Some Days, There is a Lot of Friction

Do I know any quilters in the Spokane/Coeur d’Alene area? I am registered for the Amanda Murphy ruler class being hosted by Becky’s Sewing Center in CdA on Monday, December 4. The forecast for travel over the passes this weekend is not good, so I am looking for someone to take my spot. (Surprisingly, the store does not seem to keep a waiting list for classes like this.) I am a capable winter driver, but willingly venturing out into those kinds of conditions is just dumb. If you’re interested, contact me at Janet K Szabo at gmail dot com. (Take out the spaces.) I am completely bummed about this because a class with Amanda is a rare opportunity, for sure.

I went ahead and ordered the crushed velvet fabric from Minerva. It remains to be seen whether it will become this year’s Christmas outfit or not, but it should get here in time. I received a shipping notice yesterday. I also ordered some softshell fabric (hot pink) for the Itch to Stitch Andes Jacket and eight yards of UV-coated heavy Cordura for generator covers from Seattle Fabrics. They were having a Black Friday sale this week and it seemed like a good time. I told the husband I would try to make generator covers over Christmas break.

Yesterday morning, I ran up a muslin of this pattern:

I do like princess seams and the way they fit. I am glad I made a muslin, first, using some scraps of cotton interlock. I was worried about the fit through the bust, but the size L fit well there. I will have to grade out a bit at the waist, though, because apparently Ryliss was correct about me being a rectangle.

I’ve got some chunks of French terry in the stash for this one as well as an athletic knit that I found on a WalMart remnant rack. I’m also kicking around the idea of lengthening it 4-5” and turning it into a dress.

Slowly but surely, I am getting a good stack of basic patterns to hack into the pieces I need.

I left for town around noon. The husband and I had an appointment at the bank at 3 pm to sign the loan paperwork for his new work truck and I had a few errands to run. My first stop was the quilt store south of town. The store has Open Sew on Thursdays and I hoped I might see Tera there. Not only was she there, but so were about 30 other women and their machines. I thought I had interrupted a class.

[The husband gets a lot of mileage out of this, because men do not have “open” anything. He cannot imagine a situation where men would get together to work on their projects and visit. He wonders how much work women actually get done and I have to remind him that sometimes, that is not the point.]

I caught up with Tera, then went into the store and bought some embroidery thread I need for my anatomical botanical pattern.

The rest of my errand-running was frustrating. It started to snow—which was not in the forecast—and it just seemed like everywhere I went, everything took five times as long as it needed to, for exceptionally stupid reasons. I hate inefficiency. The husband, fount of Stoic wisdom, reminded me that “Some days, there is a lot of friction.”

We met at the bank and signed the loan paperwork. Our construction company accounts are at a local community bank. The guy who was our loan officer there for two decades is now the bank president. We have a different loan officer now, but the former loan officer-now-president always comes over to visit with us when we’re in there. We’re all set to go pick up the new work truck as soon as we get a call from the dealer in Tacoma that it is ready.

I managed to get home without some out-of-state transplant unfamiliar with winter driving conditions hitting my car. That’s always a plus.

I think today will be devoted to working on the cream-and-white quilt top. I’d really like to get it done and off the Q20. I’ll see if I can get a whole quadrant quilted this morning. It’s also time to start working on Christmas choir music. Practice begins next week.

Pants Perfection and Pumpkin Pie

I had two projects on the schedule yesterday. The first was to run up another pair of pants to test the changes we made to the StyleArc Linda pants in my class last week. Ryliss showed me how far back to move that inseam. I tested the adjustment using some black bengaline from Joanns. The pants fit perfectly. I can’t get them to fit any better. Having them on feels like I am not wearing anything, which is my litmus test for the perfect fit. I can move around, sit down, and get up without any binding or shifting. The side seams and inseams hang straight, right where they should.

I said to the husband over dinner that thinking about pants and pants fitting is occupying a great deal of my brain these days. I discovered some YouTube videos yesterday about using the top-down, center-out method of pants fitting to fit pull-on pants—until now, everything I had seen involved fitting pants with zipper flies. I’ll get to those eventually, but now I want to figure out how to offer a class on fitting a pair of top-down, center-out pull-on pants. One of my students and I are going to try fitting a pants pattern to her after the holidays, and I think I’ll use her as a guinea pig for that method.

I recognize that I have had a relatively easy time of fitting these Linda pants to myself. Literally all I had to do was to lengthen the front and back rises and adjust the position of that inseam. The waist and hips required no adjustments. I need the challenge of fitting pants to a different kind of body shape.

[Ryliss pronounced me a “rectangle,” an assessment I am still trying to wrap my head around. I’ve always thought of rectangles as not having much of a waistline, whereas mine is well defined. Apparently, though, that doesn’t automatically put me in the hourglass category. The fashion advice I see for rectangle body shapes advises wearing styles with belts and waistbands to provide figure definition, but I’ve avoided those my entire life because my torso is so long that belts and waistbands are never in the right place. Now that I can make my own clothing, though, I might experiment with some of those styles.]

Once the pants were made and hemmed, I pulled out this pattern:

I bought this pattern last year—and traced it, too, so it was ready to go—thinking I would make it up in a fancy fabric as a possible Christmas dress. I even had three yards of Hobby Lobby red stretch velvet (bought on clearance) for making a muslin. If it bombed, I was out a few dollars. If it worked, I potentially had a Christmas dress should I lack the time to make something else. And that Hobby Lobby stretch velvet was nice to work with—much nicer than its Joann Fabrics counterpart.

The design is dead simple: a front, a back, and two sleeves. I knew that the tricky part, though, was going to be finishing that neckline. Sometimes the simpler designs are technically difficult because there are fewer places to hide mistakes. The pattern specified finishing the neckline with polyester bias tape. Ick. No thank you. I considered making a facing, but decided that was too bulky. I auditioned some fold-over elastic, but truly, FOE is the devils’s spawn. (I’ll master it one of these days.) I finally settled on using a length of the burgundy knit from that franken-raglan as a bias binding. That worked reasonably well. I sewed it to the neckline, turned it to the inside, and coverstitched it down.

(I have no idea why the photo is tilted like that.)

I may still make this up again in a different fabric. I am wondering if I can order some of that printed stretch velvet from Minerva (in the UK) and get it in time to make another dress. This style isn’t fancy or showy, but when I am playing piano, I don’t want fussy clothing. I really like the length of those sleeves, too, because I also hate fabric flopping around my wrists.

We’ll see. I am still thinking on this.

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From the “feeding the gaping maw” department, I made the husband a couple of pumpkin pies on Monday. This is the pumpkin I grew in the garden and canned. When I got up Tuesday morning, this was what was left of the first pie:

People do not believe me when I tell them how much food he consumes. I am glad we had girls and not teenage boys to feed.

A Delightful Thanksgiving

I checked out of my Airbnb on Wednesday morning and headed to the ferry terminal in Edmonds, WA. DD#1’s in-laws live over on the Olympic peninsula and the ferry is (usually) the quickest way to get there. However, the State of Washington is having some issues with its ferry system. The Edmonds-Kingston route is down to one boat, so instead of leaving every hour or so, the westbound ferry was only leaving every 90 minutes. I wanted to be on an early sailing to avoid any potential backups.

My plan was to stop at District Fabric, in Port Townsend, before heading to Port Angeles. DD#2 had suggested I check to make sure they were open, first, so I did that on the ferry ride over. Lo and behold, they were closed on Wednesday. I had to come up with an alternate plan. I’ve wanted to go down and explore Silverdale, so I decided to do that, instead. Silverdale is down near Bremerton, which has a naval base, and I knew there was a Joann Fabrics there.

[GPS and I are a dangerous combination. I will happily drive wherever Google Maps will take me.]

A few years ago, Joanns unveiled their new “concept store” in Columbus, Ohio, and said that eventually all their stores would follow this plan. It’s too bad they haven’t been able to carry through. I was in a similar Joanns store in Portland last June. The Silverdale store was even bigger than the one in Portland. Fabric is organized and displayed on well-labeled racks. I saw apparel fabrics I didn’t know Joanns carried. The cutting table was fully staffed by three people and other employees were working throughout the rest of the store.

I bought two one-yard cuts of swimsuit contour fabric. This is basically what is in Spanx. I am going to try it instead of power mesh or elastic in some of the pants I’m making. I could have gone nuts in there—hot pink stretch cotton sateen? yes, please—but I need to sew up the fabric I already have.

By the time I left Joanns, it was after lunch, so I headed back in the direction of Port Angeles. I stopped at the Walmart in Sequim, to check the remnant rack, and as I walked into the store, I discovered DD#1 standing there. She and DSIL were out running errands for his mom. The two of us went to peruse the remnant rack and chatted along the way. We—DD#2 and her boyfriend and I—were invited to dinner at her in-laws’.

I located the Airbnb, visited the Walmart in Port Angeles, and made my way to the in-laws’ house. After a wonderful dinner of Swedish meatballs, we all went to a Thanksgiving Eve church service. I belong to a Mennonite church here, but I was raised in a Missouri Synod Lutheran church, and the Lutheran part of my upbringing insists on popping up every now and again. DD#1 went to Pacific Lutheran. Her husband went to St. Olaf. Both are Evangelical Lutheran Church of America (ELCA) colleges. The two of them have attended the Lutheran church in Ketchikan. I used to play piano for one of the ELCA churches here in the Flathead. DSIL’s parents attend a Missouri Synod Lutheran church, so that’s where we went on Wednesday evening. His mom sings in the choir. I sometimes feel like I still have one foot in each denomination.

We were back at the in-laws’ for Thanksgiving Day. Their dishwasher broke Tuesday night—what timing!—so while DSIL’s mom cooked, I washed dishes, and we had a lovely time visiting. This is the third year we’ve spent Thanksgiving with them.

On Friday morning (my birthday) DD#2 and her boyfriend and I stopped in Port Townsend on our way back to Seattle. Port Townsend is a darling little town with lots of shops. My destination was, of course, District Fabric. They focus on apparel fabrics and have everything from silk to wool to rayons to knits. They were also having a 25% off sale. I picked up the Thread Theory Comox Trunks pattern.

I do not need to make knit boxer shorts for the husband, but I might. He did say that if he liked them, I would have to make all his boxer shorts, so I may be creating more work for myself.

Getting back to Seattle was a laborious process. We decided to drive down to Bainbridge Island and take that ferry back to downtown Seattle because that route was running two boats. Even so, they were 20 minutes behind and we had to wait in a long line of cars. We left Port Townsend just after lunch and didn’t get back to Seattle until 4:30 pm. I checked back into the same Airbnb and we had my birthday dinner at Ray’s Boathouse.

On Saturday, the three of us walked a few blocks over from DD#2’s apartment to the German Christmas Market at Seattle Center. I know this is a pale imitation of the real German markets—DD#2 has been to several in Europe—but it was still fun to visit. Nordstrom (DD#2’s employer) was one of the sponsors. I was hoping for currywurst for lunch and I was not disappointed:

I first had currywurst in Dresden when Tera and I went on the National Honor Society trip with our daughters in 2009. I am no fan of ketchup, so it should tell you something that I love currywurst. It is bratwurst smothered in ketchup with curry seasoning on top. I should make it more often.

The weather, as I noted, was stellar all week. Apparently, that was the first dry Thanksgiving in Seattle in decades.

I was missing the husband and missing Montana, so I bugged out of Seattle early on Sunday morning. I also wanted to avoid the holiday traffic over Snoqualmie Pass. I had a nice, easy drive and was home by dinner time.

Sewing School

The Sewing and Design School in Tacoma is a hidden gem. It attracts nationally-known instructors—Kenneth D. King will be teaching a trouser class there in March—and students of the school have gone on to careers in the fashion and fabric industries. I signed up for a two-hour class with Ryliss Bod. I would have taken an all-day class but someone else had snagged the afternoon spot.

Tacoma is about an hour south of Seattle. I am familiar with the area because DD#1 graduated from nearby Pacific Lutheran University. I left Seattle in plenty of time to get to my 9:30 am class and was greeted by Ryliss, who is a bundle of energy. After a few minutes chatting about Sew Expo, because she is familiar with the event and knows I’ll be teaching there in March, we got down to business. Ryliss handed me a length of elastic to tie around my waist and proceeded to take a comprehensive set of measurements.

The husband measured me last spring for my Sew Expo bodice sloper class. He builds houses and is used to dealing with tight tolerances, but measuring angles and edges is different than measuring squishy bodies. Ryliss confirmed a few things about my shape, such as the fact that I have longer-than-average arms. She measured twice because she thought she got it wrong the first time. I also have a long torso, and the rise on all my pants patterns will need to be adjusted as a result. It’s not my imagination.

We looked at the pants I had made and I asked her about the position of the inseam on the Linda pants. She showed me how to move it further back. I had worn the burgundy franken-raglan because I wanted her opinion on the raglan seams. I thought they needed some tweaking, so she re-pinned them and showed me what adjustments needed to be made to the pattern.

I like her approach to fitting. She says that Kenneth King prefers to teach drafting from scratch, whereas she likes to teach fitting by adjusting a commercial pattern. I have found that latter method to be easier for me, which probably has to do with the fact that I like having some kind of example in front of me as opposed to attempting to visualize an end goal in my head.

Two hours wasn’t nearly enough. I will be going back for more classes. Maybe even one with Kenneth D. King if I am lucky.

[On the way over to Seattle, I listened to the recent Bernina Sew and So podcast interview with Kenneth D. King. I’ve listened to a few other interviews with him on the Threads monthly podcast as well. He is a fascinating person.]

The school has several sewing machines and sergers, including this unicorn, a New Home combo machine:

It’s a sewing machine on the front and a serger on the back. Circa 1980s? I wish I had taken a photo of the front of the machine, too, for the model number. I can’t find it via a Google search.

After class, I headed over to Tacoma Mall for lunch at Panera and a stop at the Joann Fabrics store there. That Joanns is large and had a good selection of garment fabrics. I bought an ice blue rayon sweater knit with a cable pattern, destined for a Harper Cardigan for next spring. I also popped in to the Liz Claiborne department at JC Penney to see what the winter collection looked like.

My route back to Seattle included a stop here:

I love Pacific Fabrics. It is in an area of Seattle known as SODO—South of Downtown. It’s a short walk from the light rail station, but I’m not comfortable taking the light rail in Seattle anymore. I prefer to drive, and the store isn’t hard to get to despite being in an industrial area.

Pacific Fabrics used to have several stores in the Seattle area. I went to the one in Northgate a few years ago, close to where DD#1 and her husband lived when he was in dental school at UW, but Pacific Fabrics closed that store as well as the one in Bellevue. This is now their only location. The store is up a flight of steps into a huge room with wood floors and lots of old circular display racks holding bolts of fabric. I bought a floral rayon woven for a blouse for next spring.

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I am glad I have nothing on the calendar for this week, because re-entry after a trip takes some work. I did record a podcast episode yesterday in between laundry and cleaning and a few other tasks. I want to finish quilting that cream and white scrap quilt this month so I can move on to other projects. I also pulled out a pattern I am thinking of using for my Christmas outfit. I’ll test it with some stretch velvet from the stash.

Next week will be busy. Choir practice starts on Wednesday night. And some time before Christmas, the husband and I have to shoehorn in a trip back to Tacoma to pick up his new work truck.

Sewing in Seattle

I am back from barnstorming the Pacific Northwest. I had an excellent trip and a wonderful birthday. Let’s start the recap:

I left here the morning of Friday, November 18. The weather was clear and I had zero problems getting over the passes, probably because I had packed as if I were going to Siberia, including two coats, two pairs of boots, and all my cold-weather car supplies. I planned to spend the night in Spokane and arrived just after lunch. That gave me a few hours to hit up the Walmart remnant racks and see what the Joann Fabrics stores looked like.

The first half-dozen chunks of fabric I bought at Walmart were all navy blue. Some are destined to be used as muslins and some for actual garments. I need a bit more navy in my wardrobe, so this was not an unwelcome development. One chunk is a navy-and-white striped rayon blend sweater knit that will become a Harper Cardigan. I think it will look great with jeans and a white T-shirt.

The Spokane Joann stores aren’t much better than ours. Their remnant racks were 75% off and mostly empty. I did pick up two bolts of Pellon Easy Pattern at 50% off. That is what I use for tracing and I am almost out.

Spokane is a sad place these days. The hotel I usually stay at—a major chain—had all sorts of problems. Equipment doesn’t work and it’s obvious they are trying to cut corners to save money. Everything seems to take longer. Simple tasks like filling my car with fuel have become major productions because pumps don’t work, etc.

I left Spokane early Saturday morning and headed to Seattle. I always stop in Moses Lake, which is about halfway, because Moses Lake has a Walmart and a Joann Fabrics. That Joanns is fairly new and still a nice store, although I didn’t buy anything there this time.

I arrived in Seattle mid-afternoon. My first stop was DD#2’s apartment, where I dropped off a bunch of items I had brought for her. She and I went over to check in to my Airbnb.

I hit the lottery with this AirBnb rental. The price was great, but the location was even better. It was a quick ten-minute drive from DD#2’s apartment, easy to get to, with off-street parking. (That’s huge in Seattle.) This Airbnb was one unit in a small apartment building that looked like it had been built in the 1960s or 1970s. In keeping with the style of the building, the unit was decorated in mid-century modern furnishings, some of which were obviously original. Everything was clean and cozy, and the view was spectacular:

The evening view was even lovelier:

We had stellar weather all week. I think it might have drizzled once or twice but that was it.

DD#2 and I headed to the Seattle neighborhood of Ballard for dinner and a stop at a little store called Monster so I could pick up the other four Robert Mahar anatomical embroidery kits. I bought the first one there last year. DD#2 also got an embroidery kit. She’s been doing counted cross-stitch but finds it a bit tedious, so she thought she might try regular embroidery.

I spotted some yarn bombing in Ballard:

I took my little Janome sewing machine with me so I could work on some piecing. This was my sewing area for the week:

We did a Costco run on Sunday and DD#2 made dinner for me at her apartment.

On Monday, I took DD#2’s VW Jetta back to the dealer in Ballard for an oil change and scheduled maintenance. While I was there, I test drove an Atlas. I am still casually looking for a new car and the Atlas was on my list. I liked it very much, although I am struggling with the idea that I will have to give up a car that gets 40 mpg for one that gets 24. (Getting another wagon or SUV is a non-negotiable item on my list of desirables.) I thought we were worried about climate change? You would think I would be able to purchase another diesel vehicle that gets excellent mileage. The fact that I can’t unless I move to Europe makes zero sense to me, like many things these days.

After returning DD#2’s car and retrieving the BMW, I went to the Acura dealer to test drive an MDX. I did not like it as much as the Atlas. I cannot stand the fact that the instrument clusters in these new vehicles are as complicated as the cockpit of a 747. Things are designed badly from a user standpoint and that makes me nuts.

[For the record, the BMW performed flawlessly on this trip, despite the fact that it has 150,000 miles on it and the fact that I drove to Seattle and back with the check engine light illuminated. One of the emission system sensors went bad a few weeks ago. The husband ordered the replacement part and will fix it now that I am back home. He basically has rebuilt that car piece by piece over the past five years. I think I am just going to continue to drive it until I no longer can, because I see no benefit to me in getting another vehicle. All that will get me is an increase in fuel costs and a monthly car payment.]

My private sewing class was on Tuesday morning, so I’ll save that recap for tomorrow’s post.

Franken-Raglan

We needed more chicken feed, so I ran into town yesterday morning. I stopped at the quilt store south of town because it’s near the feed store, and they had just gotten in some QT Fabrics double-brushed poly. This really is the nicest DBP I’ve ever used. It’s not as thick as the DBP that Joanns sells. I bought some of this print:

(What is it with purple all of a sudden?)

This is destined to become Yet Another Laundry Day Tee, hopefully today.

I also stopped at Joanns—don’t ask me why, my car just turns into the parking lot on my way home—and ran into Robin. She had my birthday present in her car so she gave it to me:

It’s a chicken pin cushion! So cute! Pincushions are like seam rippers. One can never have too many of either.

When I got home, I ran up a muslin of my frankenpatterned raglan mashup. I used the turtleneck and upper bodice of the Toaster Sweater married to the tunic bottom of the Nancy Raglan:

The fabric is a chunk of (I think) rayon/poly doubleknit from the Walmart remnant rack in Camden, Tennessee. I wouldn’t call it a ponte, exactly, because it has a very subtle ribbed texture. (Think Eileen Fisher.) It is silky and drapey and was a dream to sew. When I put it on, it settled nicely on my shoulders. It’s the kind of top I can put on and not think about for the rest of the day, and that is the goal for my me-made clothing.

[I have run across quite a few sewists on YouTube who mention that they also buy apparel fabric from Walmart. Are you listening, Joann Fabrics Dollar Store Junk From China?]

I started packing for my trip. It is so gratifying to see how much of what I wear now is clothing I’ve made.

Packing for winter travel is so much more involved than packing for summer travel. I need a bigger suitcase because the clothes are bulkier, and I have to take shoes and boots and rain gear and snow gear because I am never sure what the weather will be like. I’ve got chains and traction pads in the car along with a snow brush and a blanket. I look like I am heading to Siberia.

My Fit for Knits book arrived yesterday and WOW, what a spectacular reference. It’s an inch thick—255 pages—with beautiful, clear illustrations and explanations of every type of garment, sleeve style, neckline, etc and how to alter them to fit. It’s all the more impressive because it is self-published, and you all know how I feel about self-published books. 😉

Revisiting the Toaster Sweater

I did not make pants yesterday, but I might today. We’ll see. Yesterday, I made a Toaster Sweater from that lavender stretch fleece I got at Joanns.

Pros: The top is luxe and warm and very comfortable.

Cons: Stretch fleece is a pain to work with. I didn’t quite get some of the settings correct on the serger. Also, I haven’t made this pattern for over a year and forgot that I intended to lengthen it a couple of inches. This top is fine and will go into the rotation, but I immediately retraced and lengthened the sweater for the next iteration.

You will notice that the cuffs look darker. I was very careful, throughout the process, to make sure the nap was running in the same direction on all the pieces. I thought I double-checked the cuffs before I attached them but apparently not. I will not take them off and reattach them because this fleece disintegrates if you try to remove a seam. I did it wrong on both cuffs so we will just refer to that mistake as a design element.

I have some hot pink stretch fleece (Hobby Lobby) but after working with the purple fabric, I am not in a hurry to cut into the hot pink. I’d also like to frankenpattern the Toaster Sweater with the Nancy Raglan. I like the turtleneck style of the Toaster but would like a tunic style top like the Nancy, which has a cowl neck.

While I was working on the Toaster Sweater, I listened to the replay of the livestream that accompanied the release of Johanna Lundstrom and Malena Hjerpe’s new book Fit For Knits. I am even more excited to get my copy. I am familiar with Johanna’s work but she published her previous books solo. She collaborated on this book with Malena Hjerpe, who is a patternmaker and has worked for companies like H&M. Malena had some excellent tips for working with knits—all included in the book—and I expect to learn a lot. She talked a bit about cutting knit patterns and noted that often, knit fabrics will look like they are off grain. The practice of measuring from the selvage to determine if a woven fabric is on the straight grain doesn’t necessarily work for knits. Hmmmm.

I’m also trying to wrap my head around the top-down, center-out pants fitting method. I have the kit from J Stern Designs and have watched her videos and a few others, but I haven’t yet come across that one piece of information that will enable me to synthesize it all in my head. Jumping in and actually doing it may be the only way that will happen.

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Not much is happening in the neighborhood right now. Our neighbor, Ali, has a friend named Sarah who buzzes in and out of here periodically. Sarah is now our friend. The husband helped her replace the pump in the gas tank on her vehicle, and in return, she offered to stain the greenhouse for us. She’s been working on that for the past couple of days. That was a job that needed to get done and it was lovely of her to offer.

We lost a couple of trees in the pig pasture, which was weird because we haven’t really had any big windstorms. The husband cut those up and fixed the fence, because, of course, the tree couldn’t fall in the middle of the pasture where it wouldn’t damage anything.

And I am packing up and getting ready to head out of here. When people find out that I usually leave the husband alone over Thanksgiving, they react with horror and dismay. Trust me, he doesn’t want to go anywhere. He once had a stretch of 10 years where he never left the state of Montana. His idea of the perfect vacation is being alone in his shop. (He will miss having his morning cup of coffee delivered to him in bed—and before people get their knickers twisted about domestic servitude, I will note that he gets the coffeemaker ready before he comes to bed and sets the timer so that I have hot coffee waiting for me when I come downstairs in the morning.) Why would I want to make him miserable by demanding that he go somewhere with me? After 36 years together, each of us knows what makes the other one tick. We laugh about the fact that he bought me a vacuum cleaner for my birthday one year—because I asked for one. I have no use for jewelry.

So I will be a migratory bird for a few days and he will spend time being productive here. It’s a win-win all around.

Contemplating Crotch Curves

I am a blind squirrel with this fitting thing. Occasionally I stumble across an acorn or two.

I have had reasonably good luck with both the Style Arc Linda pants—once I lengthened the rise—and the yoga pants from New Look 6689, which fit nicely right out of the package. I decided to lay them out on top of each other to see if and how they differed.

This is the New Look back pattern piece on top of the Linda back pattern piece.

You can see that the crotch point of the Linda pants extends much further than the crotch point of the New Look pants.

Conversely, look at the New Look front pattern piece on top of the Linda front pattern piece:

The crotch point of the New Look pants extends further than the crotch point of the Linda pants. (It really does, even though it may not look like it in the photo.)

The crotch curve measurements are the same. The only difference is in where the inseam sits at the crotch. After seeing the difference in the pattern pieces, I had a hunch that the inseam of the Linda pants would sit further forward than the inseam of the New Look pants, so I tried on each pair.

I was correct. The inseam of the Linda pants sits about half an inch forward of the inseam on the New Look pants.

Does this matter? I think it does. For one thing, I find the New Look pants to be a bit more comfortable. Comfort aside, though, having the inseam so far forward on those Linda pants is causing some pulling, with the resultant wrinkles at the backs of my legs. The wrinkles are minor—so minor that the pants would be fine even without me messing with the pattern any further—but because I suspect the location of the inseam is causing them, I decided to explore a bit further. One of the reviewers on the sewingpatternreview.com website said she had to move the inseam back because she has a flat butt (as do I) and felt that was a helpful alteration.

Jennifer Stern has a video on her YouTube channel on how to adjust the inseam if it is too far forward. She has two methods: one adjusts the top of the inseam, at the crotch, and the other adjusts the inseam all the way down the leg (or down to the knee, if you prefer). Deciding which method to use depends somewhat on how the inseam hangs on your body.

I have several tasks on my sewing to-do list today, the first of which is to put on the Linda pants and determine if I just need to move the top of the inseam or if I need to move the entire inseam. Then I need to decide if I should make another pair.

Part of me says I should refrain from any further iterations of either of these patterns—or of a frankenpattern combining the two—until I have my private sewing class next week. The focus of that class is going to be on making myself a pants sloper. I think that once I have the sloper, it is going to answer a lot of questions for me, much as the bodice sloper did for the questions I had about making tops.

This poor teacher has no idea that I am coming into this class with a list of questions five miles long, and class is only for two hours.

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I stopped in at our Joann Fabrics yesterday. It almost looks like a different store. The apparel racks have been stocked and all of the bolts are neatly organized. I did get some luxurious stretch fleece in a lovely deep lavender color (all the other colors were muddy earth tones 🤮) and I think that might end up being a Toaster Sweater.

I can’t help but think this is a stay of execution until after the holidays. I’ll see what other Joann stores are like on my travels.

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I am not going to try to get podcasts recorded and posted while I am traveling. I don’t have a laptop, although I’m kicking around the idea of getting one. My iPad is 6 or 7 years old (at least) and I might need to replace it, too, because it randomly locks me out, requiring me to shut it down and restart it.

I Love My Seam Ripper

I set a record Saturday for the number of times I sewed something together the wrong way. I was making a knot top, the pattern for which was deconstructed from one of my favorite Liz Claiborne tops. Because it was deconstructed from a RTW top—and because I had this mistaken belief that I would remember how it went together—there were no instructions accompanying the pattern pieces. I have made myself a top from this pattern once, but that was right after I deconstructed the original.

The front pattern piece looks like this:

It is cut twice—mirror images—then seamed together before sewing it to the back bodice. I knew that Step 1 was to finish that top curved edge on the serger, but after that, I was mystified.

I sewed various edges together and tried to origami the top into shape. I took out each of those seams. I got very close at one point, only to realize that I couldn’t make a knot because the pieces needed to be seamed together to form some kind of circle and the tops of the pieces were finished but not connected. (Had I known what a circus this was going to be, I would have snapped photos simply for the entertainment value.) I examined the original top and the top I had made. I could see what what happening; I just couldn’t figure out how to get there.

I gave up and went to the baby shower, although part of my brain was busy processing in the background the entire time. By the time I came home, I was pretty sure I had figured out the order of operations so I tackled it again.

Success!

I wrote the numbered steps on the pattern piece for the next time I make this top. What needs to happen is to sew the two front bodice pieces together along that large concave edge (right side in photo). That forms a facing which gets folded down (RS together) and sewn along the bottom of the keyhole opening. The front and facing are turned to the outside. One side of the bodice gets flipped and threaded through the keyhole opening to form the twist. Then the center front seam is sewn, enclosing and anchoring the facing at the same time.

Being head blind is so frustrating.

But I’ll use this pattern again now that I’ve written down the instructions. Of all my knot tops, this style is my favorite.

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The sewing area needs a good cleaning and organizing. I’ve bought quite a few patterns recently and they are strewn hither and yon, waiting to be traced and tested. I’d like to get all of that under control before I start any quilting projects, although I did pull out the bin of previously-cut tumbler units. I am taking those with me to Seattle. I don’t want a project that requires a lot of trimming or squaring up of units.

After testing out the free version, I decided to open a paid Metricool account for managing all my social media accounts. I still have some work to do, but I like the ease of use thus far.

Corralling All the Ponies

I taught a class on Wednesday and worked two mornings at the Gift Festival and now I am thoroughly peopled out. I do have a baby shower to attend today, but I think it will be a low-key event. Next week is unscheduled except for sewing. I am going to do my best to keep it that way, and you can bet I am looking forward to a road trip and the opportunity to spend 10 hours enjoying the peace and quiet inside my own head.

I listened to Nicole Sauce’s livestream Wednesday evening. Her guest was Sue Zoldak, who has been on the podcast before and who is a wealth of great information. Sue owns three companies, one of which is an ad agency. The focus of the Wednesday episode was branding. I will admit to copying Nicole’s branding strategy. She is the “face” of three very different brands—Holler Roast Coffee, Self-Reliance Festival, and the Living Free in Tennessee podcast—and had to come up with some way to manage them coherently. Sue Zoldak suggested she put them all under the umbrella of NicoleSauce.com, a domain Nicole already owned. When I started the podcast, I chose to do something similar and brought everything under JanetSzabo.com.

That has worked nicely, but now I need to corral and organize the various social media platforms. I listened to a panel discussion from the fall workshop hosted by Jack Spirko (The Survival Podcast), and one of the questions that came up was on how to participate in and manage social media. A person could spend 12 hours a day doing nothing but engaging on social media. (That sounds like hell, honestly.) The advice from the panel was to focus on one or two platforms and automate as much of the rest of it as possible. I opened a Metricool account and am hoping that it will help me with that task.

Some days I feel like my life consists of scaling one learning curve after another.

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I ordered this book yesterday—it was released on Tuesday and I am very excited to look it over:

I have Johanna’s book on coverstitch techniques and it is worth its weight in gold. I expect this one to be a keeper, too. Her YouTube channel is an excellent resource.

I still have fabric that needs to be turned into clothing, but I would like to find some balance between clothing production and quilting because I enjoy both.

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Another of Sue Zoldak’s comments on the livestream that really resonated with me was that she also gets asked—constantly—how she manages to get everything done and to be so productive. Her answer was fabulous. She said that she demands distillation; people who would like some of her time have to have distilled their requests down to the essentials. She does not tolerate meetings consisting of endless discussions.

This is something that frustrates me to no end. I cannot stand meetings that are social events or meetings that detour down rabbit trails on unrelated topics. (Or podcasts ostensibly focused on sewing that veer off into discussions about cats or toddlers.) My time is valuable. The word NO worked well as the word of the year for 2023; now I need to find one for 2024.

Winter Evenings Are For Embroidery

I pulled out a few embroidery projects to work on in the evenings. I started the third (of nine) squash for the Squash Squad sampler. I’m in the midst of prepping the second of nine chickens in the Urban Chickens sampler, although it may end up being the first of nine chickens because I cannot locate the finished first chicken. The project I am having the most fun with, though, is this Robert Mahar anatomical embroidery sampler:

I bought this at Monster, a store in the Seattle neighborhood of Ballard. (Apologies for the lousy photo, but it’s 4:13 am in my office.) These aren’t intended—at least from the photos and instructions—to be heavily embroidered, but rather embellished here and there. I’ve done two blackberries and the blue veins so far. I’ll do the red blood vessels, the other berries, and some of the leaves and see what I think. I am enjoying this one so much that I may order the other four in the series.

No cutesie embroidery for me! According to the description on the website: The beautifully macabre imagery is sourced from 19th Century French anatomical teaching charts and botanical illustrations.

Monster has had Robert Mahar as an instructor in the past, and I think it would be fun to take a class with him.

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My classes in Missoula and Spokane next week have been canceled, which is something of a relief. The store in Missoula wants another serger mastery class, but only one person signed up for the T-shirt class so we scrubbed it. That one may be better scheduled in the spring. The students from my August class in Spokane want to take the pants class, but the store owner has some upheaval happening in her personal life, and after visiting with her on the phone last night, we decided to postpone that one.

Building up demand for classes is a process. It takes time to figure out what classes students want and also what times are good for scheduling. Some students can only take classes on weekends or evenings. Some prefer daytime. I’m not local to the stores, so that adds another layer of complexity.

In any case, this gives me another week at home before my travels for Thanksgiving. I’ve got plenty to keep me busy.

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I popped into our Joann Fabrics yesterday. They are closed on Sundays now, and when I walked back to the racks where the apparel fabrics are kept, I thought it was all over because the racks were mostly empty. In other areas of the store, however, I saw several rolling carts stacked with bolts of new, unwrapped fabric, including new apparel fabrics. Perhaps they are getting ready for Black Friday.

I worked yesterday morning at our church’s international fair trade festival. Attendance was good, as it usually is on the first day of the sale. We did some radio advertising for the first time this year and I think that helped. I’m going back to work another shift this morning.

Suck It Up, Buttercup RSS

Tiny Screwdrivers for Sewists

I keep forgetting to share this set of Wiha micro screwdrivers. It came in the most recent Tool Crate—the husband’s quarterly tool subscription—and he said I could have it.

I am forever in need of tiny screwdrivers for my sewing machines, sergers, and coverstitch machines. Each brand requires a different kind, so this will be very helpful.

I taught a Decorative Coverstitch class yesterday. I was happy with the way it went, all things considered. Coverstitching is more complicated, in some ways, than serging. I tried to structure the class to minimize thread and needle changes, but students got a lot of practice unthreading and rethreading their machines and moving the needles. (Coverstitch machines have three needle positions with four combinations.) Add in the fact that I had three different machine models in class and I was on my toes the entire time. We got through all the material, however.

I’ve had ongoing issues with students not coming prepared to class. Two showed up yesterday not ever having looked at the supply list. One of the students who had come prepared pointed out that the supply lists were on the website with the class listing. I appreciated her jumping in. Sometimes, when another student does the calling out, it makes more of an impression than when the teacher does it. Yes, students can buy supplies at the store, but that takes time from class and sometimes the store is out of needed items.

It’s a process.

I wore my Burda 6329 pleat-neck top with the black waffle knit Harper Cardigan. One of my students came to class in her Harper Cardigan; she’s wearing it every time I see her because she says it’s her favorite cardigan ever. I will just say that it is wonderful to put on clothing in the morning that fits so well that I don’t have to think about it for the rest of the day.

I sent off an e-mail to the class coordinator at that store about 2024 classes. We need to start getting dates on the calendar. I don’t think I am going to schedule anything at the other store here in town—those classes never fill.

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The husband ordered a new work truck back in March. This is to replace his 2008 work truck and it is the same model as the one he got after the accident that totaled his 2014 work truck. We ordered it through the same dealer in Tacoma. At the end of June, I got an e-mail letting us know that the truck had been built (in Mexico) and was ready for delivery to Tacoma.

And there it sat. The truck has not moved for five months. This has caused frustration on all sides. The fleet manager must have lit a fire under someone because we got an e-mail from him yesterday. The truck has an estimated arrival date in Tacoma of early December. Once it gets there, it has to have the tool racks and tool boxes installed, but we are hoping that we will be able to drive over and pick it up before the end of the year.

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I was surprised to see an e-mail from Bloglovin’ in my inbox this week, so I popped over and logged into my account to see what was going on. I used to use Bloglovin’ to manage all my blog reading, but Bloglovin’ crashed and burned over a year ago. I moved to Feedly. Eh. Feedly is okay, but I really missed the Bloglovin’ format. I am happy to say that Bloglovin’ appears to have risen from the dead. I look forward to lots of blog reading.

Suck It Up, Buttercup RSS

All the Hot Pink

I may only get one or two days of sewing per week—although I am trying to change that—but I am making the most of them. Yesterday, I put together another Laundry Day Tee, the black waffle knit Harper Cardigan, and a pair of StyleArc Linda Pants in the purple bengaline. I also hemmed a Burda 6329 made from some double-brushed poly I pulled from the stash.

The Laundry Day Tee:

This is already a favorite and I haven’t even worn it yet. The fabric is that nice beefy rayon spandex from the Walmart remnant rack. I am teaching a decorative coverstitch class today and I’ll probably wear this top.

Or maybe I’ll wear this one—another Burda 6329:

Decisions, decisions.

The purple bengaline pants fit very well. I can still see a few very minor wrinkles on the back, but I am not sure how to adjust for those and truly, close enough is as good as it gets. I don’t want to become one of those sewists who obsesses over every single wrinkle. I will take the pattern and these pants to my private sewing class in two weeks and get input from the instructor. Otherwise, they fit and feel and look good. The one change I might make on the next pair is to try power mesh instead of elastic in the waistband. I’ve seen some examples where the power mesh and waistband were cut together and treated as one piece.

I am rather proud of those pants and the fact that I was able to identify the issue—a rise that was too short—and figure out how to adjust it properly for my body. I have miles to go yet, but what I learned with those pants will be helpful in future classes. The only issue is that I have nothing to wear with them. Purple is not a color I gravitate to.

[It occurred to me that the reason I love high-waisted pants is because my body is so long from waist to crotch long that high-waisted pants fit me like mid-rise pants fit normal people.]

I still have the top-down, center-out pants fitting kit from J Stern Designs and may tackle that in December.

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Oh look, a squirrel—Itch to Stitch just released the Andes Jacket Pattern:

I need a thousand more hours in my week. This is on the to-do pile, as well. I still have to order Cordura for generator covers from Seattle Fabric so I might as well order some softshell for an Andes Jacket while I’m at it. They have it in hot pink. 😉

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Having done my first successful Zoom interview for the podcast, I e-mailed half a dozen other people I’d like to interview and the responses have been overwhelmingly positive. Most of the interviews won’t happen until after the holidays, but they are on the schedule.

I’ve started working on a few new embroidery projects in the evening, too. I’ll post pics of those later this week.

Bunnies Need Snow

The piano tuner is coming here this morning. He tuned the baby grand at the church on Friday and today is my piano’s turn. I try to get both tuned in the fall. Mine gets very screechy at this time of year. It has a bright sound to begin with—that’s part of the reason I bought that particular model—but the line between “bright” and “screechy” is rather thin. (I am probably the only one who notices, though.) Both pianos have humidifiers on them because our relative humidity averages around 25%.

This guy does a good job, but he’s not Frank. Frank tuned both pianos for years. When he came to my house, he would bring recordings of low brass ensembles with him. Frank played euphonium and he knew I played the trombone. After he tuned the piano, I would make a pot of tea and we would sit and listen to music and visit.

Piano tuning is an art, not a science. I can’t explain it well, but it’s more than a matter of tuning each note to a specific frequency. (Read the book Temperament: How Music Became a Battleground for the Great Minds of Western Civilization if you want to know more, then read the book Grand Obsession.) My high school friend Robert, who lives in Tennessee now, is the most musically-knowledgeable person I know. He is a retired low brass instructor for the Akron Bluecoats drum corps. He did a podcast episode with them last year on intonation. After listening to Robert talk about low brass intonation, I understood why Frank did such a great job when he tuned my piano. Frank was able to tweak the tuning to produce a much richer, fuller sound, and part of that had to due with the fact that he was a low brass instrumentalist. My current piano tuner isn’t a musician.

Frank died of leukemia several years ago. I miss him and I miss how my piano used to sound after he tuned it.

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I stayed after church yesterday to help set up for our gift festival later this week, then came home and canned 19 pints of white beans. Beans aren’t a labor-intensive canning project. They soak overnight and then I put them into jars, load the canner, and run it for 90 minutes. A five-pound bag of beans makes 19 pints and my canner holds 19 pints, so it works out nicely.

I know, Sunday is supposed to be a day of rest, but there is no such thing for church pianists. I had already spent half my day working. And I was trying to keep myself awake. I hate changing the clocks. It’s a stupid practice and I wish we could eliminate it.

The bunny is now completely white:

The bunny should hope it snows (again) soon so it has some camouflage.

I am supposed to have a class at the store in town on Wednesday but I need to find out if anyone has signed up. I also have to check with the store in Missoula to see if I have students for next week’s class. I am supposed to teach a class in Spokane at the end of next week, but that class never made it to the store website. I need to contact the owner. It is possible that the class filled up without any advertising because the store is so small that there is only room for a few students. It is also possible that it slipped through the cracks.

This is a busy week. I’ll be working at the gift festival for a few hours each day. If I have classes, next week will also be a busy week, but the week after that is Thanksgiving and my birthday and I have some fun activities planned.

The Clowns are Here

We have been entertained by the antics of the Stellar jays this weekend. I put some scratch grains out on the platform bird feeder by the chicken coop. Three of them were arguing over who owned that territory:

I saw a fourth one in the trees, but I think it was too intimidated to come down and eat. The jays are only here for a couple of weeks, although the husband opined that these three might get too fat to fly anywhere.

We butchered chickens yesterday morning. Butchering is never fun, but it has to be done, so we do it as efficiently as possible. The husband and I were up early getting everything in place. Our former pastor, Jeryl, came to help, as he always does. Tera’s husband brought five of their chickens. Elysian came over with eight of her birds. We did 14 of our own. It took us two hours to process all 27. We worked in a light drizzle, which was less than ideal, but better than working on a hot day.

Our chickens are resting in the fridge in the old garage. I follow Nicole Sauce’s advice to allow them to sit for a day or two before sealing them in freezer bags. That way, they go through rigor mortis and are much more tender when cooked.

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In this week’s episode of “Can You Fix This?” I had to repair a pocket on one of the husband’s hoodies:

I cut off what was left of this pocket and sewed on a replacement. The fix is not pretty, but it’s functional.

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People constantly ask me how I get so much done. The topic of productivity also came up in the homesteading chat group this week, so I’ve been pondering some thoughts while I work.

I have been allotted the same number of hours, minutes, and seconds in the day as everyone else. Believe me, I wish I had more—I could get more done. But here are my cheat codes. These work for me. Your mileage may vary.

• I am married to someone who likes to work. People ask me if he ever relaxes and I joke that he relaxes by watching other people work. I am also a bit competitive. He will tell you that it’s not a competition to see who gets more done, although I suspect that if I were married to someone slightly less ambitious, I might ratchet my production back a bit. I do not see this competition as a bad thing. I appreciate the motivation that comes with being married to someone who works hard.

• I live by the monthly color-coded calendar that sits on my desk right in front of my computer. I am always looking ahead—by a day, a week, a month—to see what is coming down the pike. I don’t want to be surprised when I suddenly remember, with two hours to go, that I offered to make soup for our dinner meeting at church. I took the sausage for the soup out of the freezer on Friday afternoon so it could thaw overnight in the fridge. I browned it yesterday morning while I was cooking breakfast, then put the soup together to simmer all afternoon once we were done with chickens. (It was very good soup, by the way.) I put beans to soak yesterday so they would be ready for canning this afternoon. I try to be as proactive with my schedule as I can.

• I multitask. I know there are “experts” out there who will tell you that multitasking is impossible, or that it consists of doing many things badly at the same time. I think all of those experts are men. I think women, by their natures, are constantly multitasking. The husband asked me yesterday morning how women can get together in a group and sew, like at a retreat. He wondered how anything gets done. I told him he doesn’t understand because he’s not a woman.

• Organize, organize, organize. Systems, systems, systems. I use my canning supplies all year, so they are kept in an easily-accessible location in the basement. If I’m avoiding a task because it takes too long to locate all the needed supplies or because of some other bottleneck, that’s a sure sign I need a better system. And I make lists. Lots of lists.

• This one is a not a cheat code I’d recommend, but almost dying (twice) does tend to put time into perspective. I am grateful for the time I have and I don’t want to waste it.

My work habits have been honed over a lifetime, so I don’t even think about them much anymore. Maybe it’s discipline. Maybe it’s enjoyment and satisfaction from seeing a job through to completion. Maybe it’s excess energy. Whatever it is, this is how I am and I don’t intend to change.

Atelier Janet

I started out Thursday morning like a house on fire. I cut out a Laundry Day Tee from another chunk of rayon spandex (Walmart), a Harper Cardigan from some black waffle knit (Walmart), a Burda 6315 from some French terry (Joann Fabrics), and another Burda 6329 from a double-brushed poly (Joann Fabrics).

The French terry from Joanns has languished in my stash for far too long. Every time I took it out to make something with it, I would get frustrated by how badly it was off grain and I would put it back. The other day, I took it out, stretched the living daylights out of it, got the grainline mostly straight, then let it relax for a couple of hours before I cut a Burda 6315 from it.

My stripe matching is on point 🔥

I suspect this one will get a lot of wear.

Somewhere along the line, I lost the black cardigan I bought at Target last year, so I’ve been wearing an older black cardigan that is past its pull date and needs to be retired. I decided that a Harper Cardigan from the black waffle knit would be a good replacement. The black waffle knit is identical to a dark green waffle knit that I also got at Walmart. This stuff is so cozy. I made a Patterns for Pirates Cocoon Cardigan from the green waffle knit. Although I like that pattern and the cocoon cardigan turned out well, I think it looks funny on me because it needs to be about 3” longer. I spotted some of the black waffle knit on the remnant rack at our Walmart about a month ago but didn’t buy it. (I am trying to show some restraint.) When I went back to get it, it was gone. However, on my trip through Spokane a few weeks ago, I found another chunk of it on a remnant rack there and bought it.

I am not an impulse buyer, even of fabric. There has been a three-yard chunk of navy blue and white striped ponte on the remnant rack at our Walmart for several weeks now. (It’s very similar to the French terry, above.) Every time I saw it, I thought what a nice cardigan or jacket it would make. I was in Walmart yesterday and it was still on the remnant rack, so I gave in and bought it. I am thinking of using it for an Alina Design Company Fulton Sweater Blazer.

I am getting closer to my goal of having a curated closet of clothing that fits me well, coordinates nicely, and features colors I like. In the process, I am teaching myself fitting and pattern alteration. I know it seems like I am making more clothing than one person needs, but I don’t know how else to learn these principles except by doing. Eventually, I’ll cull the collection to the pieces I truly love and reach for over and over.

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Our Joann Fabrics now has a sign on the door now stating that they will be closed on Sundays beginning this month. Our store, at least—if not the entire corporation—is circling the drain. I did get the end of a bolt of a dark purple bengaline for making a full pair of Linda pants with my altered pattern. I got a smidge less than two yards for $4.

The body shop called yesterday afternoon and said the BMW was ready to go. The husband was home early, so he ran me in. Not only did the body shop fix the car, they detailed the inside of it, too. I feel like I am driving a brand-new vehicle. I do love that car. It’s been fun driving the Acura because it’s a stick shift, but I am glad to be back in the Diva. I noticed, when I got it home, that one of the wheels was missing its BMW badge. The husband said it was like that when I came back from Seattle. That seems to happen every time I go to the big city, so the husband keeps a box of replacement badges—available in bulk on Amazon—on hand.

The washing machine is fixed. I can do laundry again. I made the husband a couple of pumpkin pies from the pumpkin I canned on Tuesday. My goodness, those Galeux d’Elysine pumpkins are sweet! The next time I make a pie, I’ll cut down the amount of sugar. Pie from home-grown pumpkins is nothing like the pie made from canned Libby’s pumpkin. (That is not really pumpkin anyway, but a different squash variety.) It’s like the difference between eating vine-ripened heirloom tomatoes and the styrofoam ones they sell in the grocery store.

Today is chicken butchering day. It’s not our favorite day of the year, but it has to be done. If we don’t butcher chickens who are too old to lay, we’re just feeding pets. Feed is expensive. There is rain in the forecast for this afternoon, but we should be done by noon.

I put a couple of handfuls of scratch grains out on the platform feeder by the chicken coop yesterday afternoon, and within minutes, there were three Stellar jays arguing over who got the bounty. The bunny is about 2/3 white now. I’ll try to get a picture the next time it’s in the yard.

A New Tried and True

Alliteration and rhyming today.

I made up Burda 6329 a few weeks ago but I did not like the fact that the sleeve pattern piece had a shoulder dart in it. That pattern is designed for knit fabrics. I thought the dart was unnecessary and unattractive, so I re-drafted the top of the sleeve without it. Yesterday morning, I ran up a quick muslin to check the fit.

Close, but not quite. I had pulling at the shoulders. I generally like raglan tops because I have broad shoulders, but these sleeves needed more breathing room. I did a broad shoulder adjustment according to this tutorial on the 5 out of 4 Patterns website, then ran up another muslin out of some double-brushed poly from the Walmart remnant rack. I wasn’t crazy about the print—it was intended for use as a muslin all along—but now that the top is done, I like it very much.

It fits beautifully. I could live in Laundry Day Tees, but some of the fabrics in my stash are only two-yard lengths. The LDT needs about 2-1/2 yards because of the width of the front and back pieces that create the swing. I can get Burda 6329 out of two yards, and it’s dressier than a plain T-shirt thanks to those pleats at the front neckline.

Speaking of LDTs, I hemmed two more yesterday, as well. I’ve never been much for tie-dye, but I love these colors and this rayon spandex has a lovely feel and drape:

This black floral print is also rayon spandex, but in a lighter weight. It’s also a Walmart remnant rack find. It doesn’t feel like a very good fabric to me, to be honest—certainly not as nice as the tie-dye fabric—but I liked the print.

So that’s three tops added to the closet and another pattern added to the tried-and-true pile. I’ll probably run up a couple more using Burda 6329. I have two lengths of knits with chickens on them that are begging to be made into tops.

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I did my first podcast interview yesterday. It is destined for next week’s episode. I asked my friend JC Briar if she would be my first victim interviewee. JC was my tech editor for my Twists and Turns cable newsletter and my Aran and cable books. She is also a teacher and designer in her own right, as well as the author of Charts Made Simple and the mastermind behind Stitch-Maps charting software. Like many of us during the pandemic, JC turned to sewing, and now does the most fascinating improv quilting. You can follow her on Instagram at JC.Briar. (Make sure you include that period in her name.) I thought it would be fun to talk to her and I knew she would be understanding if things went sideways.

The recording went off without a hitch. It’s about 30 minutes long. We could have gone on gabbing—and I am hoping we can get together in person next summer—but I thought that was a good first effort. I can always have her back on the podcast. And now I feel more confident about asking other people to be guests.

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I got quite a bit done yesterday. I have got to figure out how to organize my schedule so I have more days to devote to sewing. I get a lot done when I can put my head down and work without interruptions. Besides making the Burda top and hemming it and the other two, I also ran up my second muslin of the Linda pants pattern (another bike shorts version). The smaller size fits better, at least in the bengaline, which is pretty stretchy. A stretch poplin may not have as much give.

I canned pumpkin Tuesday. I cut up one of the Galeux d’Eysine pumpkins—the variety with warts on it—and that yielded nine quarts. I promised to make a pumpkin pie for the husband today.

It’s raining. I don’t have to go anywhere so I am hoping for another productive sewing day. I finished the second of my Squash Squad blocks and need to get the third one ready to embroider. I’m also trying to decide what project to take on my next trip. I am going to be gone long enough that my little Janome sewing machine will come with me. I’ll probably take some simple scrap quilting project that doesn’t require a lot of thinking or cutting.

Apples and Aprons

We are practicing alliteration this week. 😊

My friend Susan and I, along with our pastor, were invited to lunch with two members of our congregation who are in an assisted living facility in Kalispell. I picked Susan up yesterday morning and we drove in to meet them there at noon. We had an excellent meal and visited with them for a couple of hours. Susan and I also ran our errands while we were out and about.

Susan has a large orchard of about 40 fruit trees, mostly apples. She loves heritage apple varieties and has grafted quite a few. Because she has run out of room in her own orchard, I am now the beneficiary of her grafting experiments and have half a dozen trees from her nursery. One of them is Westfield Seek-No-Further, which I asked her to graft specifically for me because it appears in a series of books I love by Sara Donati. (The Wilderness Series.) I’ve also got several Duchess of Oldenburg trees—my favorite pie apple—a Liberty, and a Spokane Beauty. She will have more for us to plant here next spring.

Susan and her husband went over to Sandpoint, Idaho, a few weeks ago for an apple tasting. The tasting was hosted by the Sandpoint Organic Agriculture Center, part of the University of Idaho. Susan has also gotten scion wood for grafting from SOAC. She said she got to try about 30 different varieties of apples. SOAC hosts a free monthly webinar series on apples—breeding, growing, and harvesting—and Susan says they are very well done.

Apparently the museum there had an exhibit on aprons. Susan knows I love aprons, so she took some pictures for me. The first photo she took, though, was of the sign on the library:

How appropriate.

And the aprons!

I love this style, below. I don’t look that good when I’m ironing, though.

So elegant:

I might try to get over to Sandpoint next year for the apple tasting. It sounds like it was a lot of fun.

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I have to get my teeth cleaned this morning and then I am coming home to try to get some things done. I ought to can up the pumpkins because I want some on hand for making pies. I need to revisit that Linda pants pattern, too. And I have to figure out what is going on with the BMW and when I’ll be able to have it back.

Cooking and Canning and Copying

I added nine quarts of really nice chicken stock to the pantry yesterday:

Next up is another batch of ham stock. I’ve got quite a few bags of scraps and bones in the freezer.

We are butchering chickens on Saturday. Our church’s former pastor, Jeryl, is coming to help as he always does. (He lives up the road.) He usually brings chickens of his own, although I give him some of ours, too, as a thank-you for helping. He and the husband and I have an efficient system and can do several dozen birds in a morning. I think Elysian is coming over, and Tera’s husband wants to bring some of their chickens and learn the process, too. We should have a good group. I see showers in the forecast, but I can put up our pop-up tent. And the forecast probably will change between now and then.

After this, we should be back on our usual rotation of chicken breeds. Things got messed up during the pandemic when I couldn’t get chicks. I hatched out my own chicks that year, but they were Heinz 57 chickens. The next year, I had to get half of one variety and half of another. We also had some that the husband brought home from one of his customers. By next week, we should be back down to Barred Rocks, White Leghorns, and Dave. Dave is getting up there—roosters typically don’t last more than 4 or 5 years and he’s 3—so I might incubate half a dozen eggs in the spring and hope he fathers a replacement. He such a great rooster, though. I’ll be sad when he’s gone.

The mice are lining up to get caught in our traps. They are coming in on the south side of the house and the traps in the laundry room and in my office have been busy. Ugh. Hopefully this will be over in another couple of weeks. The two feral cats have been parked outside the chicken coop, but they aren’t catching everything.

Such is life in the woods.

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I’d love to get out of pattern alteration land. I’ve got Burda 6329—a pleated-front raglan tee shirt—on my cutting table so I can frankenpattern it with the Nancy Raglan. I like that Burda tee shirt except for the fact that the sleeves have darts. I don’t understand why, as that pattern is designed for knit tops. I usually only see darts in raglan sleeves for wovens. I think they distort the sleeve, so I want to take them out. I compared the two patterns and I should be able to make the sleeve for the Burda pattern look more like the Nancy Raglan.

Pattern alterations involve a lot of tracing, taping, and labelling. Sometimes I have the patience for that and sometimes I just want to sew.

I’ve also got to get started on some kind of Christmas outfit. I don’t want to leave that for the last minute.

I Found the Missing Fabric

The husband and I hit it hard yesterday. After a breakfast of bacon and eggs (ours, of course), he took apart the washing machine to see what was going on. It was throwing an error code because the drum wasn’t filling with water quickly enough. He thought that cleaning the filters would help, but after putting the machine back together, we determined that it still wasn’t functioning properly. The valve needs to be replaced. He ordered one and it should arrive next week. In the meantime, I can wash clothes if I add a few gallons of water to the drum and make the washer think that it has filled to the proper water level.

[I have a washing machine and a husband who knows how to fix it. I will manage.]

He went outside to work on some equipment-related projects. I did the rest of the laundry and tidied up the house. I started two trays of lettuce in the indoor growing system and set the chicken stock to cook down. I also froze containers of chili for the husband to eat while I am traveling. Our neighbor, Anna, brought us a big pot of chili left over from one of her catering events. We ate some for dinner the other night but there was a lot of it.

After lunch, I made a top:

I am planning to wear this to church with my hot pink corduroys. The fabric is a fine-gauge sweater knit from the Walmart remnant rack. It has a bit of shine to it so I think it must have some rayon in it. The pattern is the Nancy Raglan from 5 Out of 4. I love this pattern. It was one of the first ones I tried when I started making my own clothes, and comes in top, tunic, and dress lengths. I’ve made several from sweatshirt fleece; this is the first time I’ve tried a sweater knit. The entire top took two hours, start to finish. I did stabilize the raglan seams with some knit stay tape.

I also located my missing bin of fabric. It was in the closet; I just hadn’t dug deeply enough. I want to check the fit of the smaller size Linda pants with another quick bike short muslin, and if I’m satisfied, I’ll make a pair of pants with the Hobby Lobby bengaline. I’ll remember to cut them on the crosswise grain this time, because bengaline stretches down the length of the fabric, not across the width.

I wish I had started making my own clothes a long time ago. I could have avoided decades of muddy earth tones, sad pastels, and ill-fitting garments.

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Our congregation is getting ready to host our annual International Gift Festival, November 9-11. This sale features handmade items from artisans all over the world. We’ll also be serving soup and homemade pies in our Village Cafe.

We can always use more volunteers (the oft-heard refrain), so if anyone local would like to come and help, we would love to have you join us. Those of us working at the sale always have a good time. We also need donations of homemade pies for the Village Cafe. (Just not pumpkin—every year we get a ton of pumpkin pies and it’s nice to have a wider selection.) The Crown of the Continent Choir will present a concert on Friday evening at 7 pm.

This year, a portion of the proceeds will be donated to Heart Locker and Sparrow’s Nest, two nonprofits here in the Flathead Valley.