just be.

and sewing!

today i finished two sewing projects. the first is my laura skirt, a variation on an a-line skirt from the design-it-yourself clothes book i'm trying to work my way through this summer. i finished the rest of the skirt a couple of weeks ago, but the ruffled hem has been giving me fits. finally, today, i took out a spool of white tulle and made a pleated ruffle, and i love it!

 

just love it. i can't wait to wear it tomorrow. AND i made a little tank top to wear with it, the grainline studio tiny-pocket tank, but without the tiny pocket. a good first top project, though not a perfect pattern, IMO. (does the notation "seam allowance" on the pattern pieces mean that i need to add that? the instructions don't say when to sew the shoulder seams. does it matter? and the bias strips aren't long enough to go around the parts they're made to go around. but these are minor quibbles.) because of the business with the bias strips, i have some bits i'll need to redo, but i'm wearing it tomorrow, dammit.

i did a simple folded hem with a graphite thread, and the rest of the edges are bound using bias tape. commercially made, purchased bias tape, at that! scandalous, i know.

i love it.

the grey and blue (SURPRISE EVERYONE) look beautiful together, i think.

clean-plate cleanse, day 3

blogging so much because my life is so fascinating lately! right? yeah, don't answer that. really it's just because there are a lot of Things going on, lots of changes and new projects, that i'm photographing (well, if you can call them "photographs") and want to remember later.

so.

here is this morning's not-very-tasty-but-good-for-me-so-i-finished-it-anyway spinach juice thing:

a lovely color of green and not terrible tasting but definitely not something i'm going to look forward to for the next 18 days or whatever it is. but good for me! and i like to do things that are good for me.

also today i got most of the way through the muslin for my laura skirt. i'd have finished the muslin and maybe even gotten the real fabric cut out if it hadn't been for those meddling kids. i mean if i hadn't needed to come upstairs to look up how to do gathering stitches. that's a thing that cal patch thought i knew, which i don't. i mean, i know about them like i know about driving stick shift: i get it in theory but god help me if i try to put it into practice. at least i can't kill anybody with gathering stitches (as far as i know). anyway, progress shots:

first task of the day was to sew together the ends of the yokes (one outside yoke and one facing yoke). but, being the super sleuth that i am, i noticed immediately that the ends of my front and back yoke pieces weren't the same depth, which would look funny. so i marked and trimmed off half an inch from the bottom of the back yoke pieces and the corresponding pattern piece.

have i mentioned that i really love my rotary cutter? love it. it's magical.

next task was to sew the outside yoke pieces to the upper edge of the skirt pieces. i made this more difficult than it needed to be because i started out pinning the wrong edge of the yoke pieces to the skirt edge, but i figured it out before i did any sewing. also i drew no blood, so that's a plus. i didn't do a terrible job, but i did have a tiny unintended dart

where i failed to ease the curves together. this task involves sewing together two curves that are mirror images of one another, which is trickier than it sounds, at least for a novice like me. 

i also accidentally sewed the skirt seam allowance closed

which is *definitely* something that i would take out and redo if this were the real skirt. on the muslin, i'm not sweating it, but i did take photos of my mistakes so i'd remember and learn from them.

the next task was to sew the yoke facing to the outside yoke, which was relatively untraumatic. so no photos of that. bonus: still no blood.

spoiler alert: no blood drawn all day. i'm still awake for another five hours or so, but i don't expect to be handling any sharp objects. so unless jack-jack plays roughly with me between now and then, probably i won't have bled on anything. and that's a pretty good day, in my book.

but i digress: after sewing the outside yoke to the skirt and the yoke facings to the outside yoke, then it's time to flip the facings to the inside and attach them. this covers the seam that joins the outside yoke to the skirt and adds some stability at the waist. i think. anyway, this part was fun, but i still managed to do a not-very-good job.

i skipped the basting and went straight from pinning (shown here) to sewing. that's mainly because basting falls into the same category as driving stick shift and sewing gathering stitches. so i'll be looking that up tonight, too. (really? she wants me to pull out a hand needle and thread for this part? am i in prehistoric times or something?)

i did okay with this part. after the pinning (and, in theory or if you're a Good Sewist, the basting), you edge stitch the waist and the yoke part you just pinned. you're doing it from the public side of the skirt, which means that you can't see all the pinning you just did or the way the folded yoke facing meets the seam. which is *probably* why she wanted me to baste that beforehand.

whatever. i do what i want.

(i know that at least one friend is laughing right now because she knows that i am a goody two shoes who follows the rules. i do feel guilty as hell about it, if that helps. i'll be doing it correctly for the real skirt.)

so. anyway. i didn't screw it up too badly, but i sewed a dart down in the wrong direction (again, something i'd fix in the real fabric but not an issue for the muslin):

but overall it's not awful.

and, to finish the seams, i tried a couple of the stitches on my machine:

(insert "I have no idea what I'm doing" meme here.)

the zigzag stitch is the one i'll try to use, but wider and more carefully, i think. no idea what the other one is. go home, sewing machine; you're drunk.

so at the end of the day, this is what i have:

front of skirt, with ruffle piece waiting to be sewn on, and

back of skirt. the ruffle is one strip of fabric, 50 percent longer than the hem sweep plus seam allowances, sewn into a circle. now i just have to figure out the gathering business and attach it. and then i get to work on the real skirt! 

i rewarded myself for my productive afternoon with a yummy dinner of quinoa, adzuki beans, kale, and pineapple-mango salsa.

(the quinoa and beans are under there, i swear.) and i'll have an apple later with some almond butter. the quinoa was already cooked from day 1 breakfast, and the beans already rinsed from the day 1 smoothie, so this was super easy to throw together. nommy.

oh, and my PSA of the day: turn on the air conditioning if it's hot. i've been sewing in our dining room, which is on the first floor and therefore not air conditioned, and i was cranky and woozy and tired all day yesterday. today, i flipped on the room air conditioner in there and was happy as a clam. a sew-y little clam.

nommy meals

i forgot to mention the very yummy lunch i had on the first day of the cleanse. lunch every day is supposed to be brown rice or quinoa, beans, and greens, and then a piece of fruit. day 1 i piled a bowl full of some of the cooked quinoa from that morning's breakfast, some of the adzuki beans from the smoothie, a couple of leaves of kale, salt, pepper, olive oil, and apple-cider vinegar, warmed it for about 45 seconds in the microwave, and ate. really good and really filling.

over the course of the day, i ate an entire bunch of kale. and i gotta say, i felt too full to eat anything else by late afternoon. not bloated, just...like i could feel the food way up at the tippy top of my GI tract. i didn't want to eat on day 2 (yesterday) and ate pretty little, and i felt pretty lousy. just very little energy and still uncomfortably full. more in than out, if you will. so today (day 3), i'm really focusing on staying hydrated and following my instructions (i haven't eaten anything NOT on the list, but i haven't eaten all the things i'm supposed to).

anyway, the good news is that everything has been pretty yummy, except this morning's drink. every day, i'm supposed to drink a blend of two big handfuls of greens, a whole peeled lemon, flax seeds, magnesium powder, and ice water. (the powder and seeds don't have to be in this drink, but i'm supposed to have those every day, too, so i figured i'd just blend it all together.) not my favorite beverage. not terrible, but not my favorite. but it's just one drink, and it's just 21 days. and most of the days since i started eating more cleanly (which is about three weeks), i've felt much better than before. much milder and fewer GI symptoms and way fewer and less severe migraines. so the regular food in the house—the real bagels and kettle corn, for instance—is not tempting at all.

i am working on my skirt, still. got through the first seam of the muslin yesterday and tried out a couple of methods of seam finishing. both were pretty disastrous, but i think i have a zigzag stitch on my machine (task for today: dig up the manual, srsly) that will work better and more easily. i'm trying hard not to want a serger.

skirt seams

not feeling so great today, so hot and tired, so i didn't make the speedy progress i'd hoped on my laura skirt today. i did get a muslin (kind of sloppily) cut out and sewed the darts and the first seam. i also attempted two finishes for the seam allowances to see which one i'd like to try on this skirt, and neither was very good. i'm attributing it to not feeling well.

the left seam allowance has just been turned back in half and sewn to itself. i've been using just a 0.5-inch seam allowance, which is too narrow for me to really sew in half very well, though it might be better if i pressed and pinned first.

the right seam allowance has seam binding sewn to it, folded over, then sewn on the other side.

again, would have benefited from pressing and pinning. duh. i'll be practicing this technique on the rest of the muslin so that i'm better at it by the time i get to the skirt.

clean-plate cleanse, day 2

so far, so good. today has been much less of a production than yesterday. leftover quinoa for breakfast with some ground flax seeds sprinkled in (supposed to have a serving of those every day), and lunch is a ridiculously easy raw soup: carrots, an apple, almond milk, and olive oil in the blender, garnished with a sprinkling of crumbs from a package of kale chips. sweet and cold, perfect for a summer lunch.

other things happening at the bernard ranch and spa: drafted a pattern this morning for my second sewn thing, another skirt based on the first but adding a yoke at the waistline with facings and adding a three-inch ruffle at the hemline. it's the laura skirt pattern from design-it-yourself clothes: patternmaking simplified by cal patch. i haven't found a photo from the book itself and (duh) neglected to take one when the book was in front of me (now it is all the way downstairs and i am all the way up here), but it's an a-line skirt of any length with a yoke of any depth and ruffle of any height and whatever level of ruffliness you want. my favorite thing about sewing, as with knitting or weaving, is the ability to choose my own adventure with each item. this particular skirt will be in a beautiful dark grey (i know: SHOCKING):

we'll see how it goes. i've gotten the pattern pieces cut out of my tracing paper:

next is to press and cut a muslin to be sure i didn't screw anything up and make adjustments if needed, meanwhile washing, drying, and pressing the grey fabric before cutting out the pieces and sewing them up. this will be my first time making a facing (there's basically a yoke on the inside and on the outside of the piece to give it some shape, flattering to the waistline) and my first time doing gathers. it's gonna be a lotta fun.™

and the other thing happening around here is the uke acquisition. mr. bee bought me a concert version of my soprano banjo ukulele, a firefly, but it turns out that the workmanship and materials on the concert version just isn't what it was on the soprano, which i adore. i emailed some photos to the terrific shop where both ukes came from, elderly instruments, and they've spent some time looking at those, looking at the instruments themselves, and speaking with me on the phone, and they're willing to send fedex to pick it up but don't have a better firefly to replace it with, so i'm trying to figure out what to do: keep the concert firefly anyway, exchange it for a different uke (if so, what? the bass i'd been thinking of for my next uke is, shall we say, unwelcome at my uke group), or return it altogether.

(edited to add photos of food and patterns!)

skirting the issue

i've been working on making my first skirt ever. my first time sewing in at least 30 years. it's the pintester's fault. and craftsy's fault. but it's not as awful as it could be. which is to say that i haven't injured anyone any worse than getting a migraine and sticking myself with some pins. and mostly it's good, except that apparently neither my trainer nor i can take a good widest-point measurement.

NAILED IT.

srsly, the shape is good, the length and waist will look good once the darts are in and hem is sewn, and i successfully put in my first zipper ever, i think. i just need to be more careful about that hip measurement.

also testing out the jawbone up versus the fitbit flex. so far (first day in), the flex is winning in every comparison. pretty, comfortable, nice interface, better documentation, easier setup.

tomorrow, i'll be volunteering at the toonseum for a few hours to help with the comic arts festival, and then i'll be working on the skirt in the afternoon. this will be my fifth iteration of the tracing-paper drafting of the pattern, but that's why you buy a whole roll, right?

fit to flatter

i just came home from amy herzog's fit-to-flatter class. so much fun, and i learned so much! i took my frankenhoodie with me, which needs just a button band, to get some advice from her on how to finish it, and i got some great advice. now to implement it :)

the funnest part of class was probably the trying on of the sample sweaters. she brought like 50 sweaters with her, many of which were her own designs, for us to try on, to see what flatters and what doesn't. here were some of the ones i tried, and what i liked or didn't like about each:

first is amy's greenaway design, which i adore because of the wide, square neckline and the smocking details:

this was knitted in a smaller size than i'd wear, as you can see from the snugness in the arms and across the shoulders, but i love it. the picture of the back is blurry, but it really flatters my waist in back.

another i love is eunny jang's tangled yoke cardigan:

i LOVE this. the deep ribbing is surprisingly flattering. look how tiny my waist looks!

because i am bottom-heavy (my hips are much wider than my shoulders or bust), the details in the yoke are good for me. the horizontal design at the yoke widens my shoulders to balance my hips and draws the eye upward.

similarly, this circles yoke pullover has lots of business at the top to draw the eye upward and balance my hips:

this beautiful grey pullover is amy's wintry mix design. i cast this one on the day it was released but haven't done much of it yet.

i'd probably need more waist shaping on mine.

finally, another of amy's designs, petrea. i love this pattern, and the sleeve length does indeed flatter the waist, i am much too self-conscious about my fat arms to wear sleeves this short. i'd add at least two inches to them, but otherwise i like this a lot. neither amy nor i could figure out why it dips down so much in front on me.

it was all great food for thought in choosing my next sweater. and it motivates me to finish my sweaters on the needles for sure.

right.

because if you're wearing this, people are paying attention to whether your makeup is well blended.

exaggerated influence

i have this joke--i can't remember where exactly i picked it up, but almost surely from a camp friend back in the day--about how i'm the center of the universe. holding up my left index finger vertically, i proclaim, "this is me." then i begin to orbit my downward-pointed right index finger around my left index finger, which remains still: "and this is the rest of the universe."

sometimes i think i really think that. i try not to, but i can be very puerile that way. i think that's why i don't always enjoy children. they have the nerve to believe that *they're* the center of the universe. i mean, honestly: the audacity.

an example: last night, we watched the steelers play the jaguars. now, the jaguars have played well this season and have handed us our pride before. recently, in fact. but i had hope. i mean, we're the *steelers.* sure, we've had lots of injuries of key players this season--no willie parker, no troy polamalu, ben roethlisberger and najeh davenport getting the crap beaten out of them game after game, and even the sweet man himself, hines ward, was a grumpy-grump last night. but i really thought we could pull it off.

after a very fun afternoon out with m'girls (see another post for that), i was exhausted when i got home and napped away the time that i should have spent changing into some steelers gear. i secretly knew that nothing was clean and that this would mean doing laundry. and who wants to do laundry when you can nap? (answer: not me.) so i told myself that, if i just knitted something black and gold during the game, that would be good enough.

ha. not so much. we flailed during the first half. a couple of minutes into the third quarter, i said to smartboy, "maybe i should go put on some steelers gear." (note: he has no steelers gear. when i insist on him wearing black and gold--which i did not last night, shame on me--he wears his office t-shirt, which is black with a gold bridge on it. this is NOT an acceptable substitute. i tried to shame him last weekend, when we were out shopping and nearly every person we saw was wearing a steelers jersey. it did not work. the man does not shame easily.) he said, "it couldn't hurt." true that. so i put down my knitting, rummaged through the laundry pile, and found my "property of steelers football" hoodie. i changed into black leggings. i did not put on my gold fleece slipper-socks with the black padding on the bottom, nor did i change into black underwear. those might have gotten us that extra couple of points. but i didn't. i came back upstairs and watched the game.

now, in the subsequent moments, ben and the offense were amazing. we cruised down the field like we were plowing over last year's crop. we made a touchdown. we actually took the lead: 29-28. i tugged on my hoodie and said to smartboy, "see? it matters!"

not the months of daily practices. not the playbooks or the coaching. no. it was me in my hoodie.

then it happened. hines' touchdown was disqualified because some ref decided that #61 had been holding, way back behind the goal line on the other side of the field, where nothing would have mattered anyway. and #61 was on the freaking ground when the flag was down, touching no one. but there were bad calls last night all over the place, so it didn't surprise me.

what saddened me, though, is that we never recovered. we couldn't pull ahead enough to make up for my not wearing my gear during the first half or for not completing my ensemble with socks and underwear to match. i was a bad fan. we lost by two very painful-to-watch points.

what's also sad is that i had planned out my blog post about our win while we had that lead. it was very clever, of course, all about how troy polamalu and i have this cosmic connection, that despite his wife's being a stunning beauty and his being a devoted husband and all-around wonderful guy, i could mystically connect to him like mike teevee through willy wonka's tv transmission and help him bring glory to his team.

alas, it was not to be. i bet his wife wasn't wearing her steelers gear.

work gets in the way.

man, a crunch week at work really cramps my lifestyle. seriously. enough of the rush projects! three more landed on me early in the week, i had others already in process, and more are coming. did anyone mention thanksgiving? yeah, i didn't think so.

not that i'm complaining. i am a true type a, love to be busy, thrive on deadlines. i worked like mad to get everything done and was amazed to find last night that i finished everything i had. i worked for a few hours this morning, then went to the mailing center to send the architectural drawings to the code-enforcement office (yay building permits!), and then...the new yarn shop! squee! it was fantastic. so many yarns i've never seen, oodles of color, plenty to fondle. it was fab. i bought a little here (three new addi turbo lace needles for socks magic-loop style). and i spent a little here
(eight skeins of lorna's laces shepherd sock in black watch
(not my photo--from yarn for socks) to make the pretty as a peacock shawl. the colors are very peacock-like. i am so excited to cast on tonight.

alas, time at the shop ended after two slow and longing trips around the store and paying the nice lady for my purchases :) i found lots and lots of things to get on another day, and i told smartboy that a gift certificate to the shop is hereafter the perfect gift for me :)

but i had to hurry home to pick up around the house a little, because today the general contractor, the insulation subcontractor, the hvac contractor, and the architect were meeting us at the house. the hvac guy never showed :( + ! but we had a great meeting with the other three. WE CAN HAZ STAIRS ON NOVEMBER 28!!!1!! omg ponies! i am SO excited. we'll finally have a third floor! we will have a master bedroom! we can buy a new bed!! squeee!!! i cannot wait. and the insulation guy is awesome; we're getting blown-in cellulose (made from recycled newspaper) in all the exterior walls, which should make the house a lot warmer and of a stabler temperature than it ever has been (currently i'm pretty sure that there's zero insulation--we had heating bills in the several hundreds in the coldest months last year).

i didn't make it to the grocery store like i'd hoped, though; i wanted to get some nonperishables today so that my just-before-thanksgiving trip would be a little easier. but i've made my list, so if i get up the nerve to walk into whole foods tomorrow, i'll know what to get. i'm making two batches of soup--one with bacon and one vegetarian--two batches of brussels sprouts--one with pancetta and one vegetarian--and vegetarianizing the stuffing recipe. we're having two vegetarians (actually, one wants a salmon steak instead of turkey, so she's not *really* a vegetarian), so i'm making everything good for everyone :)

and tonight i'm casting on for the peacock shawl, and i get to knit more of it tomorrow with anna and beth. yay girl time!

AND i got my ravelry tees and buttons today! i'm going to wear one of them tomorrow along with my juliet (provided that i can make myself put some buttons on it). yay ravelry! yay knitting! yay weekend!!