Bounty from the garden - July 29, 2013

Dill, garlic chives, some Greek oregano, one slightly unripe tomatillo (wanted to see if it was ready, the answer - no), and one mutant tomato that might be a heirloom variety.

I'm in a pretty crabby mood today. My mortgage people in their infinite wisdom decided to overpay my property taxes, and are trying to recover the difference from me. I've spent at least 2 hours on the phone with them so far today, with plenty more to come, I'm sure.

And I made a major mistake on a quilt I'm working on. A week's work - wasted.

Sigh. Not my day today. 

I make my bed for my cat

I'm a big reader of the Happiness Project. One of Gretchen's maxims is about making your bed, and I totally believe that. However, that's not exactly why I make my bed every morning. Rather...


When my bed isn't made, Biscuit likes to sleep at the edge of it. She's disapproving, really. She carefully sprawls on just the hand-made quilt, risking no contact with the sheets underneath.

Same thing today. She was at the edge of the bed, slightly irate. I displaced her in order to make the bed. (No hospital corners in my world - I straighten the pillows, drape the flat sheet over the bed, drape the quilt over the flat sheet, and I'm done! 30 secs max.)

Seconds after that, Biscuit approvingly settled herself at the base of the pillows, and embarked on a cleaning routine.

And after a thorough cleaning, it's time for a nap.

Unfortunately, right after this picture was taken, one little kitty spit up on the handmade quilt, a gift from my aunt. Sorry, Chandrama! My chores for today now include washing a quilt.

Bounty from the garden - Sunday, July 28, 2013

Swiss chard, mint, chives, basil and more cherry tomatoes.

Yup, there's some shameless showing off here. In case you were wondering, I used the swiss chard in a curry, the chives and the mint in a salad (grated daikon radish, grated carrot, chopped chives, mint, lemon juice and salt). 

Bounty from the garden - Saturday, July 27, 2013

Grape tomatoes, other yellow tomatoes, beets (and lots of beet greens), lettuce, potatoes and basil. It's a good life.

McCalls 6551 - easy summer dress

Finally, some garment sewing, right?

When in New York, I did pretty well resisting fabric, but showed no such restraint around patterns. JoAnns was having one of it's 99c sales, and I think I bought about 15 McCalls patterns. (Ahem.)

Hence and therefore, I thought it might be appropriate to sew one up.

I was originally attracted to McCalls 6551 because of the colour-block, hi-low hemline, but decided my fabric was most suited to version C - the scoop neck dress. Sewing-wise, everything was chugging along just fine till I attached the sleeves. Eeeks. Horrors. Those are not good sleeves, they looked really bizarre, stuck out in a super-weird Star-Trek like way, and were just honestly pretty horrid. I quickly ripped it out and attached a bias strip to finish the armsyce. Much better.

I'm always quite in two minds about dresses with sashes. I like the waist definition, but they always seem a bit messy to me. Same with this one. The dress isn't too sack-like without the belt, and I might end up leaving it off more often than not.

Sizing-wise - I made a small on top, medium on the bottom, and did petite adjustments at all the marked lines.

The fabric - a gift from my mom, many many years ago. 100% cotton, it's a woven yellow and red with the prettiest weave - looks orange from afar, but it's got a lot of detail in it. I love cotton to sew up - it irons well, cuts easy, and doesn't shift under the machine.

In summary:
Likes - scoop neck, the colour of this dress.
Dislikes - sleeves that got ripped out, sash.

Wearability - medium. I like it and will wear it, but it still remains a pretty ordinary summer dress. (Not a bad thing, that. Not everything needs to be special.) 

Garden pictures...

Ok, I've gotten bitten by the gardening bug... I'm shamelessly showing off the garden so far. For context, the front garden (with all the flowers) was in place before I bought the house last year, but the back-yard was a weed-filled mess.

The front of the house. I do love the flowers, but had it been me, I'd have added other colours - the overwhelming purple theme isn't quite me. 

The pathway, leading to the shed in the back. To the left is my vegetable patch. (The arch in the back, next to the composter is a makeshift trellis for some squash to climb up.)

The vegetable patch. Since it was the first year I could plant in the house, I didn't have much of a plan - just threw in a lot of different vegetables into the ground, and I'm waiting to see what thrives, and what doesn't. 

The cluster tomatoes are doing brilliantly. 

I also got these, I think they are San Marzano. Good tomatoes for sauce. No sign of them ripening yet though.

The lettuce is doing well, the peppers (in the background), not so much. It's too early to tell what's going to happen with the Brussels sprouts, in the middle of the picture. 

The swiss chard is doing great though! (The slugs do rather like it, unfortunately.)

 Apart from all this, I also planted a couple of raspberry plants by the fence, and they seem to be doing ok as well. Next year, I'll try to have a bit more of a plan, but I've got to say, it's pretty fun seeing what I can eat out of the garden every day!

June happenings

What a terrible blogger I've been! Summer blogging is always a bit sparse in my world - but this summer has been especially bad. Since I bought the house last year, there's always some house project to do, seriously cutting into sewing and blogging time.

Anyhoo - I didn't really mean to sew another quilt, but at the start of June, I found myself shopping my mother's stash, pulling out fabrics that were very non-me. My quilting style tends to favour a lot of white paired with bright solids - this time, I pulled out the most subdued fabrics, the biggest prints, etc. and got to work.

And it is in fact very un-me. But in a good way - it isn't the normal colour palette I use, but I really love it.

I was also in New York in the middle of June for a weekend, catching up with some old friends, and one of them is going to have a baby. I had three months to make a baby quilt, but since I had all my quilting stuff handy, I pulled out some brights, used the same pattern, and got to work. We don't know if it's a boy or a girl yet, so I used all the colours of the rainbow, and made something that's hopefully colourful and fun.

And the garden! I've been dreaming about a curved pathway since I got the house. We finally put it in a couple of weekends ago. This is a pretty crappy shot of it, and it still needs to be filled in with soil in the bits that are bare earth right now, but here's the pathway so far. I did a fair bit of the work myself (and roped in friends for the rest) and I'm really proud of it. Plus, it even managed not to wash away in the flood we had, so yay!

In actual sewing news, there's been a half-finished dress on my sewing table for about 3 months. Sigh. I've been roped in for a project that's keeping me busy, but once July is over, I'm hoping to be able to get back to garment sewing... Fingers crossed!

Giving in to temptation - McCalls 6112

I've been trying to stay away from the temptation of making easy, almost disposable pieces, but after the intensity of the quilt, I wanted a bit of a palate cleanser. So, I pulled out McCalls 6112 and went about making View A.

The flowers are in bloom, but I'm sure I could have removed the bags of sand. 

There's really nothing to say about this make. I used some knit fabric purchased a while back at Fabricland (yay, stashbusting!), and mucked around with the elastic around the waistline, ignoring the directions completely.

(Sometimes, I ignore directions completely because they are stupid - these directions weren't stupid, I don't think - but I ignored them because I was being lazy, and wanted to do something easier. My elastic is therefore visible on the inside, but I don't really care.) 

I don't think this dress is as strong a win as my previous 6112 make - which I really love. Still, it'll work just fine for lazy summer days, sitting on a patio, and sipping a beer. Which is really all that'll be required out of it.

Unwearable without the tank top, really. 

Baby quilt time!

I love making baby quilts as gifts - they are super-distinctive, but piece up and quilt up a lot easier than a larger size. I even got to baste this on my dining table, vs. on the floor, and my back was thanking me!

The pattern - Finlay's Stars - is based off a Moroccan tile (and will be for sale soon on my Craftsy and Etsy pages, if there are any quilters reading here.) The most work here (apart from the actual quilting, which was a lot of work, since I rather painstakingly outline-quilted it) was trimming the half-square triangles to the right dimension, but apart from that, pretty smooth sailing.

Of course, I did have a lot of help with this quilt - Biscuit was intimately involved in both the quilting and the binding process!

Lots of pictures to follow - this project pretty much took over my life for all of the last week, so I'm going to show several photos of it!

All pieced-up, before adding a border 

Basting on a dining table...

Biscuit *helps* with the quilting...

Quilting detail. With bonus bits of thread, which hopefully came out in the wash... 

|Biscuit *helps* with the binding... (don't worry, I washed the quilt prior to giving it to the mom-to-be!)

Another photo of the finished quilt. I'm pretty impressed with my quilting diligence. 

The Great British Sewing Bee provides the best inspiration!

Ok, first of all - how very awesome was the final of the Great British Sewing Bee? I laughed, I cried... it was so very inspirational! Massive congratulations to Ann - who is amazing! (I'm a lurker-ish member of the Stitcher's Guild forum, and Ann is so helpful.) Congratulations also to all the other contestants, who really represented sewing well in how nice, helpful, funny and cooperative they all were.

Anyhoo - I've been really fascinated by the time constraints on the sewing in this show, and find myself wondering if I could actually sew an A-line skirt in 3 hours, a pair of men's pants in 3.5 hours or a lined jacket in 8 hours.

(The answers respectively are: Probably, Are you kidding me? No way! and Yeah, in my dreams.)

So the other day, as a next project, I pulled out an unlined knit jacket pattern from an old Burda magazine (06-2009-114) and asked myself - can I sew this in 5 hours?

This jacket is meant to be constructed out of sweatshirting. 

I got to work at 8.00pm Monday night.

- It took me 1.25 hours to trace out the pattern, add seam allowances and cut out the pattern.
- It took me 45 minutes to cut out the fabric.
- Another 20-ish minutes to interface all the pieces that needed interfacing.
- I then started sewing...

At about the point where I had an hour left - I'd finished assembling the body and the sleeves and I had three important bits left:

- Pockets
- Hemming
- That notched collar!

Ok, I've never made a notched collar before. Since I was doing a GBSB-style challenge, I decided using the internet to google construction details was cheating. I'd have to figure out the Burda gobbely-gook instructions.

That didn't go so well either - it took me 30 minutes to have the collar basted. At this point - 4.5 hours into the project - I decided I wasn't going to be done, and went to bed.

However, the next day, I did google some instructions, and hacked away at my jacket. I vaguely kept track of time. I got the collar on, decided my pockets looked woefully hand-made, and skipped them, and then hand-hemmed the jacket. (No perfectly matching thread, otherwise, I wouldn't have bothered.)

The result? A wearable jacket. It isn't obviously the most perfect of sewing, but it works as a first notched-collar attempt. There will be more.

The great motto of the story? Sometimes - it's about the doing. I've a tendency to browse the Internet, overthink the next project, walk away when a difficult bit comes up, etc. But there's just no substitute for actual doing.
 

  

BWOF 02-2013-126 - A mini palette cleanser

The never-ending dress caused me to back up on many other sewing resolutions, and so last night, I took a bit of time to trace and cut out out the February t-shirt that everyone's been making with great success.

Today, while hanging out at my parents, I quickly sewed it up, and hey, not bad! I did do a few silly things (chiefly, read the neck binding width as 4 inches, not 4cm - but hey - make it work!)

The fabric is some remnant knit that my mother gave me, I really like it. I wear black much more than chocolate brown, but brown's a great basic as well.

I will definitely sew this again! But first, something from the March and April issues of BWOF. 

The birthday dress that never was...

You remember the Choose-Your-Own-Adventures books in the 80s? I'm going to tell this story in the form of a Choose-Your-Own-Adventure book. It'll be entertaining. Or cathartic.

Once upon a time, Reethi decided she wanted to make the Burda January 107 dress. She had a lovely red wool fabric sitting in her stash, and this dress would have been perfect.

At the same time, Reethi remembered that her last pants would have been rather tight at a straight size 40 and she knew she`d need to compensate for this tightness. She therefore took out her tracing paper, and traced out a...

If you think Reethi wisely remeasured herself, and then traced out the corresponding Burda size, go to Page 100.

If you think Reethi guesstimated - go to Page 45. 

Page 45: 
... and traced out a size 40 on top, and size 42 below. The bodice had princess seams, and rather than add in petite alteration lines, she just decided to leave out the seam allowances on the bodice, reasoning that that would shorten the bodice appropriately.

So, Reethi cut the fashion fabric out, and got to work. She stitched the bodice seams, and then the bathroom project intervened. She fiddled around making t-shirts. She procrastinated and procrastinated cutting out the lining. The lining slipped and slid all over the place, but Reethi persisted. This became the project from hell, but there was a bit of dogged determination.

Eventually, Reethi reached the stage where she attached the supposedly-shortened bodice to the skirt, so she did that, serged the seams together (of course), put in the invisible zipper with applaud-able skill, and then tried the dress on. To find...

If you think the bodice fit perfectly, despite all the clearly wrong steps, go to Page 127. 

If you think Reethi should have basted her bodice first, go to Page 64. 

Page 64: 

Ill-fitting bodice, wrinkly hem. Oh, don't miss the peculiar tail-like flipping of the side hems.

Umm, yeah. That was a disaster. The dress' waist was significantly lower than Reethi's actual waist. So, Reethi proceeded to spend a good 3 hours ripping out the beautifully sewn invisible zipper, her serged-together bodice and skirt, took out another 2 inches of length on the bodice, fiddled to make the darts sort of line up, and then proceeded to painfully resew the dress back together. The bodice still didn't fit right, but at this point, Reethi had sort of given up caring.

Like people marching for survival in the desert (pardon the wee bit of hyperbole here), Reethi's only thought was - one step at a time. But at the same time, this project was now being approached with a fair bit of dread. These contradictory impulses meant that the dress would sit, neglected, for many weeks at a time.

But Reethi's 40th birthday was drawing closer, and this was the dress she wanted to finish and wear. And so it was that at 12.30am one night, Reethi found herself at the cutting table, slicing off almost 5 inches at the hem, to get the hem to be where she wanted it.

Slicing off the hem was a good idea? Go to page 138. 

Ooh Reethi, remember: measure many times, then cut once? Go to page 73. 

Page 73: 
Yeah, that was another disaster. The hem dipped up and down. It undulated like the hills. The skirt vent looked like a little tail. And so, Reethi did what she should have done the first time - measured the hem so it would be even. However, by this time, the skirt was too short to do a proper hem, so she had to use hem tape, and then hand sew the hem on the street-car the day before the birthday. Much puckering resulted.

And the result? This story does not have a happy ending. Somehow, I was hoping the red fabric would rescue this dress, so it was greater than the sum of it's parts. But in the end, an ill-fitting bodice and a puckering, uneven hem killed this dress. I wore it out to lunch on my birthday - hated it so very much, and wore an old pair of pants and a t-shirt out to the birthday gathering.

Trust me, I might be smiling in this picture, but I was throwing a tantrum on the inside.

In the end, the dress was rescued from the garbage bin. It fits my friend Jeeva really well. She's the happy owner of a well-sewn dress. (Badly fitted to me, fits her great!) She's happy, and me? Well, I need to learn to not be an idiot, no? Self-inflicted injuries are the worst!

And below? The future that could have been...

Page 100:
Reethi remeasured, realized she was a size 38 on top, a size 42 on the bottom. She traced out the right sizes, made the right pattern adjustments, and sewed a beautiful red dress. She wore this dress out on her 40th birthday, received a ton of compliments, and was all pleased and happy. The End.

Page 127: 
Reethi tried on the dress, and the bodice fit perfectly! She realized she'd dodged a major bullet. She then proceeded to do everything else by the book. She sewed a beautiful red dress. She wore this dress out on her 40th birthday, received a ton of compliments, and was all pleased and happy. The End.

Page 138: 
Even though no measuring was involved, Reethi evidently had crazy straight-line estimating skills, since she took a rotary cutter to the fabric like a mad woman, and no damage was done! She then proceeded to do everything else by the book. She sewed a beautiful red dress. She wore this dress out on her 40th birthday, received a ton of compliments, and was all pleased and happy. The End.

Skills and such...

So, I spent a bit of Sunday trying to teach a friend to sew. It was an interesting experience... I think I bit off a bit more than I can chew, to be honest.

 - I'd forgotten that though I've only been sewing garments for 5ish years, I've been sewing quilts and suchlike for most of my life. I knew how to sew straight lines, set in zippers, cut with a rotary cutter, etc - all important garment sewing skills - before I ever cut into a pattern.

- I have no experience fitting other people. I knew this was a problem, but I thought my friend and me were more or less the same size. We aren't. I'm a B-cup - bodices fit me with minimal fussing - my friend is likely going to need an FBA. Which I don't know how to do. It'll all be rather interesting when we get to it.

- I wasn't assertive enough in the choice of pattern, we picked a pattern my friend liked, vs. something that would have been a more beginner friendly sew. So, we are sewing with a woven, lined pleated bodice, invisible zipper - these are all some pretty major skills to teach someone who's having difficulty sewing a straight line. Umm. There's going to be a fair bit of muddling through.

Anyway - that experience, plus watching the Great British Sewing Bee (Team Ann!) - got me to think about skills. And blogging. And our online blogging personas, vs. our actual skill levels.

There's a lot of sewing on the Internet that's really cute, but just not that technically great. And as long as we are blogging for our own amusement, that's perfectly fine - my first skirt was utter crap, but I felt like a rock star for making a semi-wearable skirt!

Where it gets problematic is when blogging crosses the line from "I'm showing you my work" to "I'm going to teach you how to do something." At this point - experience does matter! Enthusiasm, while lovely and fantastic, is not sufficient... (It is immensely likely that next week's bodice sewing session is going to be quite disastrous. Slightly in my defense, I'm not getting paid to do this. If I were, I'd beg off, I don't really have the skills.)

Now factor in how lovely and supportive the sewing community is - and there's not a lot of calling a spade a spade. Which is unfortunate. Cause how will you know? Without honest reviews, how do you know what pattern is amazing, and which one is badly drafted?

Anyhoo, random, middle-of-the-night musings. I'm working on a never-ending dress (and a glass of wine - though not at the same time, that would just be asking for disaster!). It's in its last stages though - the lining is in, the zipper is in, I just have the skirt vent to fuss with, and the hem. I'm hopeful to finish it during the week, and finally get to start on something else. 

Fragile beauty in the time of chaos

I mentioned in my last post that the last few weeks have been rough. My house has been in utter chaos - chief cause being a bathroom remodel. And unfortunately, I'm one of those people that cannot function in utter chaos. I just shut down. (I'm a pretty messy person, I function just fine in normal messiness.)

Chaos in the bathroom...

Chaos through the rest of the house.

As a result, my sewing has been a combination of scattered, unproductive and unfocused. I've started many simultaneous new projects - a sure way of creating multiple UFOs.

And the finished tile and bathtub. (I did take out the painters tape at some point.)

Still, everything must come to an end, even chaos. The bathroom is now done, and my house is slowly getting tidy. And there are even finished projects to show off.

This fabric is pretty special. It used to be my mother's favorite sari. All through my teenage years, I've watched her reach for this sari. However, time and multiple washes took its toll, and a couple of years ago, this sari fell apart - the silk ripped, my mother cried, and I cackled evilly and stole the fabric. (Ok, fine, that was a bit wicked. But - in my defense, see this post.)

Since this fabric was well loved and treasured, I was anxious to use it well. However, it's really, really fragile, and I needed a pattern that had no zippers, no button holes, nothing that would at all stress the fabric in any way whatsoever. Enter Simplicity 2192.

Ahem. It's all very pretty, but really, the fabric tore as I was serging the shoulders, so I ended up not serging any other seams. It also would randomly fall apart on me, so I've ironed interfacing to minimize the damage in about a dozen spots on the inside. This is not a top that is long of the world.

(Also, I dare not wear a jacket over it, for fear of tearing it while taking the jacket off. Let's just say this is a pretty impractical make.)

Still, I do like the pattern, and will make it again.

And hey - outside photos! Spring has sprung here, hopefully. I've tempted fate by turning off my heater. We'll see. It's been a long winter. (And as you can see, I still haven't put away the snow shovel.)

In which a sewist (me) makes something out of nothing...

A rather long time ago, my friend Caroline gave me some fabric that was left over from a skirt she'd cut. There was hardly almost no yardage at all - just the bits and pieces that are left over when you cut a pattern out. The kind that's maybe 12 inches or so wide, and the full length of your fabric? She wasn't quite sure what to do with it, and I confidently proclaimed that there was enough there to make something, anything.

Umm. Yeah. There was, but only just. Still - challenge completed.

Excuse my bra strap. Oh, and I painted my living room yellow. I love it, but there's no denying it - it is bright! 

I was looking for a princess-seamed (or similar) pattern - since I wouldn't have enough width to cut either the front or the back on the fold. Thankfully, Simplicity 2938 came to the rescue. I've made this up before - both as a top (first version, second version) and as a dress - so I knew the pattern well, didn't have to make any modifications, and could use this as a quick little stress-relief make.

As an aside, to say that the last month and a half have been chaotic is the understatement of the century. It has been utter, complete, total chaos in these parts - at least part due to a bathroom remodel. I've fled to my parents - almost in tears - more than once during this process. Understandably, as a result, sewing output has been tragically low.

Still, thankfully, my apartment and my temperament are both slowly re-approaching normalcy. I'll do a blog post at some point showing off both the chaos and the finished bathroom.

That crash you hear is the sound of a broken resolution...

So there I was, dear readers, visiting my cousin for the weekend. He lives in the DC area - conveniently, about a 10 minute drive from G Street Fabrics. My last G Street trip was so successful, I thought I'd take a peek and see what they had.

I walked through the store, all smug - here I was, with a specific list of what I wanted - some sweater knits, some cream fabric for a shirt, nothing else. The prices weren't that attractive, I wasn't that tempted until...

Ahem. Erase the smugness, I'd stumbled upon the $2.95 a yard clearance tables. 

6 pieces of fabric and $35 later, I left, chastened. That's quite enough for the year, Reethi, I scolded myself. Surely, you remember the resolution? 

I commit to using 25 pieces of stash fabric in 2013. I also commit to buying new fabric only if I will use it up right away.

Evidently, I didn't remember the resolution, because, what else could explain today's little splurge? (The trio on the left.)

I was in Little India, I walked past a saree/fabric store that was closing, everything was on sale - and before I knew it, a navy blue satin had jumped into my hands, along with this lovely fine cotton shirting in a shade of mustard, and a yard of black dupioni that the shopkeeper offered to sell me for $12.

(Toronto readers - it's called Sonu Fabrics? - it's on Gerrard, around Coxwell. The satin and the 100% cotton was $3 a yard - the dupioni was the end of the roll, so I think I just got a really good price. The sale price per yard seemed about $20.)

So, 9 pieces of fabric in less than a week.

Atonement is possible, of course - what's life without a little forgiveness? I would like to make it all up this year. That should erase some of the badness. :)

Moroccan Morning - now available for sale!

I finished binding the quilt yesterday, and promptly took some photos in my backyard in fading daylight. But so pretty!

The pattern's available on my Craftsy store right now, and I'm putting up an Etsy listing as well today.