Sundress #2

(Sundress #1.)

So, I promised myself I wouldn't buy more fabric until I'd used some of what I've got.

And then, naturally, I bought more fabric.

I'm still planning to make the basic dress out of Cal Patch's book, but I've got to draft the pieces first, and I wanted a second sundress now. I first found this fabric (the line is Santorini by Lila Tueller) while I was in London, but it was mad-crazy expensive (something like £11.50 per meter, which is roughly $15 per yard, when the fabric retails here for $8.95), and I wound up getting it on sale from My Needle & Thread (another Etsy shop). With the bold outlines around each leaf and flower, the fabric reminds me of a stained glass window.

(Park photos by John the Bad.)

Sundress #2 took longer than #1 even though I skipped the pockets again. I realized midway through that my machine really needed a tune-up, so I packed it up and took it to the local Sew 'n Vac; I was holed up at Rachel's (she is a lifesaver, let me tell you) working on the new magnum opus; and then with my grandpa's funeral and family time and all.

(Kind of a goofy photo of me, but a better shot of the dress. Also, from looking at this one I think I need to adjust the right strap. My right, that is.)

This dress has already been very much splashed on and stained with SPF 70 sunscreen.

The only change between #1 and #2 is the length of the bodice—this time I did a few more rounds (38 instead of 35).

Now I'm ready to try something more challenging! I'm going to make a dress to wear at my launch party in October—fingers crossed it works out...

(She stuck a crochet hook in a ball of yarn and called it a yarnipop.)

[Edit 6/21: Kate asked for a close-up of the bodice. I was concerned that the larger print would look odd under the shirring, but I think it looks totally fine.]

Sundress!

(Thank you for all those enthusiastic comments about Petty Magic—I wish I could give every one of you a galley!)

On a sultry day in Brooklyn last summer, I envied every girl out and about in a pretty sundress. Feminine vanity aside, they were keeping a lot cooler than I was in jeans. I wanted sundresses, one for every day of the week.

The pattern is Heather Ross's Mendocino sundress, which she has generously posted on her website. I usually try to buy from a designer/shop offering free patterns, and I did pick up some awesome Mendocino fabric via Fabricworm, but I decided to use it for a different dress out of Cal Patch's Design-It-Yourself Clothes: Patternmaking Simplified. (More on that later.)

I know this is going to sound really nerdy, but I've been in love with this calico since I was a teenager. I'd bought a few yards of it at a mom-and-pop fabric shop back in high school for a dress I got quite a bit of wear out of but am much too embarrassed to show you, and every time I looked at that old dress in my scrap pile I wished I had more to sew something up using a proper pattern. I finally made it back to that shop before Christmas, and what do you know—they still had the fabric, and it was still four bucks a yard!

I remember Kelly saying (back in the day) that it was the sort of thing one's grandmother would wear—"in a good way." This fabric is very vintage-y (heck, it probably is vintage)—that's why I love it so much.

A few notes, if you want to make this dress:

—It was $6.47 at FedEx Office to get the pattern printed on a 24 x 44" sheet of paper. A little bit more than I thought it would be, but taping a lot of smaller pages together would have been rather tedious. (Apparently FedEx ate Kinko's. Whatever it's called nowadays, the email-to-print service is pretty nifty.)

—The schematic indicates that you should position the pockets 14 to 18" below the top of the dress; I decided on 18" because I'm tall, but when I finished sewing the seams and tried it on (insofar as it could be 'tried on' at that stage) my hands hardly reached the pockets. I decided they weren't worth adjusting, seeing as I probably wouldn't use the pockets anyway, so I just ripped the pocket seams and stitched up the sides. But if I make this dress again I'll go with a pocket placement of 14".

—You need elastic thread for the shirring. A nice lady at Jo-Ann pointed me to Dritz brand in the notions section (with all the other types of elastic), which is a lot less expensive per yard than the smaller spools you find on the rack with all the other types of sewing thread. (It's $1.59 for 30 yards of Dritz versus 11 yards of Gutermann. Or you could buy a ginormous spool of it here, but I can't imagine ever needing or using $40 worth of elastic thread unless you're also making jewelry.)

—Found some handy tips at Projects & Preoccupations. For one, the back hem needs to be taken up a bit more than the front because of the extra fabric at the bust—that probably wouldn't have occurred to me on my own! So I pinned up the hem and tried it on before sewing.

(Long-arming it. I wanted to get a detail of the shirring, but every close-up I took was basically 'and here are my boobs!')

This dress was quick to make, too—took less than a week. The pattern says you can sew the whole thing in an afternoon, and if I make another one I'm sure it'll go a lot faster.

I'm excited to be getting more proficient at sewing, but I have GOT to become tidier and more careful—I have a bad habit of dropping pins in the carpet. Yesterday I went for a run, and on my walk back to the car I felt something sharp in my sock. Yup. A pin. I'm lucky it didn't stab me in the foot. And last week I woke up and found safety pins under my pillow...at least they were closed!

(Thanks to my mother for the first photo.)

Welcome to Babyville, part 2

I'm home! Been anxious to blog about this:

It's a zig-zag quilt, directions courtesy of Purl SoHo, measuring 40" x by 54" because I didn't want the baby to grow out of it right away (the sample quilt measures 32" by 44").

Ailbhe and Christian want to be surprised, which made choosing colors and fabrics slightly more challenging. Nothing too flowery, but I didn't want something too overtly boyish either. (I couldn't see giving the orange-and-blue Purl sample quilt to a little girl, for instance.)

I found this thoroughly adorable Alexander Henry owl fabric for the backing (from Fabric Worm on Etsy), and I think it's perfectly unisex. (This is what I told my mother, who was surprised to learn that owls are hermaphrodites.) (Edit: this was a really dumb joke!)

I chose the zig-zag colors to match the backing fabric, and decided that using salmon (it's not pink!) and blue would balance each other out. The fabrics are mostly fat quarters from Jo-Ann, though I did pick up two of the three salmon fabrics (and the quilt batting) from Purl SoHo while I was in New York. I used this handy tutorial to help with the binding.

It's not perfect, but it's only the second quilt I've made—this project was definitely an exercise in anti-perfectionism. I'd never have finished it in time otherwise! There are definitely more quilts in my future...

Oh, and here's the baby heffalump with his sweater vest.

His name is Edmund (pending baby's approval).

Patternmaking with Cal Patch

I'm trying to improve my sewing skills, so to that end I signed up for a patternmaking workshop at the Brooklyn General Store last Sunday. There wasn't actually any sewing involved (yet)—you take your own measurements and plot them on newsprint paper to make a pattern for a jersey t-shirt. As it turned out, I was the only person who showed up for the class, so I basically got a private lesson with the marvelous Cal Patch.

Cal has recently published Design-It-Yourself Clothes: Patternmaking Simplified, which I really wanted to buy on the spot, but I must sheepishly confess that I can't bring myself to pay full price for a book when I can get a discount online. (Cal is totally cool with this, and she feels the same way; authors receive the same percentage whether you pay the list price or get 40% off. It turns out we're both published by Crown/Random House, and we talked about how the titles on the Potter Craft list have gotten much better in the last couple of years. Her book being proof of that, of course!) I'm planning to use some of my Christmas loot to order myself a copy.

Her book is full of patterns that are fresh and modern without being trendy, and they're designed so you can easily modify them to suit your own taste and measurements. It was raining hard when we left Brooklyn General, but I was feeling really cheerful and inspired despite having no umbrella. Cal is a great teacher, and I highly recommend taking a class with her.

Make Do and Mend

How exciting is this: I've got an essay in this week's episode of Cast On, which is far and away my favorite podcast! The series theme is 'Make Do and Mend,' taking inspiration from WWII-era booklets on repurposing and economizing. I'm continually inspired by my grandparents' thrifty lifestyle (I've already told you about the candy tin o' buttons), so that's what my essay is about. I know a lot of you reading this aren't knitters, but Brenda's podcast is well worth a listen regardless.

I have so many items of clothing ready to be mended or repurposed—the challenge is actually getting down to making the alterations. There's the vintage 100% wool cardi I mention in the essay, which I think will become a button-down vest from A Stitch in Time (a huge, beautifully illustrated book of modernized vintage patterns, which is on my Christmas wish list). There's another purple sweater I got for Kate when I worked at Anthropologie back in college, which is half-felted; I might as well felt it all the way and make a throw pillow out of it. I have a mohair jumper my mom got me at Kilkenny Design when I graduated with my M.A.; it's forest green, a good color for me, but the design itself is none too flattering (why did it take me so long to realize that?!), and someday I want to frog it (mohair...yikes!) and reuse the yarn so it can still remind me of graduation and my mother's generosity. And I have a sweater I got in Dublin in 2001 that has a hole in the elbow; I still love it, it's purple and in perfect condition otherwise, so I need to pick up some matching sock yarn to knit a pair of elbow patches. I have a feeling I'm going to have to visit more than a few yarn shops before I find a color that's close enough.

And I have yet another project that's all about the buttons: my mother has a black cotton cardigan with beautiful sparkly ones that she never wears because the garment itself is faded. As it is, those buttons are going to waste. So for Christmas I’m knitting a classic cardigan that will showcase those lovely buttons (it was her idea), and that faded but still serviceable cotton cardi will get a plainer set of buttons (out of the tin) before it’s donated to Goodwill. Two sweaters out of one!

But add all these makeover sweaters to a huge pile of unfinished sewing and knitting projects, and it's really overwhelming. Right now I really only have one completed 'make do and mend' project to boast of, and it's five or six years old. My favorite jeans had huge holes in the seat, too big to patch, so I decided to make a yoga mat bag out of one of the legs. I cut out a circle for the bottom out of the other leg, used a sparkly purple shoelace for a drawstring, and a rainbow-striped belt for the strap. Now that I've got my mom going to yoga classes, I figure I can use some corduroy scraps to make her a mat bag too. I'll just have to add it to The List.

Next entry: vintage sweater #3!

Christmas gifts, belatedly

I come from a crafty family. My aunt Kathy used to paint the most fantastic ceramic Christmas ornaments—I'm talking four-foot-tall classical Santas, and Christmas trees with real working lights—and my aunt Debbie has a whole room dedicated to all her various crafts (scrapbooking, sewing, soap- and card- and candle-making, etc.)

As a kid I dabbled in counted cross-stitch under their guidance, and I made a quilt and a few other things in high school. You know how it is when you've got plans for all the cool things you want to make—more quilts, and sun-dresses, and throw pillows, and rag dolls. You start to develop quite a big stash of fabrics. And then life gets in the way, of course, so you never really do find the time to make (or finish) that quilt with the matching throw-pillows, or the dress, or the rag doll, and all that fabric sits in big boxes in your closet.

With each new holiday season I become increasingly set on handmade over store-bought, using materials already on hand whenever possible. In June 2007, while Kate and Elliot and I were on Hvar Island in Croatia, we picked up sachets for souvenirs that were made from lavender grown on the island. So when I saw a big bin of dried lavender at the Mediterranean stand at the Saturday market, I decided I would make my own sachets out of all that unused calico sitting in my closet.

Easy sewing (4" squares, with half the fourth side left open for stuffing), quick assembly, looks so nice with a ribbon and a matching soap or vial of essential oil. So that's what I did.


I also knit quite a few Christmas gifts this past year, but I still haven't gotten decent photographs of most of them!