wore their easter outfits today, although they were so wiggly I didn't get great shots of the dresses. Here's my sister with her family:

Kate's dress is from Sewn with Love book and Ana's dress is the Oliver + S playdate dress. Both are made with Lisette for Joann fabric.

And here is Tommy in his cute little overalls. These are the Oliver + S tea party overalls.

and the girls in their dresses:

Happy easter everyone!

Ottobre!

2011-04-21T21:34:00.000-04:00

Well, I received three sewing magazines this week in my mailbox, which was SO wonderful given that wedding + work + life in general have been crazy. I was not super impressed with this month's BWOF. That deeply saddens me, because circa 2008 I was head over heels in love with tons of outfits in every issue. However, I also received issues of Ottobre- one womens and one kids. I've just flipped through so far, but it seems pretty nice. Hmm... my BWOF is up for renewal this summer, and I may change to Ottobre or Knipmode instead. I know they are more expensive, but if I'm not making anything from BWOF, it's not worth saving money on patterns I won't really use.

In other news, our wedding invites are *mailed*. Finally. I had a whole adventure creating and shipping them. I ended up letterpressing the invite and RSVP card by myself at a letterpress studio over in Williamsburg. They came out SO beautiful. Here's a sneak peek at the card, with the amazing texture inbetween the ship's rigging in the ship in the bottle.

Was I crazy for letterpressing them? Yes. Was I crazy for chosing a square shape, which meant we paid extra postage? Yes. Did I end up at Staples at 9 AM on Sunday morning, buying a paper cutter to trim 1/8" inch off the invites because they wouldn't quite fit in the envelopes? Yes. Did I stamp all my rsvp postcards, only to find out that the postage rate was going up 1 cent on Monday? Yes. So. They are mailed though, and guests are beginning to tell us that they're appearing in their mailboxes, which is the important part!

For the curious, our paper was Crane Lettra 110, and I printed my plates at Boxcar Press. I wrote about my letterpress class back in November in a quiet weekend.

I was at my doctor's office the other day, and he gave me some advice I'm going to be taking to heart in the coming weeks. I haven't talked much about it, but I've suffered from migraines since I was in first grade. They kind of come and go, and the last three years have been particularly bad. I try to stay grounded, but dealing with severe migraines, with a fiance who is away on his ship most of the time, and wedding planning, plus my job has been... interesting. I've been cycling through various medications over the last year, and my current doctor has been godsend because he agrees with me that medication should not be your front line preventive care.

He was just married last year and so at this visit we were again talking about avoiding migraines on the big day. He said, "You have to ration out your emotional reaction and your glucose intake that week." Which cracked me up, but it's so true. (Yes, as you can tell from that, plummeting blood sugar is a big trigger for me). But especially when you get invested in projects like "Let's letterpress the invites!" or "Let's sew a wedding dress!" it can be hard not to let the projects ups and downs keep you from an even keel.

What do you think, when you put a lot of effort into a huge handmade project, do you feel that setbacks effect you deeply? Is the awesome result in the end worth putting weeks into one complicated project, or do you like smaller ones?

So how is that wedding dress sewing going here? I'm coming along on fitting, and I hope I'll have some great trial version photos to show here this weekend. As a reminder, this what the lace top will look like:

and here is the skirt & under-the-lace-top bodice:

easter sewing

2011-04-10T07:41:00.000-04:00

Easter outfits are all sewn up!

Here are the cute Oliver + S overalls for Tom. The cotton on the top is a little bunnies-in-squares print.

Since I hadn't made this pattern for him in a few years, we did a sizing check. Yes, it fits, even over his sweatshirt. He was not so sure about this outfit- his comment was "my knees are cold." Ah, Thomas, stop growing up! Can I keep you a smidgen little guy forever? This might be the last Easter we can dress you like this!!

And here are sneak peeks of the girls dresses. Ana's is the Oliver + S playdate dress pattern.

Kate's uses the bodice of the Sewn With Love tulip dress and some bunny ribbon I found in my stash.

I used some Lisette fabric I'd found at Joann's for each, since it seemed like coordinating-but-not-matching would be a nice change from the matchy dresses we've done for easter in earlier years. It just didn't seem like a frilly lace kind of easter this year. Maybe I'm getting lace overload from the wedding dress.

another market blouse

2011-04-07T14:44:00.000-04:00

I used some Little Folks voile by Anna Maria Horner to make up another Market blouse (simplicity 2211). No buttons on the placket yet, but I will likely sew some on at some point.

You can see the pattern on the Lisette site over here. I've been planning to make up the skirt, as well.

This is a really nice blouse to whip up since it has no buttonholes, zippers, or anything else, but is not too boxy and frumpy looking when it's done.

I also bought some really gorgeous lace for my wedding dress top...

I'm a bit worried about goofing so I bought 2 yards even though I could easily get away with only 1. I'd rather not find myself worrying about finding more!

Market Blouse

2011-04-02T20:42:00.000-04:00

The Market Blouse by Lisette is Simplicity 2211. It's a really simple top with a fake placket and outside facing at the neck. I made up a version in a very lightweight silk/cotton border print voile I'd bought at Mood a year ago, and wore it to our family's memorial lunch for my grandparents today.

Here I am with a whole bunch of my cousins:

And here's a closeup, with my sailor. This was his first introduction to much of my extended family. Thankfully he survived, and he seems to think we're somewhat normal despite my warning him that he's marrying into a crazy family. ;) Well, he'll learn soon enough!

We had a VERY long day, since so many people had traveled pretty far but it was wonderful to see everyone and share silly stories of growing up over at the farm. Do you remember my run-in with the rat snake 2 years ago? That story got repeated a bit. We reminisced about the geese and chickens that used to run all over the farm... the fig and quince trees and making jelly from them... all the crazy things we used to get into all summer long.

So the pattern for this shirt was very easy to put together and went together in just about 2 hours, even accounting for how wiggly the fabric was. The placket and "collar" are interfaced with a lightweight woven interfacing from Pacific Trim, which worked pretty well.

I just ended up making two small alterations... lengthening the bodice and making the arm band a little wider. It's a very easy wearing shirt, and I can see myself making up a few more of these to wear to work.

2 bells into the dog watch

2011-03-27T20:52:00.000-04:00

Dear sewing blog,
hello neglected blog! i haven't really been sewing recently... this little called "a wedding" has been sucking up my time. Perhaps you've seen my friend, the wacom tablet. He's been hogging my attention for AGES while I draw nautical flags and tall ships and maps.

Here's what we have at the moment for our invitation... it will be a little booklet, with a cover, then the main page (this) inside, and a map and some guest information, and our RSVP cards inside. Lots of little things to draw and lay out and get arranged!

Why yes, we do have the latitude and longitude of our reception site on there. And two bells into the dog watch.... I LOVE awesome nautical terminology. We're still sorting out what kinds of sailor speak we can put onto the RSVP cards. As you can tell, we're not taking this whole thing super seriously. I'm convinced that the only way to survive wedding planning is to keep a very dry sense of humor and read A Practical Wedding frequently. We found our marvelous DOC (Day of Coordinator for the non-wedding-immersed) indirectly via that site- it's such a breath of reality.

I did have one break today... I went to the taco truck in Hoboken with my friend who got married last October and we discussed the wedding crazy. And java performance analysis. ;) We're hopeless nerds like that.

I hope everyone had a wonderful weekend! Has anyone begun summer sewing yet, or is it still too cold?

A public service announcement for NYCers...

2011-03-14T12:32:00.000-04:00

....today's Groupon is $15 for $30 fabric at Mood!

Valid instore only, so you have to be in NY or planning to visit in the next year. Definitely a great deal, though. I think mine is going towards some more blouse material, since I have my eye on the Market blouse from Sew Lisette for a spring top... ;)

purple flowers

2011-03-13T16:13:00.000-04:00

I'm finally almost finished with taxes... which means, of course, that the kitchen is *sparkling*, the sewing room is somewhat more organized, and I sewed up something for myself. ;) Here's a little hint.

I stumbled over this fabric on Gorgeous Fabrics and fell in love with the really pretty flowers. It's cotton with a hint of stretch, and the surface has a slightly ribbed faille texture to it. SO pretty.

Here's another hint...

Yup... another Passport dress, since I had the pattern already out.

There may be a lot of dresses shown on my blog, but it's not really my normal clothes- I work in jeans and sneakers, and skirts with boots is really stretching the dresscode for my job. So I always feel a little like a kid playing dress up when I wear something fancy like this - right now it's slotted in for Easter brunch, when hopefully it will be warm enough to wear it without tights.

This one feels a little loose around the shoulders, which is weird because I didn't cut it any differently than the other one. I'm chalking it up to the bit of stretch in the fabric -it's not huge, just a bit loose around the neckline this time around. Other than than that, it's pretty much the same as the other dress. So for now it's getting tucked into the closet to wait for warmer weather!

Passport bliss

2011-03-06T17:01:00.003-05:00

My passport dress is all finished! I L*O*V*E it, and I can't wait for warm weather to wear it, although I may try it out with some tights and a sweater soonish. This is Simplicity 2209, also known as the Sew Lisette Passport Dress.

Yesterday's post showed my bodice alterations, but it was too dark in the evening to get a picture of my muslin.

Not that it's any brighter today, but here is the muslin I'd made. One side has a dart pinned out for a SBA, the right side is unaltered. Unfortunately, the picture is not super in focus, so you may not see any difference.

When I made the actual dress, I ended up varying from the pattern and making several changes. I was a little wary of all the changes at first, because the instructions for this dress were excellent, and who am I to know how to properly sew a dress. My back alteration, though, made for a curved back seam so I could no longer cut the back bodice on the fold as in the original. At that point I figured I'd just do things my own way.

That led to making my own all-in-one neck and armhole facing, which let me use my favorite through-the-shoulder-seams sewing method. I learned that trick from Marji's old pattern review post on sewing a sleeveless dress lining.

Here's a view of the inside of the bodice front of the front angled darts and how they attach to the skirt:

I used an invisible zipper in the back. Here are my three necessities for invisible zipper insertion.... fusible interfacing in the seam allowance, a 3/8th inch seam allowance, and hand tacking the zipper in place.

I stitched the back facing down against the zipper to neaten the inside:

The hem is double folded and hand sewn down so that I could ease in the fullness.

So here is a headless shot of me in it. I unfortunately didn't quite manage the flower placement perfectly on the bodice. Ooops. And you can't really see the bodice darts with the busy print.

Another change I made was to put in a pocket in the right side seam. I envisioned wearing this dress to work, and I always want a pocket to hold chapstick or a few dollars for lunch or whatever. Excuse the silly face here... I always feel funny smiling for the camera when there's no one behind it. ;)

Here's the back, in need of a hook and eye above the zipper:

It came together really nicely and was a dream to sew up. There will definitely be more versions of this dress this summer, since it's nicely fitting without being too tight or too baggy. Especially with the pocket addition. ;)

Passport Dress - Simplicity 2209

2011-03-05T18:30:00.000-05:00

I was so excited when the new Lisette patterns by the same designer as Oliver + S were announced last week that I bought two of them, and I made up a muslin of one today. :-) I picked the Passport dress, which has some very neat darts and tucks and a classic shape to it.

There's a Lisette blog which has a post which explains the dress and jacket in this pattern. I thought the dress darts were really neat looking, but I was wondering how difficult they would be to sew. Here's the bodice front pattern piece:

They are actually quite simple to sew, it turns out. I had to make two alterations to the bodice to fit a little better:

The overlapping from the armhole is a quick and dirty proto-SBA, since the muslin was kind of poofy in my upper chest area. Otherwise, it fit quite nicely. I'll be making this up in a purplish linen blend from the Valori Wells Jenaveve line.

My raincoat is mostly finished, although I'm likely to go in & add the waist drawstring to shape it. It fits OK, but it would be good to have a little shaping in there. And, of course, it needs me to go into the city with it at some point to have buttonholes made up for it.

our etsy wedding

2011-03-02T20:43:00.000-05:00

I haven't had a chance to work on the raincoat this week, but I wanted to share a few wedding details. I'm leaning *very* heavily on etsy for these, and so far it's working out nicely.

Our escort cards (aka little cards that tell people where to sit- I never knew that word before) are from etsy by cuddlecreature. Imagine 100 of these set out on the table... it will like a sweet little regatta!

Our favors will be envelopes of wildflower seeds, and I had an etsy vendor, Toast and Laurel, make us stickers to put on the envelopes:

And, of course, I've been buying milkglass bowls from the site for the last few months to make our centerpieces, which will look like this:

My nieces, who will be flower girls, will be sporting little blue and white hair decorations from etsy as well:

from Lovely Gifts

from Sweet and Sassy

And finally, to save us from writing our address over and over and over, we bought a custom return address stamp from Paperfinger which looks like a calligrapher wrote our address. LOVE IT. This was easily the smartest purchase we made... it got used a lot for christmas cards and other things as well ;)

Last month, on a whim I picked up a new wedding crafts book by a Martha Stewart editor which has been fun to look through as well:

Handmade Weddings: More Than 50 Crafts to Personalize Your Big Day

It has some simple sewing projects, invitation designs, and fun stuff like that. I love flipping through it, althought I haven't really done any of the featured projects in it yet.

So there you are, a small wedding design update :)

Spring Showers

2011-02-27T18:49:00.000-05:00

J. Crew had a cute little rain jacket in their spring catalog this year. I certainly have a ton of raincoats (I did live in Seattle for many years (; ), but they're all of the patagonia/REI hiking type, and I feel kind of underdressed in them out here sometimes. Here's the J.Crew coat - it's a bit fancier than most raincoats.

I posted on artisan's square last month asking if anyone could remember seeing a BWOF pattern that was similar, and a few hours later I had my pattern! BWOF 01-2009-123.

Yesterday I decided to visit BJ in the garment district for some nice raincoating material, and I bought 3 yards of absolutely gorgeous eggplant colored waterproof cotton raincoating. It's a dream to sew, presses really nicely, and although it was crazy expensive ($20/yard) it's still half the price of buying the J. Crew coat, so I feel like I'm coming out ahead here. ;)

Here's the muslin I had sewn up earlier today:

I have the coat mostly finished except for the front bands, the hem, and the sleeves. I ended up leaving it unlined, since the fabric doesn't fray at all. I did insert a back stay, though. It's flannel with horsehair canvas fused to it.

Instead of upper & lower pockets my version has the lower pockets and then on-seam pockets for my hands directly behind them. At the moment I'm leaving off the waist drawstring, and I instead narrowed the back and side seams a smidge.

I went through my button collection and picked out a few botton options, then showed them to the sailor, who had been amusedly following the "let's make a raincoat" adventure all day. What, normal people don't just up & decide to knock off designer rainwear over a weekend? ;) Anyway, he liked a set of navy blue & gold anchor buttons that I had. Of course. I don't have quite enough of them, so I'll have to hit up Pacific Trim to get a few more.

Perhaps I'll actually finish this up before the torrential March downpours start up!

so sweet

2011-02-19T21:33:00.000-05:00

My dad finished up the cake topper he made for us! I bought a somewhat generic military groom cake topper off ebay, and he painted it for us to match my sailor's uniform exactly. How sweet is that? :-) He took a picture at the change of command ceremony this summer, then carefully copied all the ribbons and every last little detail. Wow.

Of course the bride's hair is much longer than mine and dress doesn't exactly match my dress, but we decided to just leave it as is, especially given the molded flowers on her skirt. It is, after all, a $10-from-ebay wedding cake topper, so we're happy just to get the uniform right. ;)

The restaurant where we're getting married is making a simple cake for us, so we'll be dropping this off for them to place on top a few days before the wedding. Until then, it will dancing away on a bookshelf waiting for the big day.

project catchup

2011-02-17T07:26:00.001-05:00

When my grandmother died 2 months ago, my grandpa said that he wouldn't live another 5 minutes. Well, he did make it a little longer, but just a few weeks. He passed away Friday, so I guess he's back with grandma again. Am I the only one who turns to a lot of fiction when they're really sad? I needed a good book to lose myself in last week, so I downloaded a new novel to my kindle, which I ended up really enjoying. I don't read too much fiction, but after loving the Harry Potter and Golden Compass books, I'm a bit of a sucker for anything involving magic and Oxford. A Discovery of Witches was pretty delightful- great book to lose myself in for a few days.

Since I haven't done too much sewing recently, I'll post two projects I (mostly) finished up a few weeks ago but was too busy to blog.

First, in need of Jonathan Embroidery buttonholes, my Built by Wendy jacket from Simplicity 4109. I also need to sort out how to get off the waxy mark for the stitching line on the front - the wax really settled into the wool, sadly.

I love this jacket, although the sleeves are a bit long for me. It's warmish without being too heavy, and a great length.

And here's another twist dress that I made up from New Look 6802.

My sailor ended up suggesting that I make this - I had a bunch of pieces of fabric out a few weeks ago and was trying to match them to patterns. He said that he liked this print, and that he really liked the twist front knit dresses, so I took his suggestion and made this one. The hem on this dress drove me bonkers, though - I couldn't chalk mark it as I usually do. I'll show you in a post soon the new vintage toy I ended up purchasing to deal with the hem.

a hint of spring

2011-02-06T15:30:00.000-05:00

The sun is out today! And it's warm! (-ish (; )

After a week of ice rain and frigid temperatures, any bit of warmth is a great thing in my book. I took full advantage of the sun and had an Upper West Side adventure this afternoon. I rode the subway up and stopped off at Zabars for a babka, and pistachio macarons, and a few cheeses. Mmmmmm. It was a total zoo, of course.

A sunny block near W80th:

Then I walked a few blocks to Joe for a proper latte to sip on a long stroll down Central Park West. You know what really drives me bonkers about NYC? Very few places out here know how to make a latte correctly. Joe, thankfully, is one of the few that make a very nice one. I had a loooong walk with my coffee in the sunshine, and it brought me hope that spring might really be just around the corner.

To celebrate the spring-like weather, I made a little shirt for Ana and a dress for Kate with some spring-ish fabrics. These are from the Delilah line by Tanya Whelan. The pattern for both is the Oliver + S Ice Cream dress, which is a very quick & easy pattern to whip up.

I decided I'd go for Kate's favorite look, the intentional clash, with these, hence floral + plaid. Not too bad... they should be good for running around in the backyard once the snow is gone and it warms up!

fashion model

2011-02-05T07:12:00.000-05:00

A few weeks ago I posted a picture of the polka dotted Tulip Dress from the Sewn With Love book.

Kate modeled it for me last weekend when we were taking pictures of my dress muslin. I think she wanted to get in on the posing for the camera business, too. Hence the fashion accessory fan. ;)

She reports that she likes the tulle in the skirt so that it's "really twirly" and it's just the thing to wear to a birthday party.

pattern alterations

2011-02-01T18:31:00.000-05:00

If flat pattern alterations bore you, you might want to skip this post!

In the last post I mentioned that I'd like to make a lace jacket to wear over the simplicity dress, and we had picked Vogue 2979, which has a really retro Grace Kelly look to it. Today I was home sick, due to an upset stomach all night, so I felt kind of run down but able to sit at my dining room table with pattern paper and a ruler. I decided a good project was to make this lace top fit me.

Here's my first muslin on my dressform. The front closure in this muslin is a separating zip. The real thing will have a row of buttons, but I wasn't doing that for a muslin. You can see that it really doesn't fit, especially at the top where it "floats" above the shoulders. It's also too tight in the lower bodice (darn holiday cookie eating! trust me, it was worse on me, that's why you're seeing it on the dressform. (; )

I rather expected the neckline issue, I have very small, somewhat rounded shoulders. To fix the float and get the muslin to lay correctly, I made a series of alterations that I make to nearly every pattern. Here's a comparison of the pattern pieces I ended up with compared to the original.

I'll walk through each adjustment - you should be able to see the cuts or redrawn lines below.

* slashed and overlapped the pattern from the shoulder seam to above the bust point
* redrew the upper neck curve
* inserted a half inch of length in the armhole
* inserted an inch of length in the lower bodice
* added 1/4 inch to each side seam
* redrew the waist dart

Same alterations to the back

Yes, this is a little tedious, but necessary. I was taught to make these alterations to the pattern pieces, rather than draping or pinning directly on a muslin & then tracing the muslin, so this is the method I'm most comfortable with. Any of those, however, will lead you to the proper fit.

One thing that this string of ENDLESS MUSLINS has led me to see is that I really do need to make the same alterations to each pattern. Previously, I would scattershoot apply these techniques, and not always make them all together. Having done these to several patterns, from different pattern companies, over and over, I'm seeing how they all work together and getting a better idea of my body shape. It's been very educational and well worth doing even if there wasn't a well fitting wedding dress at the end of all this.

Better muslin pics

2011-01-30T19:07:00.000-05:00

Wow, you guys are very sweet- thank you for all the kind comments, and on a muslin no less!

My mom had a go at the bodice and helped me tweak the paper pattern to remove the smidge of excess fabric in the upper bust. We took a slight dart shape out of the armscye tapering to nothing at center front. So I need to re-cut a bodice and stitch it up to try it out. Likely with the same skirt, since I'm NOT sewing those pleats more than I have to. ;) (Scary thought, how am I going to transfer those markings to while silk?? Oh man.)

Anyway, mom really likes this dress pattern as well, but she was concerned that the overblouse in the pattern would be too boxy. We looked at the other choices and decided to make an overblouse from Vogue Pattern 2979. Here's the short sleeved version:

In the pattern it's attached to the skirt, but we'll make one that is not attached.

Here are some more pictures with slightly better light. I had my mom take these, but I had a vintage, fully manual lens on my DSLR. So it was fun taking these. My poor mom.

Back view...

Side...

Front.... serious face because I'm worried she is changing the settings of the camera!

So, there we are.

I also finished up the flower girl "pomanders" aka "balls of flowers on ribbons that flower girls carry" made with silk hydrangea, styrofoam balls, greening pins, and ribbons. I figured these were easiest to make from fake flowers, as I doubt any wedding guests will notice or care that Kate & Ana are carrying silk flowers down the aisle. ;)

early morning wedding dress muslin

2011-01-30T09:36:00.000-05:00

I woke up extra early again to sew up the Simplicity muslin I'd cut last night, and quickly ran face first into the most bewildering array of pleat markings I've ever seen on a pattern.

Have a look- but only if you're fortified with more than a small cup coffee!

I had to retreat and make a nice fried egg while my poor brain cells attempted to wrap themselves around all the pleats over more pleats under other pleats, fold on this line, stitch over here. Yikes!!

Well, I'm happy to say that after much seam ripping and puzzling over the directions and trying some more, I ended up with what I thought might be the right arrangement of pleats. I held my breath as I attached the bodice with pins, but everything lined up! hallelujah!

Here we are..... pardon the un-showered hair, the messy sofa, and general I-sewed-a-wedding-dress-before-9 AM-and-took-a-self-portrait-with-a-cell-phone look going on here.

Here's the pattern again.

This dress feels fantastic- the top fits amazingly well for the small amount of alterations I've made, I adore the full skirt, and I'm actually OK with it sitting at my natural waist. Wow... I feel like a real bride in this one. ;)

So there's a little bit of weird extra fabric or pulling above the bust. And again, I'm drawn to patterns with no side seams for pockets! However... I think I found it. This is it! Are you excited to see this made up in white silk taffeta? With a lovely short sleeved lace overjacket? :-D

bodice alterations & a garment district celebrity

2011-01-29T16:46:00.000-05:00

I was up early early this morning to make sure that I made it into the city to the garment district to purchase some navy blue silk for my sister's bridesmaid dress. First stop was Rosen & Chadick, where I got 4 yards of really nice dark navy silk taffetta. Lindsay had recommended them, and they had a wonderful selection of silks- and since it was so early I had the store to myself and plenty of assistance picking out a fabric. There was a beautiful deep navy silk faille, but it was over $100/yard. Sigh. Sorry, kid sister, not even my dress fabric is going to cost that much if I can help it! ;)

Next I headed over to Mood. It was 9:55, and they open up at 10 am, so the lobby downstairs had a bunch of design students and other early shoppers hanging out, waiting. At 9:59, in swept Swatch the doggie with his owner and everyone yelled "Swatch is here!!" As if there was any doubt that dog was a garment district celebrity!

Mood had some very nice lighter colored navy faille for $35/yard, but there was less than 2 yards on the bolt and no more in that color. So I decided to not pick up any more (my reasoning had been that if I bought some fabric at Mood that would work, I'd tuck away the Rosen & Chadick taffetta to use for a dress later... as if I have a pressing need in my life for lots of silk taffetta! (; ). Anyway, I ended up buying another 8 yards of muslin at Mood and chatting with the girl who cut it for me about the perils of making your own wedding dress: ENDLESS MUSLINS.

So on that thread, here are some shots from the bodice alterations of the Simplicity dress.

Tracing the outline onto swedish tracing paper

Transferring darts and grainline

Putting in the small shoulders dart and upper bodice length

And the front piece with the same alterations

I read through the directions for this dress last night, and I think I really like the option to have both silk taffetta and lace in the dress- the lace being in the form of the button-over "jacket". Very retro, but it could be cute. So I looked at laces while I was at Mood and snapped a few photos of them. The advantage of lace just on the over jacket piece is that you'd hardly need a yard, so it could be a really $$$$ one without making the whole dress far too expensive. Here's a cotton one that caught my eye there:

Vogue 1745 muslin

2011-01-28T10:56:00.000-05:00

You know it's a bad sign when you can put a wedding dress muslin on without opening the zipper. Really, I'm not going for a skintight mermaid dress for my wedding dress but I'd like *some* shaping.

As a reminder, here's the pattern envelope. Tres chic, no?

Here's reality.

Well then. So the Butterick remains in the lead..... one problem with the Butterick, though, is that it has no side seams to put pockets into. Instead the back panel wraps around to the front, and there's a front panel that takes up just 1/3 of the front. So the seams are offset to the center by quite a bit, which hangs very nicely. However, my wedding dress requirements are really:

* cap sleeves
* side seam pockets
* floor length

I may be able to insert a side seam in the Butterick without affecting the gorgeous shape of the skirt too badly, so I'll likely draft that up this weekend.

I'm also thinking of making a muslin of this beauty. Not an empire waist, but I keep pulling it out of the patterns box. It's a totally different look from the 1960s slim dresses that I keep trying, however it's not too far out. I'll make it up and we'll see.

snowy day cozy quilt

2011-01-27T11:20:00.000-05:00

This one has been in progress for over a year and I finally finished it up so that I'd have a warm lap quilt for our sofa. Would you believe I only had one quilt I'd made in our home until I finished this one?

it goes very nicely with hot chocolate and snow falling outside.

Details- just a very simple pinwheel pattern out of kona premium muslin scraps & anna maria horner prints. Batting is a cotton batting from JoAnns, back is some more muslin with a fold-up binding. Quilted with very unintentionally wobbly straight lines with my brand new walking foot.

this is a newsflash - Couture Sewing Techniques, Revised and Updated!

2011-01-08T20:01:00.000-05:00

I just stumbled over this in my amazon recommendations.... Claire Shaeffer's book is being updated! I love my older version, so this is going straight onto my birthday wish list. ;) Comes out in May. I imagine I'll be done with the wedding dress by then, so in the mean time I'm leaning heavily on the original. It will be interesting to see what gets updated in the new version, though.

Couture Sewing Techniques, Revised and Updated by Claire Shaeffer

muslins and pinwheels

2011-01-08T16:09:00.000-05:00

One of my little projects I wanted work on this year was a Photo Project 365- take a picture every day. I've wanted to one for a while, and I figured that the year I got married would be a good one to do it. Well, of course, on Jan 4 I ended up catching a horrible stomach flu (like norovirus or something else super evil) and couldn't even get out of bed for a few days. Don't you love how life corrects your plans sometimes? ;) Ah well, I'm picking up where I left off with it anyway. My parents came down to visit today and brought their sheltie, who found the pinwheel quilt top I've been working on. I think the colors very nicely complement his coat, don't you?

My mom also fit the muslin of butterick 3478 and said that it's her favorite so far. So I have some muslin tweaks to transfer to the pattern, and then there will likely be another muslin, with some drafted cap sleeves. I really like the look of these lacey cap sleeves:

The major changes my mom took in the muslin were to increase the inner neckline dart I'd pinched out so that the shoulders came in even further, and then pinned the side seams out a small amount. We both agreed that the skirt hung pretty nicely, and we'd wait to see how the shoulder change affected everything before making any new changes. I'm so thankful that I have her to come and pinfit things on me- I don't know how I'd get through sewing this dress without the assistance!

Have a wonderful weekend :)

butterick 3478 muslin

2011-01-03T20:42:00.000-05:00

This is what I learned making this dress:

1. Bite the bullet and make the paper pattern alterations you think you'll need to make (extra inch at high chest, tiny dart to pull in shoulder line)

2. Don't pose in a white dress muslin right in front of the TV lest your dress turn neon blue!

3. Just because a B34 in a vintage 1960s Simplicity was a bit tight in the chest, a B36 in a vintage 1970s Butterick may not be exactly the right size in the bust

The back doesn't look too bad, though!

This pattern is Butterick 3478- I don't like the poufy sleeves on the pattern, but the curved empire seam looked very interesting.

Here are some more views....

This is the "did I actually press the shutter button? Is it going off?" face ;)

This view gives me hope that the excessive ease in the bodice could be taken out by pinching a dart out at the side seam - it doesn't look too bad here.

I do like the curved empire seam and the full skirt, but today I got a new pattern in the mail that I've been stalking for a while, waiting for my size to appear. It finally did, and I grabbed it! This is either going to be epic-ly AWESOME or look like a sack of potatoes! It takes 9 yards of fabric. Gulp.

some more of my coat

2011-01-01T21:16:00.000-05:00

Cindy had a post up the other day with a wonderful quote:
"A winter coat is a lot of work!"- unknown sewing blogger (from here)

Well, um, I agree. Here's my coat at the moment, from Simplicity 4109. Since it's unlined, I'm doing a hong kong finish with a twist. The pattern calls for topstitching all the seamlines, so after I fold the binding fabric from the hong kong finish under, I pin and then topstitch the seam when I would usually sew down the binding fabric just to the seam allowance. So that makes it a smidge easier.

I hope everyone had a wonderful new year! We had my parents over for a late lunch. I enlisted my dad to fix a broken dresser here, which was an opportunity for the sailor and him to break out the cordless drill and all kinds of other tools and whatnot. Then my mom and I took her dog down to the dog park:

You can see that our snow is slooooowly melting away! Now there's a small river in every crosswalk. Good thing I have some waterproof boots, you really need them right now.

On the wedding planning front, an Indian friend of mine brought some gorgeous white and silver bangle bracelets home from Kerala for me. In India women wear bangle bracelets when they get married, as its supposed to bring good luck, so all my friends at work (most of whom are Indian, from Hydrabad or Kerala) have been telling me all year that I really need to wear a few for my wedding. My friend decided to bring some back with her, and I'm very excited to wear them- they're really gorgeous and it will be sweet to wear something that my friend brought all the way across the world for me!

Would you believe that I still haven't picked out a dress pattern? My mom and I had a long discussion of the relative merits of various patterns I've been looking at, but I'm still undecided. At least there are still a few months to go.

Simplicity 4109

2010-12-30T15:12:00.000-05:00

I finally finished quilting a little pinwheel quilt for the kids which I'd started last spring using a jelly roll of the Make Life fabric line. The pattern is from Jelly Roll Quilts. Not too tricky but I did have some problems with the squares stretching on the bias. Here it is on our sofa:

The backing is a little cowkids fabric that I thought semi-matched the colors:

And I've been working on a little jacket that I've had in my patterns-to-sew pile for a very long time. This is Simplicity 4109:

Despite the fact that it's an unlined coat I decided to fuse the body with hair canvas and underline my wool with flannel, since I was using a very, very soft and floppy wool.

I ran up to the garment district yesterday, to Pacific Trim, to pick up some fusible hair canvas, but it turns out that I should have purchased it from fabric.com instead. At Pacific Trim I paid $12/yard, while the fabric.com price was just under $9/yard. Well, now I know to plan ahead for it!

This is how I cut my hair canvas.... if you know anything at all about tailoring, you'll likely want to avert your eyes and run away screaming. ;)

I use a marker to trace the pattern piece onto the non-fusible side, and then pull out my rotary cutter. I use the guide arm, which usually is used to ADD seam allowances, to subtract the SA as I cut out.

You can see the rotary cutter arm here:

So when it's fused, you end up with:

I've got the body mostly complete. My topstitching went a bit wonky around the pockets - which are an AWESOME design feature, by the way! I love them. You topstich down a panel on the front and end up with both pockets to slide your hands into and a little flap top pocket at the top. So ingenious!

Sewn with Love dress

2010-12-29T12:45:00.000-05:00

Given that we've been rather snowed in the last few days, I had some time to make up a project from one of my sewing books. The sailor has been taking the subaru to work, since Jersey City has yet to see fit to plow our street yet (Seriously! Snow is still knee deep out there!) which leaves me at home with the choices of (a) walk places through uncleared sidewalks, (b) risk some highly non-functional public transportation options or (c) stay home and sew. What would you do? ;)

I've just about completed a dress from the Sewn With Love book, it's just lacking buttons and buttonholes. This dress had some really cute details like a back button band, but I had a few frustrations with it as well. First, they blithely tell you to gather and insert the fashion fabric skirt + a tulle skirt + the lining skirt, all of which have many many many many gathers, in one go. Um... yeah. I ended up zigzagging the tulle to the lining skirt (I wanted the scratchy tulle edging to be hidden away from sensitive kid skin, anyway). Then I stitched down some stay tape on the bodice and inserted the skirt and lining.

In addition, all the patterns are on CD so you have to print pages and tape them together. Which would be OK, but they make you do that for the fashion fabric skirt pattern piece, and another pattern piece for the lining skirt. Which, again, would be OK if they also just listed the dimensions somewhere for those of us who would rather cut two rectangles to size using rulers than tape together 35 sheets of paper just to cut out two different sized rectangles.

In all, it's kind of a cute dress in the end. The fabric is a cotton lawn from Mood which I bought a few months ago with the idea of a full skirted party dress for Kate. And you can see I sneaked in a decorative stitch at the bottom of the skirt lining!

And here's a little Christmas photo catch-up of three projects that I never took pictures of earlier. First up, a flannel nightgown that I made for my mom... she asked for a v-neckline, so I tweaked the yoke and finished the neck edge with a bias strip, otherwise it's the same ancient Butterick pattern that I always use.

A little quilted table runner I made for our tiny table

And some Christmas pillows for the bed :-)

Very comfy to lean against as I relax, do nothing, and watch the gorgeous sunsets we've been having!

Happy new years!

Merry Christmas!

2010-12-25T16:08:00.001-05:00

kate & ana
Originally uploaded by wck

Happy Holidays!

Best of luck all those traveling today- we are apparently getting snow here this evening, which has the kids VERY excited! I wouldn't mind a bit of the white stuff as well. :-)

I received some fantastic sewing books this year, so I'll be happily tucked away under a quilt reading through them the rest of the day.

From my best friend, who knows me FAR TOO WELL. I bought him some wood working books for his woodshop, and he bought me this.

All Dolled Up: Sewing Clothes and Accessories for Girls and Their 18-Inch Dolls

A great techniques reference book! At first glance, the diagrams don't seem quite as clear as other books, but it covers a lot of ground.

The Dressmaker's Handbook of Couture Sewing Techniques

This one is my favorite- it has some absolutely gorgeous dresses inside! I'm really dying to make the silk chiffon dress and the pintuck dress.

Sewn With Love: Classic Patterns for Children's Clothes and Accessories

Christmas Eve

2010-12-24T15:22:00.000-05:00

Why yes, it is Christmas Eve and I am finishing quilts!

And you'll remember that I made my two nieces each a fancy winter coat from BWOF. They wore them recently to see the nutcracker. Here they are in their coats with their mother:

Well, their american girl dolls will be receiving matching coats for Christmas this year since I had enough scraps left over.

The sailor and I just got back from dropping off a big dinner for the guys standing watch on his ship and now I'm back to the sewing machine! Happy sewing and merry christmas to all the other last minute finishers here! ;)

stripes

2010-12-22T07:05:00.000-05:00

All I want for Christmas is to never see another roll of gold braid again!

My sailor realized last week that he had no jackets with his Lieutenant (LT) stripes on them, and asked me if I would please, please upgrade his Lieutenant Junior Grade (LT JG) jacket. Silly me, I said "How hard can it be?" Ha! A LT JG has one thick gold stripe on the sleeve, then one thin gold stripe. Above that is a gold crest. A LT has two thick gold stripes.

This picture is actually a cadet jacket sleeve (I think), which has just one tiny stripe on it. The LT jacket is in use today, but this one was in the closet here.

Well, if you are ever asked to do this work, this is what it entails:

1. remove the old thin stripe- the ends are secured in the under arm seam, so you have to open that
2. remove the gold shield
3. open the stitching holding the sleeve lining to the sleeve at the wrist
4. carefully measure one fourth of an inch above the bottom stripe and pin the new thick stripe in place
5. stitch it down
6. hand sew the shield back on
7. hand sew the under arm seam again, making sure to enclose the ends of the braid. This is actually my least favorite part, and showed me that I need to work on my couture hand stitching, specifically the nice even ladder stitching that's best for this.
8. hand sew the sleeve lining to the sleeve again

I did it all while watching Top Gun on the DVD player last night. Hey, if you're going to be sitting on a sofa surrounded by gold braid, you might as well revel in it! The one good thing that I see coming out of this is that for the first time ever I could look at the uniforms in the movie and tell from the striping on their uniforms what rank the actors were playing. ;) The Sailor & I have been together for ages, but coming from the communistic dot-com world, I tended not to pay a whole lot of attention to what ranks had what gold stripes on, until I was forcibly introduced to it via a few hours of hand sewing. ;) I can now spot a LT from across the room!

(this is my sailor on his bridge during a public affairs tour of the NYC harbor- wearing ODUs instead of fancy gold trimmed jackets (; )

You know what's coming this spring? That's right, he becomes a LT Commander (Lt Cmdr)... which is three gold stripes. Oh boy. I'm tempted to tell him to send the jackets to a military tailor, but that is really expensive. I have trouble justifying spending that much when I can do it, although now I rather see why it costs so much with all the hand sewing and precision.

In more exciting news, I'm still cranking away on Christmas present sewing, and there will be photos of those soon!

Happy Holidays, and good luck on the tail end of your holiday sewing!!

A concert skirt

2010-12-11T17:39:00.000-05:00

First off, I had a question about where I had gotten the fusible hair canvas for my sister's coat. It's from Fabric.com, Fusible Hair Canvas. I'm sure you could get some from the garment district, but this was handy and not too expensive.

Next, Kate has her school's holiday concert coming up and needed a floor length black skirt for it. My sister couldn't find one in the stores so I whipped out BWOF Sept 2009 (the one that had Ana's coat pattern in it) because I remembered a long kids skirt in it. Indeed - and it has a really pretty flare shape to it. It's shaped with darts and has a center and back seam with a back invisible zip, so it's a very schmancy skirt for a little girl.

I cut a size 128, sewed the darts, and basted up all the seams, then tried it on the munchkin. Guess what? It fit perfectly! Dear BWOF, I love your fit. :-D

Here is the skirt on a hanger:

She was very excited to try it on, and pulled out her violin to show me how it will look when she plays in the school concert, since I won't be able to attend.

I'm glad I never throw out my old BWOFs, you never know when your sister will ask for something crazy like a floor length black skirt for a small kid! Of course, now I'm likely going to making concert wear for the kid for years, but that is a decent tradeoff for a private violin concert in front of the christmas tree on a December afternoon. :-)

Burda 8292

2010-12-05T17:56:00.000-05:00

We had a very Christmas-y day today, baking gluten-free christmas cookies and.... watching National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation. Twice. ;) Kate had never seen it before and I'm afraid that my sister is now going to shoot me because Kate LOVED it. She's seven, which is pretty much the target audience for that movie!

"Don't bother me, I'm busy watching the squirrel scene!!"

I also did a whole bunch of work on my sister's coat. I'm using Burda envelope pattern 8292. The fusible hair canvas worked really nicely for interfacing the top- I block fused the entire top of the coat with it and gave the coat a nice heft. Then I interlined all the pieces with flannel. It took a couple hours to get to the point of constructing the body what with cutting each piece out of the wool flannel + hair canvas + flannel interlining + ambiance lining. This is what our entry way looked like all afternoon:

Here's the inside. You're looking at the flannel interlining, machine basted to the wool flannel fashion fabric.

And here we have the outside constructed. My sister tried it on, and other than the pockets being a bit low, it looked pretty good on her.

And finally, my mom noticed that there was a bride in the NYT Wedding section this weekend with a short sleeved empire waist gown made by her grandmother. We were very excited because we rarely see this style in the real world- her dress looks beautiful & it made me think hard about using lace for mine.

BWOF Coat 09-2009-146

2010-12-04T07:23:00.000-05:00

I've been a bit quiet around here recently because I just lost my grandma. We were very close when I was growing up since she only lived a few miles from my parents house on a huge farm, and my sister and I would go over there all day every day when I was growing up. I learned how to drive out in the apple orchard, went swimming, and played baseball out in the back field. And talked and talked to my grandma since she was a pretty cool lady. Here we are on the front steps a few years ago:

In happier news, Ana was very jealous of her sister's new wool coat and asked me if I couldn't make her one. My dad is taking all of us to see The Nutcracker ballet in two weeks so I promised her a new coat to wear to it. I picked BWOF 09-2009-149 because of the beautiful flare shape:

The fabric is a stretch black wool flannel from Fabric.com which I seem to recall being from the Vera Wang Lavender collection. I interfaced with a light non-woven interfacing from Pacific Trims that was labeled as a shirt interfacing. To control the stretch and give it a bit of structure, I blockfused the pieces, which is very easy to do using BWOF patterns. I always trace the pattern and then add the seam allowances with a rotary cutter arm which means that it's easy to cut the interfacing without adding seam allowances and fuse them to the fabric without getting super bulky seams.

So here we are so far- it needs trim and buttonholes.

The coat is lined in a tan ambiance lining which of course, as always, drove me NUTS. It slides, it wiggles, it refuses to sit properly to be cut, even doing a flat insertion of sleeves makes you pull your hair out, and it's all around a huge pain. ARGH! ;) The buttons are little silver ones from JoAnns, and I want to add some pink trim to it so that it's not quite so severe looking.

But there we go, a mostly finished coat for my teensy niece.

Up next - a coat for my sister in a really pretty pink wool. I ordered some fusible hair canvas from Fabric.com to interface this one, which could be interesting. (Yes, can you tell that coats are my favorite thing to sew these days?? (; )

PATTERNS and some other photos

2010-11-24T18:50:00.000-05:00

Let's call this a catch-up post. :-) I'm busy baking chocolate chip cookies for the guys on my sailor's ship who have to work on Thanksgiving, so this might be a disjointed while I move cookie sheets in & out of the oven!

Faye asked recently about how to create boiled wool. I started with some very heavyweight 100% wool jersey, and ran it through a cycle of hot-washer-hot-dryer about three times. I know some people zigzag the edges first, but I didn't, so I did get some distortion. However, I started with 3 yards and I was only making a size 7 jacket, so it was OK.

Next, here are a few patterns I purchased recently. Now I need to get over the sore throat, and find some time to sew them up. (I'm actually not a super dedicated seamstress, sewing while super sick... this is more of a "wow I don't feel great" sore throat so the quilting projects were good to keep my mind off it.)

Vogue 1156.... I love this one. Need to make a muslin soon!

And a really cute little dress that I may or may not ever get to, but which I love looking at anyway. If I didn't go to work in sneakers and jeans everyday, this is what I'd wear.

And finally, some finished photos of the Thanksgiving table runner I made:

I used the "snowflake" stitch from my Viking to quilt the lines.

Have a wonderful Thanksgiving!

under the weather

2010-11-21T16:29:00.001-05:00

The sailor and I are both sick with sore throats... must be the start of winter. We've stocked up on tea and OJ and I've retreated to my sewing room with lots of charm packs to do some holiday sewing. I bought a whole ton of Moda charm packs in the last month and they've been collecting near the sewing machine. Just sitting there looking so cute and tiny waiting to be made into christmas presents. This first one, though, is not a Christmas present at all. Here's the current WIP, a thanksgiving day square table runner, which is not yet quilted. We're all eating at my mom's house, so I've told her to put on an ivory tablecloth & I'll bring this over.

We also have a little table runner for my future MIL. I love the little snowmen!

Corner folded up to show the back

Has anyone else started holiday sewing yet?

coat Q & A

2010-11-15T20:05:00.000-05:00

Important pieces first, shall we? Cameraphone pictures of my niece in her coats, taken while I was trying to mark with a safety pin where to hem the sleeve.

She quite loves the pockets on the brown polka dot coat so I'm glad that I put them in, even if they aren't fancy welt pockets.

Elizabeth asked if I was interfacing or underlining the coats. The grey coat is not interfaced- when I felted the wool jersey I just kept throwing it back into the washer until it was really thick so it really didn't need anything. That jacket is unlined, anyway. Then the bodice of the brown coat is block-fused using a nice interfacing I buy at pacific trim. It's a lightweight white woven cotten that's fusible, and it's my favorite interfacing these days. It's the white stuff here:

BeeBee asked if I was going to use the reverse of the brown wool. No, I thought it was neat looking but it didn't really fit with the look of the coat, so it's hidden away.

I was all set to start working on a brown tweed coat for myself using a really pretty vintage pattern. However... I lost the pattern! It has to be here somewhere, the apartment is Not.That.Big. I think my fish is hiding it...

polka dot coat

2010-11-14T09:55:00.000-05:00

Here are some coat innards, from last night! Again, this is BWOF 11-2010-147, the little girl's coat. I changed a few things, using wool instead of a boucle, leaving off the facing (I lined to the edge), and making it single breasted in the end.

I finished up the shell and then paused there for the evening. This pattern was very nicely drafted and it went together very easily- the sleeves slipped right in, the collar met the notches, everything lined up without much effort. Dear BWOF, your new pattern sheets drive me crazy but you are still worth it. ;)

I did have some issues getting the back tab's shape to come out correctly, since the wool was so bulky. Eh. I think I'll get two largish buttons today and sew them onto the tab, so hopefully that will disguise the wonky factor. It is at least sewn on straight, but this photo was at an angle so it looks a bit more off here than it really is.

And here we are- almost done except for hemming the sleeves. To do that I need to try it on the munchkin and she's at her mother's house right now. :-) This is hanging on an adult size hanger so the sleeves are poking out because the hanger is a little too big.

You can't see them, but the pockets are in the side seams. The buttons are gold colored shell buttons that I had lying around... I think the gold picks up the pink so they look ok.

To make the buttonholes this morning I basted a line down the front, then thread traced where the top & bottom of each buttonhole would be across that line. My machine makes a 4-step buttonhole that uses tiny "X"s up & down the sides and I've discovered that they work very nicely for thick wool coats. With the threadlines marking the top and bottom of the buttonholes it's not too tricky to make them as 4-step buttonholes. :-)

So, there we are, a tiny dress coat for my niece!

a new winter coat for Kate

2010-11-13T16:03:00.000-05:00

I haven't finished the trim for my niece's military jacket yet, but this weekend I decided I'd start on a new winter coat for her.

I bought this lining fabric at Joann's about two years ago:

and I bought this fabric from Mood about 3 years ago- it was $40/yard, so it's one of the most expensive pieces of fabric I've ever bought. But the instant that I saw it, I knew that it had to be made into a sweet little coat for one of my nieces!

The fabric's reverse side is kind of neat looking as well:

I'm using BWOF 11-2010-147, from the newest issue. You can see a picture of the pattern on the german site. And here's the line drawing:

So far, I've cut the fashion fabric, fused the bodice pieces to woven fusible interfacing, and sewn up the lining. Let me tell you right now what's not going to happen: welt pockets (I'll put them on the side seams instead). No way am I messing up $50 of fabric with imperfect welt pockets!! ;)

This project is reminding me why I love sewing little girl outfits, they go together so incredibly quickly. The lining just zipped together in a few minutes!

a quiet weekend

2010-11-07T18:59:00.001-05:00

This is Henry:

Henry lives in a small printshop in Brooklyn that is stuffed full of 100 to 50 year old letterpress print machines. Henry and I had some quality time today while I learned how to print the same way they used to in the 1800s... pick out individual letters, load them into a chase, ink your press, and print the page one sheet at a time. It was slooow going, frustrating, tedious, and hard physical work, but totally worth learning. So now I'm qualified as a letter press printer in the shop and I can go in and print my own projects. Oh boy.

To get all philosophical, it has a lot of the same appeal as learning how to sew garments, doing something carefully by hand that's usually done in mass production these days. The prints are like 10000% more beautiful when you've spent the last hour setting the text and aligning your paper than when it just spits out of an ink jet printer. ;) I've seen this kind of printing demonstrated before but never done it myself, so I had no appreciation for the amount of effort it takes to print a carefully lined up block of text straight on a piece of paper using these old technologies.

To get all practical, hello letterpress wedding invites that I can now print myself at cost. I'm sure there will be some artsy fartsy projects produced, but there will also definitely be some wedding printing going down. ;)

This was work-by-hand weekend, apparently, because I also spent several hours sewing buttons, frogs, and trim onto Kate's little military jacket. Still coming along... I'm thinking right now about putting snaps under the frogs since they might be hard for her little hands to open & close easily.

Here we have the buttons (from Pacific Trim) down the front princess seam & one side of the frogs:

I'm still debating what to do on the collars and the sleeve cuffs, to add braid or buttons onto them.

Some sewing for Kate

2010-10-31T17:34:00.000-04:00

It hasn't been all muslins around here- i squeezed in two pieces for my oldest niece recently.

A few months ago, Stella McCartney made an adorable little band jacket for a Gap Kids collection. Sooo cute! The October BWOF had a sweet little girl jacket with similar styling. I'd recently tried felting some wool jersey at home and had been wondering what to make with it, so I put two and two together and came up with this jacket. The trimming is still quite the WIP at the moment, but here we are so far:

So far it has satin piping in the front princess seam & chenille trim for "braid" across the front. I'm planning gold buttons where the trim meets the princess line, and gold buttons with loops as a closure. Then possibly more chenille trim on the sleeves & collar to copy the original.

In addition to the little jacket, I made up her Oliver + S school photo dress last weekend... this is in a silk/wool twill from the Vera Wang Lavender collection that was on fabric.com last year. This is the "trial run" for Kate's flower girl dress, to see how it fits on her. A size 7 is kind of loose, but the length is right for her. She loved the little pocket in the dress!

and a front view

2010-10-29T20:09:00.000-04:00

Here we are, new pictures of the front! The dress was fitting OK yesterday, I just looked like a complete dork in almost all the pictures we took last night. ;) Of course muslin photos are supposed to look silly, but these looked super silly! I used the muslin re-shoot as an excuse to bust out my "ebay veil" to try out something approximating the whole look.

Here's one where the sash slipped down a smidge, but you can kind of see the bodice. I still need to put on the cap sleeves.

And a full length. Notice that I need to either let it out a bit at the hips or eat less ice cream and go to the gym more! I had been walking 2 miles home from the train station every evening all summer, which stopped when it got cold. D'oh! I need to replace all that activity with something indoors for the winter!

Cindy commented on the sash length- this is just a tester sash that I pulled off a dress in my closet. I'm rather leaning towards a band at the empire seam with nothing hanging down as a sash, but this is working for try-ons.

And lsaspacey commented on the dress resembling a regency dress. I love that period as well. Their empire line dresses were soooo beautiful!

Finally, this afternoon we had "trunk or treat" at Kate's school. Here's my little subaru, all decked out for giving away candy to screaming elementary schoolers!

dress muslins

2010-10-28T21:58:00.000-04:00

I hate to admit it, but I'm starting to feel a smidge jealous of the girls on Say Yes to the Dress! (OK, yes, I watch it occasionally. It has gorgeous gowns on it! (; ) Anytime I want to try on a new potential wedding dress, I have to unwrap a bolt of muslin, lay it out on the floor, de-wrinkle a 50 year old pattern, pin it, cut it out, stitch it up and THEN I can try it on, in plain muslin, while I imagine it in a fancy silk. Yeah. Not that I'd do this any other way but there's a lot of work to try out one dress.

So here we have a very rough muslin for my sister's dress. My mom is pin fitting the princess seams on her. I'm so grateful she can help with this.

And here's a muslin I made this evening. With, of course, silly face from trying to instruct the sailor to turn on the flash on my SLR! (No front view at the moment, it came out super weird looking)

I really like this pattern. Here's the original pattern envelope, Simplicity 7177

a wedding dress

2010-10-17T17:25:00.000-04:00

Would you guys like some wedding pictures? I got the film back from the pictures that I shot my friend's wedding, so I thought I might share a few.

As I mentioned earlier, she sewed her dress! With a bit of help from me and a few other friends, but she did the bulk of the work. This corset and skirt are, respectively, the third and fourth items of clothing she has ever sewn. Amazing, no?? If only we all just jumped right into whipping up wedding dresses when we started!! ;)

She hand sewed crystals onto the skirt, which was silk organza over duchesse satin. The top corset is lace over a silk corset.

There was some last minute tweaking... This is Vashti sewing. Somewhere is an identical photo of me in that red dress doing this to another piece of the dress. ;)

The wedding was tons of fun, and I had a great time shooting. Since they had an official photographer, I just brought film camera with a 50mm prime lens and meandered around shooting whatever caught my eye. No pressure, so it was very enjoyable. Here are a few more:

a party dress

2010-10-11T07:16:00.000-04:00

You might remember that I mentioned here I'd been helping a friend sew her wedding dress over the last few months. Well, that wedding was this weekend and I'm happy to report that her dress was gorgeous and the wedding was wonderful fun. I don't have any photos yet of her outfit because at her request I shot film all day. My original plan was to stay out of the way of their official wedding photographer and shoot detail shots and so forth, but it turned out that he was delighted to have another photographer running around and kept having his assistant call me over to shoot at some of the portraits. So I ended up learning a lot of new stuff about wedding photography, which was fantastic- but I have no pictures until the film is developed!

For my outfit I ended up sewing up one of the vintage wedding dress patterns (Simplicity 5872) in the shorter length. I want to practice bodice fitting with sleeves, and this dress really showed that I've got some practice ahead of me. Here's the inside of the bodice, the silk-cotton basted onto silk organza.

I decided that I'd just skip the muslin & jump into making this dress since the measurements were pretty close and I was rather crunched on time. My fitting mostly involved basting the seams, trying on, and slight tweaking from there. First I moved the armscye in by a quarter inch, which ended up being not quite enough since I still had trouble raising my arms entirely overhead. And I also should have widened the sleeve pieces by about a quarter inch to a half inch since they were just a little too tight.

The trim is a length of organza ribbon with beading applied to it which I bought at MJ Trim to baste onto the dress along the empire seam.

During the construction, I'd posted a plea for help with the material to artisan's square sewing board, since I was having a terrible time with the pressing. I got some good advice to try to mainly press from the wrong side, which I mostly stuck to. Here's a view of the dress on Charlotte in the middle of a round of pressing.

So next up, I'm going to play with the bust dart placement and try to fix the sleeve issue. I have a nice black/tan print cotton to make another version of this dress in and I'll see if I can't get a better bodice fit this time around.

Oliver + S school photo dress

2010-10-03T21:34:00.001-04:00

Here's what I spent a Sunday afternoon sewing up:

It's the Oliver + S school photo dress in a plaid printed cord. This is size 4, for my niece Anabear. She's in preschool these days so this should make a nice school dress for her. You can see on the front I sort of made an effort to match the plaid which almost worked. I didn't even try on the back, as I didn't have enough material to really wiggle around.

That's OK, it's a little kids dress. The dress went together really nicely, and the directions have you sew it all up with a really clean finish inside. It would be even neater if I'd used the pattern piece for the armhole binding, but zig zag is OK.

The way you sew the pocket into the front pieces is ingenious although I was convinced that it wouldn't quite work, it did. Hooray! And everything fit together perfectly, so no fighting with with any bits to fit together.

So this is actually the front runner pattern for the flower girl dresses, done up in blue silk. I thought a bit about the standard full-skirted poufy flower girl dresses for the girls, and I've sewn similar dresses to that style, like this year's Easter dresses. Really, I just couldn't get into it for a flower girl look, though. The front pocket on this dress was what sold me on these as flower girl dresses... can't you see them standing up at the ceremony with their hands tucked into the pockets? Adorable! ;)

Pink and Sparkly

2010-09-26T12:16:00.002-04:00

You might remember the pink & brown princess dress that I made for my niece Kate for Halloween two years ago. She wore it for dress up quite a bit, and so it got a good amount of wear for a costume. Good thing, since it literally took hours to make it up! It doesn't fit her anymore, but she wanted to dress up as a princess again for Halloween this year. She found a really beautiful pink and silver princess dress costume with a white and pink fur cape in a kids clothing catalog that her mom got. The kid is clearly well trained, because instead of asking her mom to buy it for her, she asked me to sew her another princess dress just like the one in the catalog. With the white fur cape, please! You know where this is going, right? ;) Good thing Halloween is one of my favorite holidays.

Here's a picture of the dress she wanted, from the Chasing Fireflies catalog.

First Kate and I went to the fabric store and bought some sparkly pink polyester costume material. I generally refuse to sew with anything poly, but this was only a costume. I have to say, it wasn't quite as bad as I thought it could have been although it did fray like crazy. I ended up ironing woven interfacing to all the bodice pieces and underlining the silvery bits in silk organza (I know. Really.) to sort of keep things kind of under control.

This weekend it was construction time! I looked through old BWOFs over breakfast because I remembered one of them had a girl's cape pattern.

Pattern and material all ready to start

Yes, go ahead and laugh at my pattern weights. I knew what pain I was in for, sewing icky costume poly into a complicated dress!

Here is the bodice, which took a LONG time to make. I started the costume at 10 AM, and this photo was taken just before 4 PM. So the glittery trim is from MJ Trim in the city and cost more than the whole rest of the dress put together. However, I only bought a yard of it and it really does help make the whole thing a little fancier.

I did have a few tea breaks during the construction process.

The skirt went much faster in comparison. I machine basted the organza to silvery stuff and stitched the whole thing together, then gathered and attached to the bodice. The best part? I talked my mom into hemming this behemouth. ;) yay!

And the cape was even easier - 45 minutes from pulling the pattern sheets out of the magazine to hand sewing the opening at the neck where I flipped the cape right side out after stitching it up. It's BWOF 10-2008-138.

Kate's mom marked the hem and made a few adjustments. The pattern ended up being REALLY low cut, but she'll have a turtleneck on under it... so it should be OK.

And here we are, 8 hours of work later, a 7 year old fairy princess with a serious couture habit who knows how to talk her aunt into making fancy dresses to her exact specifications. ;)

Dress Sewing

2010-09-25T07:50:00.000-04:00

There haven't been many wedding dress muslins around here lately because the plan for the dress has settled down to taking a week of in February to do the bulk of the sewing, and then have it completed by April or March timeframe. Our wedding photographer will take some pictures the nieces & I in our wedding outfits so that we don't have to stress about Ana on the day of the wedding. (As background for new readers of my blog, she's only 4 and she's handicapped, so the wedding day could be very exhausting for her.) I'm really looking forward to hanging a great picture of the three of us in our schmancy dresses in my sewing room, so this seems to be the best way to accomplish that. As a bonus, it forces me to finish all our outfits well before June. I still need to figure out which pattern I'll use by February, but that seems like plenty of time at the moment. ;)

Over the last few weeks I've been helping an old friend plan and make her wedding dress, which has kept me plenty busy with wedding sewing. While we were laying out the skirt pieces on the silk last night we had a few hours to chat about sewing, fabric layouts, grainlines, work (we used to be officemates years ago & have worked at the same companies over the years), wedding nonsense, programming, being oncall for a job, wedding bouquets, old friends, seam allowance sizes, website engineering, and more wedding nonsense. After fiddling with grainlines and layouts on the material for a few hours I left her late last night to mark the stitching lines and cut the fabric. It's been wonderful to see a dress come together, and it's so relaxing to sit around a table and work together. Her wedding is in just a few weeks so she's way ahead of me on the wedding planning and I've been making notes of everything I need to remember when it gets this close to our wedding. Her style is totally different from mine, so her dress is nothing like mine will be. We've had some good laughs over our personal styles affecting the dresses we're making & everything else about the weddings.

Anyway, as if I don't already have enough empire waist gown patterns to select from, I bought two more on etsy recently.

Isn't this one from 1967 just so beautiful? I love the square neckline and the back bow. I've been looking more closely at empire gowns with no gathering where the skirt attaches to the bodice, and this fits that.

Simplicity 7117

And another option:

McCall 9126 (reviews on patternreview)

blue morning light

2010-09-16T23:31:00.000-04:00

Hello from pike place market, Seattle! I flew out for just a few days to see my best friend, who is going to be my "man of honor" in my wedding this summer.

I woke up insanely early this morning craving a real latte, so I walked myself down to the market with my camera to get some coffee. The flower vendors were just setting up:

I know it's such an over-photographed, iconic sign, but it says "home" to me.

The city is really beautiful before sunrise. I just meandered around taking lots of photos without really being awake.

I've been so homesick recently that it's good to come back even for just a short visit. It was great to see my friend and catch up and talk about wedding stuff and work. We both work for the same company, just on different coasts, so we had lots to go over and gossip about. On the wedding front, I've been lobbying for the boys to wear this sailboat patterened bow tie, but it's getting veto'd by him & my sailor so far. Apparently I need to work on being a bossy bride because I appear to have caved in and the current menswear on groom + the best man + my best friend will be tuxes with plain black bowties. ;)

New Look 6802, take 2

2010-09-04T21:31:00.000-04:00

In October I made up New Look 6802 & really liked how it came out. I promptly pulled out another another knit to make it in, and then ended up packing it away in a box with the pattern. This morning I was looking for a quick dress to make to wear to my grandma's 90th birthday party & stumbled over the pattern & fabric.

Viola, new party dress! Just as easy to make as last time. :-) This is "French Dressing Knit - Grays/Pink" from gorgeousfabrics.com.

Anyway, My grandma's party was lots of fun. She's still in great health and as sassy as always. Here she is with my sister & Ana.

When she was growing up she actually lived very close to where I live now so we talked a lot about Jersey City in the 1930s vs today. It's growing on me... I still miss Seattle quite a bit, but we do have nice sunrises here. I took this yesterday morning on a walk around block.

That's a view of the World Financial Center and Battery Park from the Morris Canal inlet in the Paulus Hook part of Jersey City. The interesting morning clouds were about all of the hurricane that we really ended up getting!

Butterick 5147

2010-08-31T20:26:00.000-04:00

At long last, I finally made up my version of B5147! I made the flare version, not the sheath dress version. The fabric is a nice cotton I bought on Saturday's trip to the Garment District in NYC.

The top of the dress is lined with a grey cotton voile.

I followed Marji's sleeveless dress construction method, except that I goofed. Here's my construction method:
1. sew all the darts
2. Decide I should put the invisible zip in while I just have two flat back pieces. Insert it. (cue ominous music here.... dum dum dum!)
3. Sew lining and dress together at the shoulders
4. Sew lining to dress at neckline and armholes
5. Go to pull the backs out through the shoulder seams..... aARRRGGH!

Well. I wasn't quite ready to take out the zipper, so I sat stumped for a moment, then decided I would just see what I could do. I took out the seam below the zipper (thankfully I hadn't finished it with a zig zag or anything), and the I cut off the end of the zipper and took off the zipper pull. That gave me two back pieces again that weren't joined.

Once I'd pulled the backs through the shoulders and pressed everything, I fiddled with the zipper until I had the zipper pull back on. It was a little hairy for a moment, but I forced it back on, and then stitched a new zipper stop & sewed up the bottom. Whew! It was close there but I ended up with a wearable dress!

Closeup picture

Cheesy picture

I need to fix the back so that I don't get so much pooling

This is a really nice pattern, and it goes together very quickly. Including my goofup, it took less than 4 hours from cutting out the pattern paper to wearing the dress. I only made a few modifications- I sewed the side seams a little deeper from my waist up to my underarm, and I took EIGHT inches off the bottom. Yikes I have short legs. :( And I decided to go with easy for the hem by using single fold bias tape.

So there is my entry in the Butterick 5147 sew along!

in the garment district

2010-08-29T08:20:00.000-04:00

Saturday morning I woke up early, early and walked down the Hudson River Walkway from my apartment to the PATH. After all the muggy days we had, we'd had a week of very rainy and cold weather here. Yesterday was just perfect, though. Warm, but not hot, not muggy, and really gorgeous!

I met up with a bunch of sewing bloggers and Pattern Review members at Metro Textiles and Elliott Berman in the Garment District on a little trip organized by Elizabeth and Robyn. You can see the full plan for the day on Robyn's blog. Sadly I was only able to do the morning part, but it was SO MUCH FUN! After I left they went on to many more stores, and I went home to take some quick pictures of my purchases and go to a friend's 10th anniversary party.

Here's a lace swatch from Metro

A blue silk from Metro that's like a slightly opaque silk organza

From Elliott Berman, an ombre white-to-navy silk organza that was $10/yard... I need to figure out how to make one of the flower girl dresses for my wedding in June from this, it's awesome!

And a pussy willow embroidered silk organza, also $10. I'm thinking Ana's next Easter dress.

And finally, a light blue print cotton that I believe is going to be sewn up for the Butterick 4157 sew along.

Here's some pictures from the shopping. I'm terrible with names so I didn't get everyone's names who was there, but below we have Nancy K, Carolyn, Claudine, Karen, Elaray, and Noile. If I missed your blog, andd a comment! :-)

Here are a few more photos.

Some old wedding photos

2010-08-26T20:51:00.000-04:00

Eight years ago, I photographed my little sister's wedding and had the film scanned to CDs. Then I gave them to her, and they got lost shortly afterwards. My mom recently turned them up, buried with some old photo albums and framed pictures, and it was lots of fun to look at the pictures again! So here's a little slideshow of some of my favorites. They had a very tiny, totally- DIY wedding which was lots of fun, and I had a grand time photographing it. Enjoy the pictures!

Burda 7561 Skirt in Blues

2010-08-21T09:19:00.000-04:00

I made this skirt last week, but then never got a picture of it. It's Burda 7561, a straight skirt with a slight flare at the bottom and front and back darts. The fabric is a navy blue cotton eyelet from Mood over a robins egg blue silk habotai from Gorgeous Fabrics.

Here it is on my dressform:

Not much to say about the pattern beyond that it's a nice basic. I bought it in a petite size, so I didn't have to shorten the skirt lnegth, which was a nice change. Since the layers are only attached at the waistband, the two blues look kind of cool when you walk around because the eyelet moves around over the lining.

Simple sewing

2010-08-11T06:49:00.000-04:00

This is about the level of sewing complexity my brain could handle this weekend. It's a few charm square packs of "Nautical and Nice" sewn together, also known as "head start on christmas sewing for my nephew since I can't handle dress patterns right now". ;)

It still needs a border, which will be more of the life ring fabric and some plain white, before getting quilted. But hey- December 25 is far, far away!