rostitchery

being a beginner

this post was originally published here on 10 january, 2005.  i repeat it every january to help us all get off to a good start for a new year.  enjoy!

the beginning of a new year brings with it a host of new seamstresses who received their very first sewing machines for christmas and are ready to get started on their sewing adventures.  it can be confusing at first, there are so many choices to make and so many ways to do things, and it seems that many people give up really quickly because their things don't seem "perfect".  i'm hoping to fix that.

the first thing i ever sewed on a machine, using a commercial pattern, was a skirt and top that i made when i was in 8th grade.  it was a peasant top with raglan sleeves and an elasticized neckline, and a 12 gore skirt with waistband and back zipper.  my mother showed me how to thread her sewing machine, gave me a book on sewing, and left me to make my own mess.  this was the result (click to enlarge):

now, before we go any further, please take a moment to notice all the flaws.  seriously--look it over carefully, get a pen and paper if you need to, make a list.  i'll wait.

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so, what's wrong with this outfit?  why, nothing of course.  :)  i wore it with pride for several years, i got many compliments on it, and i always felt beautiful when i wore it.  this outfit was so popular that other girls paid me to make outfits for them too--even one of the teachers hired me to make an outfit for her daughter.

but why did i just put you thru this???  because, now you will appreciate this picture even more, this is the inside of the skirt, at the waist where the zipper joins the waistband (please please click and enlarge, i don't want you to miss anything):

now let me give you a few more details about this outfit.  when mama took me shopping for fabric, the store didn't have enough of the red fabric on one bolt to make the skirt, so i bought some from a different bolt and it wasn't the same dye lot and the reds don't match.  i alternated the panels because i thought it wouldn't be so noticeable (but you can clearly see the two different reds, look again at the enlarged pictures).  i didn't know what interfacing was, so i skipped that part on the waistband.  mama couldn't find the zipper foot, and i didn't know how to use it anyway, so i put the zipper in by hand.  i was in a hurry to make the outfit, so i didn't read the part of the book that mentioned edge finishes.  all the seam allowances are still raw (and they haven't raveled yet, lo these 30 years).  i was also in too much hurry to learn how to gather, so i just pleated the ruffle, by eye and not by measuring, and cut off what was left over.  and please notice that the hooks and eyes are sewn on, badly, with baby blue thread.

the top is much better.  ;)  the lace is not stretchy, but i didn't stitch it on until after the elastic casing was complete, the neckline doesn't actually stretch.  the hem is 1/2"--1/4"--3/8"--1/2"--etc.  and in the same hurry as with the skirt, i skipped the casing on the sleeve hems so instead of being puffy, they are droopy.

however, i DID read the part about pressing each seam as i sewed it--i'm pretty sure that is the main thing that saved this outfit from that "loving hands at home" look.

what's my point???  it's just this:  not knowing how to do something is no reason not to do it.  just make something, learn as you go, before you know it you'll be teaching someone else all the tricks of the trade.

i LOVE this outfit, i am still proud of it, proud enough to show it to you here, proud enough to show it in person to anybody i can trap long enough to show it to them.  whenever i look at it, i hear the song i listened to when i cut it out, i smell the detergent in the laundry room where i sewed, and i feel my heart pound with joy the way it did when i tried it on for the first time.  this outfit made me love myself in a way that i never did again until ella was born.

i could still fit into this outfit before i got pregnant with ella.  hey, this summer i might even wear it again.  just because. 

oh, and that sewing machine?  i still have it, and i still use it.  it makes some of the best buttonholes i've ever seen.

it's not nice to fool mother nature, but it is fun

ella deliberates about her halloween costume in silence, and once she has decided, she is committed.  this year, she decided to be mother nature.

by the time she announced her decision she had already figured out exactly what she wanted her costume to look like (on the ELLA echo you can read more about the symbolism of each element of this costume).

she knew exactly what each part should be made of—she wanted the top to be fleece because last year she FROZE while trick-or-treating in her indian dress (i think i forgot to post about that costume).  she had a blue chiffon skirt in her dress-up box so all we needed after our fabric trip to joanns were the embellishments.

we found all the flowers and leaves we needed at the dollar-tree-i-love-that-place, and we had the rest of the stuff we needed in the art room.  i drafted a top using the child’s play patternmaking program from wild ginger software but you could just as easily use a sweatshirt with the ribbing cut off the bottom and sleeves. 

following her sketch, we hot glued flowers on the top, then embellished them with buttons and glitter glue.

for the sleeves we added some petals and leaves and of course, more glitter glue.

i hand sewed felt fish to the skirt, that way i can remove them after halloween and the skirt can go back to being a ballerina tutu/mermaid hair/cat bed.

for the headpiece, i cut a cardboard shape and then painted on strips of glue and heavily sprinkled them with each glitter color.  i then hot glued the rainbow to a headband and put flower petals and blossoms to cover the edge.

we got the mask at joanns when we bought the fleece.  ella painted it green then we hot glued the flower to one side and i outlined the edges with more glitter glue.

and for the final touch, i cut up a net bath scrubber from the dollar-tree-i-love-that-place and hot glued strips of it to the back of the headpiece to make a waterfall. (it was pure luck that the piece of cardboard i found for the headpiece was green on one side!)  the netting sparkles when light hits it, but i might just add a few sea coins to it just for fun.

 

because it is going to be COLD once the sun goes down on halloween night, there are fleece pants to wear under the skirt, but the afternoons here have been so nice that mother nature doesn’t need them during the day.

two bits of important construction info:

1. for costumes, choose fleece or felt!  no seam finishes required and it has enough weigh to it to give the costume some body.  if you use fleece, put the walking foot on your machine.  (what, you don’t have a walking foot?  GO GET ONE.  you won’t regret it, in fact i use mine for about 75% of all my sewing.  they make them for every machine ever made).
2. learn to love invisible zippers and stock up on the longest ones you can find when they are on sale.  i almost never use a regular zipper anymore, and here’s why:  it doesn’t matter what color i have in my stash, and it doesn’t matter how long they are either.  once they are installed, they are invisible except for the pull and you can just paint that or take it off and use a sliver of fabric for a pull.  i just cut off the excess zipper after i’ve finished the seam.

 

 

ella wore this costume last weekend for the fall festival at her old preschool—she won second place!  my mother asked me what costume won first place but i didn’t know—ella was so excited about winning a prize that she ran over to hug me and i didn’t hear anything after that except “thank you for making this beautiful costume for me, mama!”.  she was so so happy, and seeing her smile made me feel like i was the one who got the biggest prize that day.

*for those who use child’s play, the settings for the top were:  classic dress, back zipper, jewel neck, flared—set in sleeve with sleeve cap height at –0.75”—skirt flare 5, 2” chest ease, skirt length mini. 

 

meet the dorkingtons

last summer, ella saw this fabric at walmart:

 

which she wanted me to buy to make a hawaiian shirt for rudi. and while the woman was measuring the fabric, ella said, " and we need a little more, for me," so i had her measure out another yard, and then ella said, "and some for mama". and thus were born these:

 

and i kid you not, people literally stopped their cars as they passed us on the street to ask were we got the family outfits. and then when they got close enough to see it was "cars", i could have sold the whole set off our backs.

and best of all, ella's dress and my shirt are the exact same pattern and size--the only difference is that ella's sleeves are a little longer and there is some elastic for a waist (inside the red casing)--so she could conceivable wear this until she is an adult, if she so chooses.  i kind of hope she'll do that--it would be so sweet to think she still loves her baby things.

peacock rejoicing

ella wanted to be a peacock for halloween.

 

she saw a picture of one online.

 

so she described to me exactly what her costume should look like.  "not real feathers.  fadric feathers.  painted on fadric.  with fadric paint."  this is a child who has watched mama paint her fair share of fadric.

 

so i made a sketch.

and she painted the feather on paper as a guide.

and i made her a peacock. 

 

 

she told me that everybody thought she was a peacock wearing girl's shoes.

 

gory details: 

base costume drafted using wild ginger software's "childs play" pattern drafting program.  ruffles are strips of tulle stuffed with netting.  the tail was drafted using wild ginger software's "wild things! vintage" program--in the program the pattern is called a "hostess apron" but as you can clearly see, it is actually a peacock's tail fan. 

reflective tape on the back of the tail fan for safety.   headpiece crafted from the most traditional of halloween costume materials:  pipe cleaners.

what are the notes on the sketch?  that is some advice from ella on what to expect when she is in costume:  "peacocks make people dizzy with their feathers.  that's how they protect theirselves."  she's right--she dazzled me with her beauty.

    
 

out it went

mostly toys, some shoes, and other miscellaneous household flotsam/jetsam.

that was refreshing.

today's task:  clear the rest of the room from whence this stuff came, specifically:  the room that was formerly known as my sewing room (before i had an actual costume shop at the theater)--that was then formerly known as the guest room (after ella was born)--that is now soon-to-be formerly known as the room that time forgot (due to the massive pileup of things that had no other place to be)--and turn it into the room where the family does their crafts together, specifically:  sewing/knitting for me--"art crafts" for ella--and a painting studio for rudi to work on the painting projects for his degree.

yep, it's an exciting holiday weekend around here.  :D

out it goes

check back today or tomorrow to see if i made it.

major irritation, simple fix

one reason why i always wanted to learn to knit my own socks is that i detest the seam in the toes of commercial socks.  they irritate me, they rub places on my feet, and for years i've just worn my socks inside out so the seam doesn't bother me.  which means for years i've worn nothing but plain, ordinary, non-exciting socks.

and then, it came to me--the seam should be on the outside.  so i ripped out the seam in a pair of socks, turned them right side out, and re-seamed them.  IT WORKED!  these socks feel great, and since the seam is inside my shoe, it doesn't show.

inside sock, before:

inside sock, seam opened:

inside sock, after:

the ripping was tedious, so on the next pair i just cut the whole seam off, and that worked just fine, the seam is so narrow that it didn't make any difference at all in the socks.

i used a serger, but you can do this with a zig-zag on a sewing machine too.  in fact, i might even do it by hand on some of ella's socks--that way i can make a very tiny seam and use very lightweight thread.

yes, it is a little effort but only a little, and to me this is a quality of life issue.  and by the way, sock manufacturers, YOU could do this too--and of course you'd have the motivation to use matching thread.

outside sock, after:

live, in person, in real time!

ok, not really me, but my costumes. 

after posting nearly every day for the entire month of september, i didn't post any day for the entire month of october, but now you can see why:  today, at  2:00pm central time, you can see live streaming video of the opera that i've been working on for the past month, "the magic flute", produced by the vandebilt opera theatre.  the live link to the program will be posted at 1:55pm at the blair venues webstreaming page.

if you miss it, don't dispair, you can always catch it when the archive is posted at VUcast and on our brand-new VU YouTube page!

footage

it turns out that socks, for me, are not that complicated to knit after all.  or at least they are not as complicated as some people try to make them sound. 

however, they are not, for me, a quick knit.  rudi gave me some beautiful yarn for christmas, not last year but the year before--i started knitting my first toe-up sock.  and then i had to rip it out because i wasn't happy with the toe--the increases were weird to my eye--it took three tries for me to get them to satisfy me.  by the time i had knitted the foot and learned to make a short row heel, i wasn't in the mood to stop and fix the one side of the heel that had holes in it.  and then ella helpfully took out all four needles and repositioned them at random in the sock leg--something i hadn't gotten around to yet--so i ripped the entire thing back to a ball of yarn and started again.

meanwhile, i was thinking on trying two at one time on two circular needles--to avoid the tedious row counting and gauge gauging and paying attention--but i wanted to knit them toe up and i couldn't find instructions on how to do this with 2 circs--so i got another set of double pointed needles and knit in units.  i knit one toe, then the other--i knit 10 or so rounds on one foot, then the other.  i still had to count rows but at least i got to use my pretty stitch markers that my dear friend esther had made for me.  by this time, i had decided that i would make the top of the foot in K4 P4 ribbing, which turns out to be somewhat tedious.  and when i got to the heel, i decided to just do what made sense to me--when i got to the turns, i didn't wrap, i didn't yarn over, i didn't do anything.  i just picked up an extra stitch when i got to the gaps and i knit it together with the next one.  not fancy, but it worked, no holes, and i was ready to get to the leg.

so i had all this pretty yarn and i wanted to use all of it--which was why i was  knitting toe up--so i had the grand idea that these would be knee socks, but after 8 inches of K4 P4, on 64 stitches over 88 rows--after those 5632 stitches--i decided that knee socks were overrated, and hatched the even grander and betterer idea to use the rest of the yarn to make socks for ella.

total elapsed time:  14 months.

now--the problem with knitting socks for a three year old is that three year old feet have a habit of becoming a different size overnight, without warning and without permission.  so i hatched the most grandest and bestest plan yet, i would knit tube socks toe up, using a round toe which i worked in reverse and a spiral rib, with the idea that the three year old wouldn't need help putting them on because there would be no heel to maneuver, and when the three year old feet turned into four year old feet--which potentially could have happened before the socks were done--i could just rip out the last couple of rows and knit them longer. 

and since i wasn't going to be working a heel, and since knitpicks had finally started carrying very affordable circular needles in the size i needed, it seemed like a logical time to try out the highly-touted two socks on two circular needles.  which, for me, turns out to be one of the singularly most fiddly processes i have ever encountered.  between making sure i had picked up the correct needle, and making sure the yarn was coming up between the needles the right way and not making a yarn over, and keeping the two yarn balls separated and not wrapped around each other, the socks, or me, and between the mind-numbing tedium of knitting K4 P4 ribbing for 8 inches on 56 stitches over 88 rows--after those 5720 stitches--i have decided that i gave it my very best try and that 2socks/2circs is not for me.

all of which is to say that 19 months after starting the first sock, i now have one complete mommy/daughter set to be mightily proud of and to be bragged on and to be worn to bits.

if you dress like a pirate, do you have to talk like one too?

hit-and-run post for my sisters so they don't die of suspense:

my sisters lala and bina are going to the maryland renaissance festival in baltimore this weekend and they asked me to make some things for them to wear. 

lala's outfit was inspired by this picture she sent me:

and this is the result (i swear the sleeves are the same length--it was hard to show this costume well because the dressform doesn't have arms, so the sleeve heads sort of collapsed):

bina only wanted a waist cincher based on the black orchid jacket from a fabulous online store that she introduced me to called museum replicas (it is part of the jacket but she only wanted the cincher):

this is what i came up with:

i also made some boot toppers for her.

they both promised on oath that they would take copious and plentiful and a plethora of pictures so i'll post them as soon as they send them to me, hint hint to lala.  :)

i love you both most most, have a great time at the faire!

remembering

in the days immediately following the attacks of 9/11, i spent a lot of time just trying to keep my mind off my fears.  flylady was a tremendous help in this--she had taught me that i could add to the total peace in the world by creating peace in my own home.  it was soooooooooo soothing to take up a mop and just clean--to spiritually unite my little effort to the efforts of so many brave, heroic men and women who were cleaning up a far greater mess.  a lot of contemplation can be had while swiping back and forth, back and forth, back and forth....

my heart began calling me to do something outside myself, to offer whatever i could to help.  and like most americans, my mind turned to the one symbol the entire world recognizes as "US"--our flag.

from my scrap bin i found just the right red--just the right white--just the right blue (it even had some stars on it).  i cut and sewed and pieced and trimmed and at the end of the day, i had a pile of little quilted flags.  TINY flags, small enough to fit in the palm of my hand--all different, all made on instinct and without a plan, all of them childish and simple and utterly comforting to my sore, scared heart.

i wore one as a pin that night to the show, and so many people asked to buy one that a little "industry" was born--i sold dozens of these little flags for whatever donation the buyer thought they were worth--and in just one week i raised hundreds of dollars to give to the american red cross.

as much as possible, i will describe how i made these, but there aren't really any instructions because the making of them was more a process toward healing than an exercise in creativity. 

i started by cutting several strips of white and red fabrics and piecing them together lengthwise in groups of two (white and red) and three (red/white/red).  i also cut little rectangles from the blue fabric, not really paying attention to how many stars were in each piece but making them about the width of the red/white/red group.

i cut the group of red/white/red strips into segments that seemed proportional to the blue field--i did this by eye, and i think you can trust your own eyes for this too.  i stitched a blue piece to a red/white/red segment, stripes running horizontally of course, making the upper half of the flag.

i cut the white/red pieced strips into segments the same length as the upper sections, stitched the upper and lower sections together, and trimmed them to square up the corners.

lastly, i layered the flags with batting and muslin backing, stitched around them and turned them right side out, then quilted along the stripes and around the blue field.  i sewed pin backs on by hand after the flag was all done.

i kept two of these little flags, the one that i wore, and one other.  i got them out today so i could wear mine to work, ella took the other one (that one does not have a pin back on it), she held it over her heart and sang her ABC's.  i think that is as american as it gets--to hope for a better future as we remember the sorrows of days past--all wrapped up in the hand of a child.