Biketopus

More Sorbettos

2012-01-01T11:39:00.000-08:00

Sorbetto is the pattern that just keeps on giving! Like many out here in the sewing internets, I've made a bunch of these now. Here are a few more versions:

This one is for my mom, made out of a fabric that she purchased while on vacation. I'm not sure what exactly it is, but this was not a fun fabric to work with! It frayed like crazy, and as you can see from the photo it creases easily, too. Fabric issues aside, though, the top turned out quite well. I made it for her in a size 6, with an inverted pleat left open at the bottom to give it more of a swingy tunic look to it.

I made one for myself as well with an inverted pleat left open at the bottom, but I don't have a photo of it here. I do wear it, but it's not the best look on me -- having a pleat that opens up directly under my bustline makes me look like a pregnant lampshade. I also used the size 6 pattern as my base and did a large FBA. That helped with the shoulder and armhole fit, but it resulted in such a massive dart that it was impossible to sew without getting a pucker in it at the tip.

So, when I made this version, I divided the giant dart into two little darts (it's a little hard to see in this photo, though). They still look a little puckery, but I think that's more the fault of the fabric than the pattern this time. This final Sorbetto is madeout of a stretch silk charmeuse that I've had aging in my stash for a while. I wanted to make something pretty basic out of it, but to make it slightly more interesting I did the pleat and the binding out of the reverse matte side of the fabric (unfortunately this made the binding a total nightmare to sew because the slippery sides were facing inwards and the binding kept twisting like crazy!).

I think I'm probably about finished with this pattern -- despite tweaking the pattern multiple times, I still feel like the fit in the shoulders is not quite right for me. I had the feeling that the shoulders were too wide for me in my Rooibos muslin as well, so maybe the Colette patterns sloper has shoulders that are just a bit too broad for me?

More mini clothes

2011-12-13T19:41:00.000-08:00

With Christmas getting ever closer, I've put my blazer project on hold for the moment so that I can finish up some presents in time. Last weekend I finished up the other pieces of the mini wardrobe that I'm making for my soon to be nephew. I made a long sleeved version of the Oliver and S pattern I used for the Hawaiian shirt, this time out of a remnant from a button down shirt that I made for myself (I still haven't blogged about that shirt, maybe it's time to get the SO to take some pictures of it!).

Little mini details like these cuffs are cute but certainly time consuming. I have to say, though, the instructions for stitching the sleeve slit were really good, and I'll use their technique again when I'm making my own shirts.

I ran into some problems with the shorts. Partway through making up the shorts, I realized that there was something amiss with the pattern. I went online to the Oliver and S forum and found that the pattern did indeed have errors, but unfortunately my pattern envelope was missing the errata slip that was supposed to come with it. Miserably, the pattern piece for the back of the shorts was missing seam allowances, and so there was not much I could do to salvage the pieces I had already cut. I ended up retracing, correcting and recutting the back pieces, and I only hope that this didn't use up too much fabric as I have the rest of this piece of fabric earmarked for another project.

In my frustrated state, I wrote Oliver and S to complain about having such an annoying error in a rather expensive pattern, and they wrote me back to offer me some patterns of my choice to try out free of charge. Nice of them! I'm glad that they offered me some "second chance" patterns, because I probably wouldn't have bought from them again after having tried this as my first pattern.

Errors aside, the instructions for this pattern are really thorough, and the pants have some nice design details like the faux fly front. I thought this was going to be time consuming to sew, but it wasn't at all. The trickiest part of sewing up these pants (after correcting the pattern, that is), was figuring out how long to cut the elastic for the waistband, since I have no idea at all how big a six month old's waist is!

Mini clothes

2011-11-12T19:40:00.001-08:00

This is my first attempt ever at sewing children's clothes, and I'm so pleased with how it turned out I had to post right away! My brother and his wife are expecting a boy this winter, and I thought I would make them a mini wardrobe as a present. I just got the pattern in the mail a few days ago, and I was so excited about it that I put aside two other projects that I had already traced out to make this up.

The pattern is Oliver and S' sketchbook shirt, which is basically a classic button down in mini form. The only difference between this shirt and an adult sized shirt is that the collar and stand are one piece, which is nice because a collar stand of this size would probably be just impossible to sew. I used this as an opportunity to work on my shirtmaking techniques, so even though this will probably be worn all of three times before the kid outgrows it, I finished all nicely -- flat felled seams on the side seams and sleeves, and edgestitching on the placket and collar. It looks just as nice from the inside as it does from the outside!

I'm planning to make the long sleeved version of this shirt in some leftover shirting material and the shorts up in some khaki cotton to complete the mini wardrobe.

Two finished items in a week!

2011-10-30T13:16:00.000-07:00

I have a bad habit of taking on very complicated sewing projects, which means that they tend to drag out forever and I start to lose interest in them because I've been simply staring at them for too long (processor quilt, anyone?). After my last complicated project (which I will post about soon), I decided to do something much, much simpler so I could have a finished garment to wear right away. I thought Vogue 1179 was a good candidate; it only has three pieces and wouldn't be heavy on the fitting since it's drapey. I also had the perfect fabric for it in my stash, a printed silk jersey that I bought ages ago from Fabric.com.

And here it is! It came together super quickly, even though I don't usually sew with knits and there were a few things I had to figure out here and there. I don't have a serger, and I'm still a little bit intimidated by sewing with knits on my regular machine. I ended up stabilizing the neckline with some ribbon to keep it from growing, and I did the armholes with clear elastic as the pattern suggests. The armholes are a bit high on this pattern for me. I took an extra half inch or so off of the armhole at the bottom, but it still feels a bit snug after installing the elastic.

For the seams I used a narrow zigzag, and that seemed to work fine since the jersey didn't have a lot of stretch in the length. I wasn't sure what I should do for the hem. I thought about using a twin needle, but I haven't been all that happy with my twin needle attempts. I'm still getting the "tunneling" effect no matter how much I bump the tension down, and the resulting stitch is not all that stretchy. I hemmed a RTW shirt with my twin needle recently, but it snapped after a few wears because the stitching just didn't have enough stretch. So for this dress, I stabilized the hemline with some stretch lace on the inside before sewing it. It makes it less stretchy (and therefore less comfortable), but also less likely to break.

I always end up smiling too much when the SO takes my picture. This is me trying to make a serious face, and ending up just looking goofy!

After my success with the dress, I immediately whipped up a tunic length version in another knit that I had in my stash. It looks great with skinny jeans and is very comfortable. I think I'll wear this outfit tomorrow on the plane as the SO and I set off for Cleveland. Bon voyage!

More adventures in mass cooking

2011-10-16T19:23:00.000-07:00

It seems the preserving season is not over for us yet! We visited the St Jacobs Farmers' Market with my parents last weekend, and it was overflowing with good produce deals (and people, since it was the long weekend). We went intending to get some apples, which were there in abundance. We bought two big bags of mixed apples for sauce making for six dollars a bag. Here's one bag, with a paint can for reference:

We've now made two batches of sauce, one batch of apple pie filling, and one apple pie. We bought a food mill while we were making all of our tomato sauce, and the food mill is fabulous for making apple sauce. Just chop up the apples, cook until mushy, and then take out all the seeds, stems and skins with the food mill! A few random little bits of things still seem to get through, but I'd say it's worth it to not have to peel and core all those apples.

The apples weren't the only cheap items at the market, and we ended up coming home with a giant bag of carrots as well (about 30 pounds for six bucks). A few stands had similar quantities of peppers for sale, and if I'd been able to figure out what to do with that many peppers I would have bought those as well. We're still working on using up those carrots. After making giant batches of Zeus' thai carrot soup and a morrocan stew, we're stumped. Anyone have any recipes that call for about ten pounds of carrots?

Introducing my new sewing room!

2011-09-26T15:35:00.000-07:00

This is a post that I've been waiting to do for a while! Like many other sewing obsessed people out there, I've always wanted to have a space of my own for sewing and crafting projects. In the past I've had my sewing machine set up on the kitchen table, and then graduated to a little desk in the corner of the bedroom, but the mess has always managed to spill out and take up more of the house than was really desirable. Now I finally have a room of my own, custom designed for sewing. I also have enough storage space that I hope I'll have at least a fighting chance of staying organized, and a door to close if I don't!

Our apartment in Montreal is a three bedroom (or a 5 1/2, in Montreal speak), which sounds quite large (and it is a lot bigger than other places we've lived in, to be fair), but the bedrooms are pretty tiny. The room that we use as our bedroom is barely large enough to hold our double bed, let alone a dresser and clothes. After mulling over what to do about the bedroom setup, it dawned on me that there's no law saying that I have to get dressed in the bedroom -- in fact, it makes quite a lot of sense to keep my clothes along with all my sewing stuff. So, the room is actually a sewing room/dressing room, and now my dresser is right across the hallway from the laundry and in the same room as the ironing board.

I repainted our old dresser to match my new color scheme, and made two sets of curtains. Since the windows are just above street level, I wanted one set of curtains that would stay permanently closed for privacy, and then some sheers for decoration. I finally managed to make peace with my rolled hem foot while making these curtains. They were so long that there was no way I wanted to go over each seam twice to do the rolled hem manually, so I just sucked it up and messed around with the foot for a while. I watched a lot of internet videos to try to help me along, but really, I think the rolled hem foot is all about tacit knowledge. And after sewing 30 or so feet of curtain edges, I'm finally getting a feel for how to hold the fabric so it feeds through nicely.

On the dressing side of the room, my SO installed some wall mounted clothes bars for shirts and skirts. I like the idea of having some clothes out in the open -- I can hang things out there that have a tendency to get lost in the back of my closet to encourage myself to wear them, and it's also nice to have some things that I've made on display in the room. I hung a few pegs on the wall for works-in-progress or hanging up pajamas or so, but in reality I tend to dump them on the dressing chair. The chair was a great find that I bought off my neighbors who have a scrap metal collecting business. They were about to dismantle a set of these excellent chairs before I ran outside and saved them.

On the sewing side of the room, I bought some of these Ikea shelves to use a cutting table/storage area. My most excellent sister bought two of these shelves for her sewing room, and when I saw them at her place I couldn't believe I'd never thought of turning them on their sides and using them as a table. The two shelves together comfortably fit my cutting mat and ironing board, and I hung some baskets on the wall so I can have my rotary cutters and chalk markers nearby.

I took allllll of my fabric out of storage and folded it up neatly so that it could be stored in the Ikea shelves. The SO has a really great picture of me surrounded by fabric mid-organizing, looking totally overwhelmed. With the notable exception of some fabric shopping done while on vacation in Paris, I'm still refraining from buying new fabric until I use up at least half of my stash. I'm hoping that keeping it out in the open will motivate me to sew! I also made some storage bins for scraps and interfacing/random notions. The bins turned out really well, but they were truly more complicated than they needed to be (what with the binding around the edges and all), and I was really annoyed with myself for spending so much time making storage bins by the time I was halfway done. One little idea that I'm really pleased with was painting the front of the drawers of an organizer with chalkboard paint. Now they can be relabeled easily if I ever decide to store something else in there.

And finally, I really lucked out with finding this little desk for my sewing machine at a garage sale in my neighborhood. It's a really tiny desk -- my chair just barely fits under it, and that's after we added little legs to the bottom to raise the height a bit. The person I bought it from said that she thought it was from the 50s or 60s, and probably held a piece of infrequently used office equipment.

So there you have it -- my new sewing room. Now that I'm finished painting and organizing, perhaps I'll actually be able to get some sewing done!

It's a canning frenzy over here

2011-09-13T18:11:00.000-07:00

The jetlag from our recent trip to Europe had us up early in the morning for our first few days back, and what better to do with that extra morning energy than go to the market? Early September seems to be tomato season around here, and there were giant bins of tomatoes at the market. We picked up a bushel of roma tomoates (52 pounds!) for 16 bucks and felt quite pleased about it, but as the SO was walking them home on his bike a guy stopped him to say you could get a bushel of tomatoes for ten dollars elsewhere. So cheap! I don't feel sad about paying 16 bucks for these lovely tomatoes at all, especially considering how much we pay for sad and lifeless tomatoes here in Canada in the winter.

Tomato based things are pretty labor intensive to can. We did two batches of tomato sauce over two days, and it takes a good afternoon for the sauce to slowly simmer and reduce enough until it's thick enough to can. We also made ketchup (a looooong time to reduce for that), and salsa, which didn't have to cook very long but involved a lot of prep work (scalding the tomatoes to remove the skins, and then de-seeding them).

But, those cans of salsa look pretty awesome, don't they?

We also ended up with a lot of cucumbers this week from a friend's CSA share. The SO, who is extremely picky about both mustard and pickles, found a recipe online for mustard pickles that appealed to him, and he tried these out. Unfortunately, he used a bit more (actually, a lot more!) horseradish than the recipe called for, so these may end up being pickles of death. We opted to keep them in the fridge rather than processing them, and every time I open the fridge now I get a whiff of horseradish.

After a long weekend of canning, my favorite part is labeling the lids and arranging all the nice jars of stuff in the cupboards. I'm a bit of a hoarder and find it very comforting to have a stockpile of stuff around, so the sight of this cupboard full of sauces and jams and pickles makes me very happy. I'm not sure that it's quite enough to last us through the long Montreal winter, but it's a good start.

Oh, those Germans

2011-09-05T04:54:00.000-07:00

The SO and I just returned from our vacation to Europe, and we're currently unpacking our overstuffed suitcases. Seriously, we brought back a lot of stuff (we were within a kilogram or so of our weight limit for the flight), and a lot of that was stuff from the grocery store -- tomato paste in a tube (great invention!), cans of vegan mushroom pate, ridiculously cheap and tasty fizzy vitamin tablets, German christmas cookies, etc. My SO understandably misses a lot of food items that you can't get in North America, and even though I've never lived in Germany there are already some things that I'm pretty addicted to as well.

While I love browsing through German grocery store for new things to try, I also like going for the amusement factor. There's some wacky stuff in there. Exhibit one: jars of pickled white asparagus. I don't know quite why I find this so weird, but I really do. Every time I see this stuff, it still strikes me as Star Trek alien food and I wonder why it is that someone would actually want to buy/eat this. Pickled albino alien tentacles!

Another thing that I find amusing about German grocery stores is that they have a lot of beverages that you wouldn't find in North America, and a lot of drinks in general. We went to one "drink store," which was an entire store for juices, water and beer. Some of them are familiar -- I find tomato juice quite tasty, and I'd be willing to try vegetable juice and beet juice, but sauerkraut juice? Who buys that?

Here's the water section of the drink store. Yep, that whole big warehouse space is entirely devoted to different kinds of water! There are several dozen different brands of water here, from different springs and with different degrees of fizziness.

I'm a big fan of fizzy water, but even I can't imagine a need for this many different kinds of fizzy water. The SO suggested that we have a water tasting, and we picked five different brands to try. The green bottle is a "medicinal" water that is supposed to help with digestion and comes with instructions on recommended usage. They do all taste different, but not in any strongly identifiable way. I thought that I'd be able to pick out the ones with high sulfur contents, for example, but they don't really taste like sulfur.

Finally, it's funny but a little horrifying to see what other countries think of your own food culture. It happened to be "American week" at one of the grocery stores that we were at, and the special foods section was stocked with products like these:

I'm guessing the "hamburger sauce" is some sort of blend of ketchup and mayo? Every single "American Way" product was pretty terrifying, and I'm sure that at least some Germans are just as weirded out by those marshmallows as I am at pickled asparagus.

A metric century

2011-08-10T19:20:00.000-07:00

Things have been lovely but busy here in Montreal. The SO and I relocated all of things from New York in July, and we've been busy setting up our new apartment here. All of my spare time has been taken up with little projects around the house so I haven't had much time for sewing, but we have had some time for a few little bike adventures. Our new place is just a block from the Lachine Canal bike path, which connects up with the Route Verte network of bike pathways that runs throughout the province. You can bike for miles and miles (or kilometers and kilometers!) on nice, paved bikeways.

This weekend we decided to try for a metric century (100 km, or 62 miles). I love hitting little bike milestones, and this seemed like a totally doable goal even though I haven't been riding all that much this season. The furthest I'd biked in one day up to this point was around 56 miles, so it wasn't that much more mileage and many of the routes around here are dead flat (nothing like hilly upstate NY!).

It takes a little while to get out of town and through the suburbs, but parts of the urban bikeways are still really pretty. The photo above is taken along the bike path that runs on top of the Champlain Bridge ice control structure. It's a 2 km long barrier that spans most of the river and it's closed to cars, so you can take it easy and look around while you bike across.

We headed down towards St Jean sur Richelieu, a small town about 50 km from Montreal. We took the Route Verte on the way down, which goes through the countryside a bit and then follows a canal all the way into the town. This was one of the nicest stretches of the ride, but unfortunately I was also the most tired for this part -- by the time we were approaching the town it was mid day and I was hot and hungry. Being out in the sun for 6 hours was probably at least as challenging as being on the bike for six hours; I really don't do well in the heat.

But, we made it through and found a great little pub for lunch. I can't remember the name of this place, but I really hope that if we ever bike this way again we can find this place. It had a huge, shady patio with Adirondack chairs, ping pong, a foosball table and even a bike parking area. I got a giant plate of nachos and a beer for lunch. These were seriously cheesy and giant, I didn't even finish half of them! All that good cheese gone to waste...

Prying myself out of that Adirondack chair after lunch was difficult, but the SO was determined to keep us on schedule so that we could make it home before it got too dark. Somewhere after lunch I hit my stride, and on the way back we only made two brief stops (for a popsicle, and to enjoy the view from the other side of the river). By the time we made it back to the Lachine canal the sun was getting low in the sky, just in time to give us a nice view on the way home.

It took us about six hours of riding time, with a total distance of 108km and an average riding speed of about 11 mph (17 kph). I was trying to keep it slow so that I wouldn't wear myself out, and in retrospect I think that this was a little too slow -- my butt hurt more than my legs at the end of the day, so I think I could probably push a little harder. This trip was almost exactly 2/3 of a century ride (100 miles), and honestly, I can't imagine biking 50% more, even on those flat bike paths. But then, I certainly didn't imagine myself ever biking 100 km a few years ago, so maybe I'll make it to an imperial century yet!

Bahn mi bowl

2011-06-22T07:00:00.000-07:00

I was in the mood for a good bahn mi last night, but I sometimes get tired of buying baguettes because it's hard to eat all that bread before it gets hard (the perils of living in Montreal alone). So, I decided to make a bahn mi bowl, inspired by the dragon bowls at Aux Vivres. The bowl has wheat noodles, lettuce, baked tofu, pickled carrots and radishes, and a dressing made out of tofu marinade and veganaise whipped together. I already had the pickled veggies and baked tofu made, so this was super fast to put together.

The baked tofu is part of my ongoing efforts to figure out a recipe for Tofu Kan, an Ithaca specialty that I've been missing since moving here. I'm already starting to forget exactly what it tastes like so it's hard to say how dead on this iteration was flavor wise, but the texture is quite close and the flavor was delish.

In case there are any other frustrated Ithaca ex-pats out there, here's how I made it.

Marinade:
Soy sauce
Sugar
Lime juice
Brandy
Sriracha
Chopped ginger
Dash of liquid smoke
Garlic/cilantro bullion cube thing (it's rather oily, so I didn't add any other oil)
Enough hot water to dissolve the cube and cover the tofu slices

(Unfortunately I can't really tell you which of these ingredients are essential, and I definitely can't tell you the amounts. I'm more of a dump-stuff-in-and-taste-as-you-go kind of cook, which makes it hard to reproduce things sometimes).

Cooking:
Drain and press the tofu, and then marinate it for a few hours (I left mine overnight in the fridge this time). Take the slices out of the marinade and bake them on a cookie sheet at 350 F for about 40 minutes, flipping them once. They should start to shrink up and brown on the outside. You definitely don't want to bake them in the marinade, I've tried that before and the texture just doesn't come out right. Then, after taking them out of the oven put the slices back in the dish with the marinade to cool down. It finally dawned on me that Tofu Kan is sold packaged in some sort of marinade/liquid, and this seems to be the final trick to really getting the baked tofu to be nice and flavorful.

Still in process...

2011-06-18T09:00:00.000-07:00

It's been a while since I've talked about this project, hasn't it? I think the last time I did any serious work on this thing was over a year ago, about the time that I was starting up this blog. When I last put it away I had around half of the quilt done, pretty much everything on the left side of the center line. Further progress on the quilt had slowed to a stop because I hadn't actually draw in the pattern for the other side of the quilt on my graph paper plan (it's not exactly a mirror image, so I really did need to draw it all out on the other side for my own sanity down the road). I've been having crafting afternoons with a friend of mine here in Montreal, and I thought that filling in the rest of the quilt road map would be a great lazy sunday afternoon activity.

After doing some work on the plan I was motivated to sew again, and as you can see I've made some pretty good progress on the upper part. I spread out the pieces I have so far in a bedroom that's mostly emptied out (as we're all preparing to move here) to get an idea of what it will look like overall.

First impressions: it's HUGE. And it's going to take me forever to quilt. This really is the project that never ends!

Could I bike up this?

2011-06-12T10:23:00.001-07:00

My SO sent me a picture last night of this mountain pass, which is near to the hotel that we're staying at in the Italian Alps while on vacation this summer. He's thinking about biking up it (which I have no doubt he could), but crazily enough I'm thinking about biking up it, too.

If we started right at the base of the pass the trip wouldn't be all that long distance wise (about 25km), but of course since it's a mountain pass it is quite a bit up (1800m or so). That makes it substantially more climbing than anything I've tried to to before in one day, but maybe with the short distance and taking it slow I could spin my way up this thing.

One of the things that I love about biking is that I feel so thrilled every time I reach another small milestone that I've set for myself. I've never been an especially athletic person, and biking is one of the few activities that makes me feel proud of my physical abilities (as opposed to intellectual or whatnot). I already have a few new biking goals in mind for myself, one of which will be to try a metric century sometime this summer, which I'm pretty sure I could do as long as it was a fairly flat route. Should climbing this mountain pass be another? I'm pretty sure I'll hate myself halfway up the mountain for doing it, but I'm also pretty sure I'll feel amazing if I make it to the top.

Sorbetto top and a cheater FBA fitting method

2011-06-06T08:09:00.001-07:00

Like many others on the internet, I was thrilled when Sarai and her team at Colette patterns released the free Sorbetto pattern a little while ago. The weather was finally warm in Montreal, the pattern looked quick and easy to sew, and it's easy on yardage so I could use up some of the one yard pieces I have in my stash. The finished product is very easy to wear (see how relaxed I look on my balcony up there?), but it did take some doing to get there.

The problems were entirely of my own making. Instead of doing a full bust adjustment, I cut a straight size 12 with the overly optimistic idea that it was just going to fit. Foolish, right? Every once in a while I do this, probably for a variety of reasons -- laziness, thinking that patterns drafted for a C cup might be just close enough, failure to think about what the pattern will look like on me and not the model, etc. In this case I think I saw the pattern being modeled by Sarai, and I thought to myself, "Her boobs look awesome in that top! Mine will look awesome too!" Of course, I'm forgetting here that I'm not Sarai (Shocking, right? She's an awesome pattern designer, I'm an awesome academic... it's easy to see how you could get us confused).

So, for those who are both full of bust and full of optimism and have cut yourself a size or two too large, here's a method for dealing with full bust fitting problems that I used to save this top. Keep in mind this is NOT a true FBA or a substitute for actual pattern alterations, this is more of a cheater method that can work on an already cut garment (I use this a lot on RTW clothes as well).

First, let's diagnose the problem:

On the left you see what the shirt looked like me on first fitting. This is a nice pattern to troubleshoot fitting problems because what you see after sewing up the side seams is pretty much what you're going to get -- the binding follows the raw edges of the top, so this is essentially what the shape will look like finished. As you can see, the straight size 12 on me is less than ideal everywhere other than the bust. The straps are towards the outer edges of my shoulders rather than being centered, I have a wrinkle at the neckline on my large boob side, I have a lot of gaping around the armhole (enough that it shows my bra from certain positions), and the fit overall is a little loose.

If you've ever wondered whether or not you need a FBA, the armhole is a great clue -- go try on one of your sleeveless ready-to-wear tops and see if you have a big wrinkle or gap there. It looks like the fabric wants to form a dart at the armhole, an indication that you need more shaping. This problem now drives me crazy on RTW tops, but before I started sewing I honestly barely noticed it. Having my bra peeking out at the armholes was just a fact of life, so I made sure to always have nice bras on. No more!

The main problem here is that the armholes and neckline are too large and don't have enough shaping, so we're going to solve that problem with some creative gathering. I started with the neckline because it's easier to fix -- you have a longer distance here and less gathering needed to make it fit. Plus, if you've followed the pattern instructions you already have your staystitching there that you can use for shaping. Just take one of the ends of the threads, and use it to gather the neckline very slightly until it lays nicely against your body. Smooth out the gathers as you go so that they are as evenly distributed as possible. You can see here that the shirt looks better already after I gathered the neckline -- it sits better on my shoulders, and I no longer have that neckline wrinkle (the gathering will create wrinkles as well, but these should be small enough that you can press them out in the end). I also took the shirt in by the side seams, leaving the hem at a size 12, tapering in to an 8 at the waist and back out to a 10 at the armholes.

For the armholes, you'll need to add a line of stitching to use for gathering. I bump the tension on my machine down and put the stitch length up to 4.0 or so to give nice, loopy stitches that are easy to gather with. To keep the gathering in place, I tie off one end of the row of gathering stitches so that it's anchored and doesn't move while you're pulling the other end.

You can see above here that I have a row of stitches just inside the seam line, and where it ends at the side seam I've tied it off. The top is open and ready to gather. Slip the shirt on, get in front of the mirror, and start pulling on one of those top threads until the armhole begins to flatten against your body.

On the left you can see me awkwardly trying to show you how to fit the shirt by pulling on the loose threads. It may be quite puckered, and you may have to find a happy medium between a fitted armhole and a wrinkled blouse. Remember, this is the cheater method so it's not going to get you to fit nirvana if you have lot of bust to deal with.

On the right you can see the difference between the two armholes. See how the one I've adjusted is sitting closer to the body, while the unadjusted one still pops away? When you get something that you're happy with, tie together the threads at the top. This keeps the armhole from loosening back up as you take the shirt off and handle it. You can also adjust the gathers a little bit more to smooth them out and make them more even once you have the shirt off of your body.

After you've finished sewing on the binding, you're going to need to give it a good press to make the binding lay down nicely and to try to smooth out any wrinkles caused by the gathering. If you have a forgiving fabric they might mush out entirely, and if you have a busy print they'll be less noticeable. You can see below I have a few puckers that I'll try to press out here.

Here's the finished product -- you can see now that my bra is totally covered at the sides, even with my arm raised in this rather unnatural position. The top still feels big through the shoulders, but that's just the way it's going to be since I cut the size 12. Hopefully this method will help some of you fix your gappy tank tops, but I hope even more that my impatience will be a cautionary tale. Fit first, or you'll be annoyed later!

The no-drama blouse

2011-06-03T06:10:00.000-07:00

After my last project (a button down shirt that I have yet to photograph because it's been too hot here in Montreal to wear it recently), I wanted to make something that would involve absolutely NO fitting drama, just wear and go right from the pattern.

I decided to make a blouse from a dress in the April '11 Burda issue (dress 135A, in the plus size section -- this is one of those cases where I'm lucky to be a size 44 in Burda patterns because it often means I just fit into the high end of the normal and the low end of the plus patterns!). As a dress I thought this might end up a little shapeless overall, but I thought it might work as a blouse in a very drapey fabric. It's also perfect for a no-drama project fitting wise. It has raglan sleeves (therefore no fitting that the shoulders), lots of space in the bust and the waist, and opportunities for gathering the neckline a bit more if it's looking too wide. I used the purple rayon print from my trip to Japan, which was a tight squeeze out of only a yard of fabric but doable.

The construction was super easy; I didn't do anything fancy on the inside other than finishing off the seams with my faux-serger stitch on my Pffaf and I finished the arms and neckline with self fabric binding. I like the way that the binding gives the bottom of the sleeves just a little volume.

The neckline did turn out to be a bit wide on me, which is at least partially my fault for not staystitching it to keep it from stretching out during construction, but it probably at least partially because the pattern is drafted for someone who's wider across the shoulders than I am. I considered just easing the neckline into the binding to reduce the width all around, but I ended up just gathering it between the two raglan seams at the back. Reducing the width right there rather than all round seems to help it stay in place on the shoulders better (which it does pretty well, considering what a big neckline this is).

Silly things that I did here that I should know better than to do by now: The blouse ended up being a bit short; it's okay, but definitely could have used another two inches. I guess I just didn't plan well here and it wasn't until it was all cut and hemmed that I realized it was a little 80's cropped shirt looking. Since it's a blousy blouse I didn't want it to become long and tent like, but the blousiness also means that cutting it a bit short makes it feel quite short. I also cut the binding strips on the straight grain rather than the bias. I certainly know better than to do this, but I had a severe lack of fabric here and thought the fabric was drapey enough that I could get away with it. Obviously you can, but it's not ideal and the neckline doesn't lay as nicely as it could.

One major lesson to take away for the future here is that I need to stop buying one yard pieces of fabric as souveniers! I always think that I can squeeze a top out of a yard of a fun print, and then I always do end up *just* squeezing a top out. From now on I'll buy myself 1.5 yards minimum of "just for fun" fabrics.

And the secret ingredient is...

2011-06-02T08:42:00.000-07:00

I was having one of those indecisive moments at the grocery store last night where I just couldn't decide what I wanted to eat. All of the dinner ideas that I was coming up with were pretty dull, so I decided to go over to the produce section and pick something that looked tasty and build a dinner around that. I settled on a bunch of broccoli rabe, which I've never cooked before but seems like something that I should definitely like given my extreme love of broccoli. After googling it later on it seems that it's more closely related to turnips than broccoli, but it's all to the good since I like turnip greens, too.

Here's what I ended up making:

It's a pretty simple concoction just using what I had in the fridge and pantry (which is not a lot, since I've been doing a lot of traveling these days): onions, garlic, olive oil, chick peas and the broccoli rabe. There is a secret ingredient, though, and it's not broccoli rabe. It's poutine sauce! While I was thinking about what to put in here as far as seasoning I remembered that I had a leftover container of poutine sauce in the fridge from last night (St Hubert always gives you just a little bit too much sauce with the poutine, I think). So I dumped in the poutine sauce, some sriracha and a bit of lemon juice, and there you have it--broccoli rabe a la Montreal!

Cubicle makeover

2011-05-25T11:55:00.001-07:00

This is a project that has been a long time in the making! I finally got around to sewing the last panel of fabric and hanging it up today, and am now officially ready to unveil my newly decorated cubicle. Back in Ithaca, I had my own little office (shared with my SO) in a crappy old building that probably should have been demolished but instead was given over to grad students. Here at my new job I have a desk in a lovely old building that is a former house, and I share the old parlor (fireplace and all!) with several other grad students and postdocs.

The only downside to this setup is that the university has provided us all with office-beige cubicles, which I find totally depressing. If you're going to look at a wall for 8+ hours a day, it had better not be a wall colored in oatmeal-colored synthetic fabric, IMHO. So, I gave myself a bit of a budget to make over this average looking cubicle.

Here's a few pictures from before.

The bay window that I have in my cubicle spot is amazing, and I knew right away I wanted to get some plants to put in there. I also knew right away that the ugly and dim lamp that the desk came with was going to have to be replace with something that was actually useful for reading and not hideous.

Most of the makeover supplies were purchased at Ikea. I bought a few yards of inexpensive fabric and sewed fabric panels for each wall. Figuring out how to attach these was a little tricky, but it's actually pretty easy to pry the plastic tops off of the cubby walls and use these to hold the fabric panels in place. The tea kettle that I bought at a different store just happened to match perfectly with the Ikea fabric!

I bought a shelving unit from Ikea for holding plants, teapots and snacks. You buy the metal side panels separately and then attach the length and width of shelves that you want to finish it off. Since the side panels are metal they're also perfect for storing my canisters of office supplies. I'll admit to being drawn in by the shelving unit because of the green. What can I say? I love green!

The white bookshelf was brought up from home, and is mostly stuffed full of tea and gym clothes right now. It's woefully inadequate for holding all of my academic books, and so when those eventually come up from Ithaca I'll have to decide if I want to buy more shelves or keep them at home.

In all, I spent a bit under $150 on my desk revamp, on fabric ($15), the lamp ($30), the kettle ($50), the shelf parts ($25) and the orchid and pot ($20). Future plans will probably include more shelving for books, cushions for the window sill, and hopefully a nice piece of art (if I can find something I like and can afford!).

Finally, some bike related news!

2011-04-30T16:54:00.000-07:00

Finally, after months of cold and bikeless Montreal winter, I have some bike related news to share. And it's big exciting bike related news, too... what could be more exciting than coming home and finding a new bike in the middle of your living room? Tada!

The bike is a graduation present from my sweet and wonderful SO. When I came back to Ithaca for a visit, I walked in and found the bike all set up. I was totally surprised! I would never manage to keep quiet about something like this for a month or so, but he's a much better secret keeper than I am.

When the SO told me that he wanted to build me a bike as a graduation present months ago, we had a few daydreaming sessions about what it would look like. Much as I do love my touring bike, I really wanted a true city bike for everyday riding around. One of my major requirements for the bike was that I should be able to hop onto it and go, with no special shoes, strapping my pants down, bringing a pannier to carry my purse, or worrying about whether I could wear a skirt. Translating this into technical requirements, we decided that such a bike would have a step-through frame, chain guard, a reasonably upright riding position and some sort of basket. And since it's my dream bike it would also be green, preferably a nice bright apple green (mock me if you want, but I know what I like!).

Shockingly, such a bike already exists in the world, right down to the apple green paint. While my SO had a custom build in mind initially, he found the Civia Loring bike while flipping through some product catalogs with our local bike dealer.

It's like someone reached inside my head and pulled out the perfect bike! It has a front basket with a nifty little spot to hang your lock (always an issue on my previous bikes since there's not a really good place to mount a lock on my small frames). The bike also has some fabulous things that I hadn't even thought of, like an internal gear hub and disc brakes. Since I have small (and somewhat weak) hands and Ithaca is a hilly city, I've long had problems with stopping power and the disc brakes are a nice upgrade.

As always, there are still some things to tweak. The bike doesn't have lights right now, so probably installing lights and a generator hub will be a project for the near future. I'm also not sure about the front carrying rack that came with the bike -- it's pretty heavy, which makes it somewhat awkward to lift up stairs, and I'm also still paranoid about stuff sliding out of the shallow tray thing (although this hasn't happened yet). I'm leaning towards getting a basket of some kind, but we'll see.

So, isn't that a fabulous update? Wave if you see me whizzing around town on my new bike!

The four horsemen of the stashpocalypse

2011-04-21T19:44:00.000-07:00

Sarai wrote a very thoughtful a post on the Colette Patterns blog the other day about balancing a compulsive sewing habit with an equally strong desire not to hoard and over-consume. This post really struck a chord with me because I've been on a fabric buying lockdown all year in an effort to reduce my stash. When I moved up to Montreal in January it became embarrassingly apparent just how much fabric I've been hoarding -- I packed up a massive tupperware bin of fabric to take with me, and I still have more at our apartment in Ithaca. And I'm clearly not the only one with this problem, as evidenced by the response to Sarai's post.

Reading everyone's comments about hoarding control mechanisms made me think about why exactly it is that I do this. Some of the reasons are not so bad, perhaps: I buy fabric because I love nice fabric, and it's fun to stop in the garment district when I'm passing through NYC or traveling somewhere else and buy a few fabric souvenirs. But I also have a well-documented tendency to take on too many projects that I never get around to doing (and to be fair, I've had very little time to sew for the last six months so my backlog is worse than usual).

Inspired by all the talk of de-stashing, I pre-treated a bunch of fabrics tonight that I would like to sew with soon. As I was folding them, it occurred to me that each of these fabrics represents a different problem that keeps me from actually using the fabric I have stored up.

1) A purple rayon print from Japan. I bought this fabric as a souvenir and because I loved the print, but inspiration has yet to strike on this one. Every time I look at it, I just can't picture what kind of top it wants to be. I'm actually not so worried about this anti-stashing issue, because I think the moment will come for this fabric eventually.

2) A cotton double gauze, also from Japan. This fabric falls into the category of fabrics that I would be heartbroken if I screwed up. This piece was expensive enough and I love the print, and so even though I'm dying to make something out of this and wear it around I keep avoiding it in case the thing that I make doesn't turn out well. I would hate to make a dress out of this that ended up in the back of my closet.

3) Shirting from Paron Annex. This is one of several fabrics in my stash that I avoid because I feel like my technical skills are not quite up to the task of making what I envision. In this case it's not that the cotton shirting itself is hard to work with, but I fear that the button down shirt that I plan on making might be above my skill level. I could make a tester shirt out of a cheaper fabric to practice shirtmaking techniques, but I hate sewing stuff out of crappy fabric that I'm not really excited about (catch 22, anyone?)

4) Lightweight cotton from Quilter's Corner in Ithaca. Here I have exactly the opposite problem from fabric number one: I have way too many ideas of what to do with this fabric. I've mentally drafted four or five different summer shirts with this fabric in mind, but all that inspiration makes me indecisive. If I lock in one plan, I kill off all the other possibilities!

So there's my four horsemen of the stashpocalypse. Of all these, I've decided that the least tenable reason not to sew is number three -- there's no reason to not make something (or to buy cheap fabric and make something I don't love) just because I'm afraid my skills aren't up to it, especially when the fabric wasn't insanely expensive, I have lots of it, and more cotton shirting can easily be found elsewhere. Classic button down shirt, here I come!

Towards a personal blouse pattern

2011-04-18T08:27:00.000-07:00

For a while now I've had the sewing goal of trying to work up a set of basic patterns that I can use for altering commercial patterns and drafting my own designs. I worked on this basic pencil skirt pattern a few months ago, and next up was figuring out a basic princess seam top.

I'm sure I'm not the first one to post this lament on the internetz, but as a short and reasonably busty woman button down shirts rarely-to-never fit me properly. Usually they're some combination of too tight/gappy at the bust, too big in the shoulders and too long in the arms. I've used various tricks to overcome these problems over the years, like rolling up the sleeves, wearing shirts partially unbuttoned over camis, or stitching down part of the front so that it can't gape. But, I think I have enough fitting knowledge now that I can actually make something that fits properly, and this is my first attempt at that.

This shirt is actually a remake of a shirt I made some time ago, one of my first blouse attempts:

I loved the idea, but the blouse suffered from a few issues that made it uncomfortable to wear, namely: too big in the shoulders and gaping neckline, not big enough in the waist so it was tight when I sat down, and I used crappy quality quilting cotton (terrible beginner's mistake, I know) which made it stiff. Despite all of the time spent carefully piping this bad boy, I gave it away when the SO and I moved in the summer.

This attempt is made from a bit of a frankenpattern, which combines the bodice of the JJ pattern, the sleeves of the Ute pattern, and a self-drafted collar. The first item of clothing that I ever made from a pattern was a JJ blouse, and looking back at it the fit was remarkably good for a first attempt (I still have that blouse, but I'm not sure I'm brave enough to post it on the internetz. It's also in quilting cotton!). I started with a 40 bodice and did a FBA, adding to both the side and front panel to try to get that seam right over the bust. Since the piping attracts a lot of attention to the seam line, I wanted to make sure I got the placement right. In retrospect, I wish I'd done armhole princess seams, because I think that the shape would have been even more flattering with the white piping.

I was originally planning to modify the Ute collar, but after fiddling with it I decided to just draft my own. I really wanted to make sure that this shirt would end up being work appropriate (i.e., not too low cut), and I just wasn't trusting that Burda neckline! Once again, this vintage sewing guide proved very helpful. The little trick about adding 1/8 inch to the neck seam to get a nice roll on the collar worked perfectly for me. Other finicky details: I made all of the piping by hand with 1/16 inch poly cord (it was pretty time consuming!) because I wanted a nice thin piping to go with the small dots, and to get practice in making piping for my next project. It's this kind of stuff that makes sewing go so slowly for me!

Here's some views from the side and back:

Looks pretty good from the side, I would say, but the fit does look a bit blousy in the back. In general the top feels pretty loose around the middle when I'm standing, but I was reluctant to take it in because it isn't all that loose when I'm sitting. My waist changes shape enough when I'm in a seated position that I think I have to deal with the extra room when standing in order to be comfortable sitting. I'll wear it to work for a day before giving the pattern a final verdict, just to see if it becomes uncomfortable at some point in the day. If you're stopping by and have any other fit suggestions, I'd love to hear them!

Bowtie blouse

2011-03-16T18:28:00.000-07:00

My sewing mojo has still been a bit low lately despite the fact that I do have time in the evenings (and even a nice little room to sew in!), so I decided to try to kick start myself by sewing a simple, gratifying project. I often have a habit of making overly complicated things that take forever, and this bowtie blouse seemed simple enough.

Actually, this project turned out to be a bit of a headache due to some bad decisions on my part and some issues with the pattern. The fabric I was using was a remnant from Sew Green, an awesome store that sells vintage/recycled fabric at very little cost (I'm pretty sure this piece was part of seven bucks for all you can fit into a grocery bag haul from one of their sidewalk sales). The piece seemed pretty big so I just started hacking into it, but my lack of prior planning came back to bite me in the end. I was forced to make the blouse a little bit shorter just so I could squeeze it out, and now I have a bunch of oddly shaped scraps instead of useable leftovers. Not very green of me!

The other issues I had were with the pattern. The pattern is from an old-ish (2003 or so?) issue of Burda magazine. This being Burda I knew that the little keyhole neckline was likely going to be quite low, so I raised it by more than an inch when I was tracing out the pattern. Even with that modification, it's still low. I had intended this to be a work-appropriate shirt when paired with some navy slacks (like so), but it's really a bit too low cut for me to get away with that. The fit of the shirt was also quite blousy, so I had to add some front and back darts to keep it from just hanging straight down from my boobs. I think those modifications worked pretty well; it's still blousy enough to be comfortable but definitely has some shape.

One thing that turned out really well with this project was the seam finishings. I used a whole bunch of different techniques in here -- french seams on the side seams, flat felled seams on the armholes (it was a little tricky to do, but looks sweet!), and I took some extra time to fiddle around with a few different stitches for finishing off the facing. In the end, I went with a zigzag stitch around the edge of the facing, which I then trimmed, turned under, and straight stitched over top to hold it in place. The result, I think, is pretty neat looking. Normally facings are so floppy and ugly that I avoid them, but in this case I'm proud enough of the finished result to post a picture of my facing. Voila!

My own skirt sloper

2011-03-03T19:52:00.000-08:00

I posted a picture of this skirt previously, but I thought it deserved its own post because I'm really pleased with the way it turned out! This skirt is drafted from my own skirt sloper. The idea of making personalized slopers and working from them for modifying or drafting new patterns makes so much sense, but I've never managed to get around to making them. I thought that I might be more motivated to make a sloper if I could use it to use something right away, like this simple pencil skirt. It's basically a sloper with a back vent and waistband!

For the base of this pattern, I started with a pencil skirt pattern from an old Burda magazine and started fitting from there. This vintage guide was really helpful for fitting the pattern, although a warning that it has a lot of frustrating body shaming language sprinkled throughout. If you have sanity watcher's points to spare, though, it's really helpful. My fit problems were similar to the problems shown in Fig 3/4 -- my butt tends to lift up the back of skirts so that the back is shorter than the front. Usually I just deal with this by shortening the hem at the front, but this time I tried shortening at the waistband. You can see on the houndstooth pattern here that the waistband now dips down slightly at the center front:

The advantage of doing it this way is that it makes the front of the skirt smoother because it hangs flat from the waist, rather than being pulled by the back by my butt. I also eliminated the front darts because they just dig into my stomach at the front (one of my major annoyances about RTW skirts), and then deepened the darts at the back for a better curve over the butt:

You can see that I still have a bit of a weird divet thing than happens at my hip. I'm not sure how to fix that. I always end up with a little pooch of fabric there right underneath my hip bone where my hip actually curves in before it goes out again at the thigh. I pinched a bit of fabric out at the seam there but it still looks weird in certain stances. But I think the problems here are fairly minor -- all in all this skirt is really comfy to wear and I think it looks good, too!

I'll leave you with a few pictures of the inside finishings of the skirt. I get so anal about seam finishes and all then no one ever sees it but me (well, my SO does, but he doesn't always know what he's supposed to be appreciating!).

The houndstooth was a little ravely, so I finished it off with hong kong seams on the inside. It's time consuming, but since there are only a few seam to finish here it wasn't such a big deal. I also hand stitched the hem so it would be super duper invisible. Figuring out what to do with the lining at the back vent had me stumped at first, but fortunately The Cupcake Goddess has a great tutorial on how to address just this problem. With the lining and the seam finishes, I hope this skirt will hold up for many years of wear!

Lazy (but tasty) saturday morning

2011-02-26T10:35:00.000-08:00

While I was finishing up my dissertation, I thought that as soon as I was free from the pain of daily writing and revisions I would be back at my sewing machine as soon as I defended, cranking out all the projects that I had been dreaming about but had no time to actually do. And now that I actually am finished, I find that all I want to do is make a nice G&T and watch some bad TV in the evenings. Normally I have to actively restrain myself from rushing through sewing projects, and now about one step an evening seems like quite enough work. On thursday I traced out the pieces for the new blouse that I'm making, last night I sewed the sleeves (yep, that's it!) and today I may or may not actually get around to fitting the bodice. At this pace it's going to take me approximately forever to get through my mental project backlog, but I don't want sewing to start to feel like a job rather than a hobby.

So what did I do this morning instead of fitting that bodice? Well, I made a super duper fantastic latte. A while back, a friend of mine was kind enough to give the SO and me a home espresso machine (this one here). It looks simple enough, but it's actually a pretty complicated little beastie and it took us a while to figure out how to produce good espresso with it. I took it with me when I moved to Montreal, and since arriving here my coffee has been terrible. Watery, sad coffee, making for a sad morning Biketopus. It's like the machine was protesting its relocation to Canada. I finally figured out that it was probably due to the grind of the coffee (the grinder stayed in Ithaca with my SO, so I've been using pre-ground). And after buying some new coffee at a finer grind, behold:

I seem to have my coffee making mojo back! In addition to actually being able to pull a decent shot, I'm also getting better at frothing the milk. This is obviously not perfectly "micro-foam"y, but it's close enough that I could make a pretty swirl/dot picture. It's not quite the amazing leaf and heart patterns that you get at gimme!, but I'm pretty pleased with it nonetheless.

I had just enough morning motivation to make some banana bread, too (using the Veganomicon recipe). Nom, nom. Now off to watch bad TV and be lazy!

Long time no sew

2011-02-13T18:02:00.000-08:00

Well, no sooner did I write that last post promising my imminent return to regular blogging than my life was shaken up rather dramatically! After a rather disheartening few months on the job market last year, I had finally made peace with the idea of spending another year in Ithaca (and in grad school) when I got a job offer in September. The job was fantastic but required me to be able to start in January, so I kicked it into high gear and started putting the pieces of my dissertation together to get ready to graduate.

Between writing, revising, preparing to move and other things, I had basically no time for any of my usual hobbies. I did manage to make a few things in the precious few days off that I had, like this houndstooth skirt:

After sending the full draft of my dissertation to my committee, I headed straight to the sewing machine and whipped this skirt up while I was waiting for their feedback. I wore it to one of my defenses (yep, that's right, our department has multiple exams!).

I intended to make a new skirt to wear to the final defense as well, but unfortunately I was too exhausted by that point to make it all come together. Even though I didn't have a snazzy new outfit, I got the most important job done: I passed! You can now call me Dr. Biketopus :)

The other big news is that my SO and I got married in a lovely, low key ceremony in Ithaca. Since I was rather stressed out with other things I had initially planned to just wear something I already owned, but about a week before the date I decided I really did want to sew something. A lot of late nights were spent making this dress come together, but in the end it turned out quite well!

I've already started my new postdoc position in the fabulous city of Montreal while my SO remains behind in Ithaca to finish up some of his work at Cornell. Since I'm now free from dissertation writing and alone with my sewing machine, I hope I'll have some new things to post in the near future!

Gone biking (amongst other things)

2010-09-10T10:55:00.001-07:00

I know, I know, I've been gone foreeeeever. When our neighbors moved out a few months ago and took the internet with them, the SO and I foolishly decided that we would just go internet-free for a while. Well, that was about as much fun as any other form of dieting, and I'm pleased to report that I'm back to an all-you-can-eat internet plan. In the intervening months, we moved to a new apartment, sold off a whole bunch of random accumulated stuff, I taught some high schoolers about history of medicine, and I went to Tokyo. How's that for an entirely too hasty summary? I'll be back to regular blogging soon, but in the meantime you can enjoy this nice pic of my SO's fully loaded and my lightly loaded bikes on vacation!

Digital croquis

2010-07-05T08:09:00.000-07:00

Since it was my birthday a few weeks ago and I had a little bit of extra money to burn, I decided to get myself a new toy -- a Wacom Bamboo tablet for drawing on the computer. A while ago my SO saw me drawing sketches of other people's clothes in my notebook (I often get ideas for things that I'd like to copy when I see other people wearing them), and he suggested that I would be able to make good use of a tablet. I always thought these things were prohibitively expensive, but it turns out they're not so bad. I got a refurbished version of the tablet I linked to above for around $65.

One of the first things I wanted to try out with the tablet was making a digital croquis for myself so that I can try out patterns on my virtual avatar before sewing them up. I'm sure I'm not the only one in the sewing world who's guilty of looking at patterns on a model or a figure drawing and sewing based on that, without first thinking about whether or not the pattern will actually look good on *you*. Mikhaela over at Polka Dot Overload always has fantastic sketches of her clothes that give a remarkably good impression of what the outfits will look like when finished (check out this one, for example). She's a professional cartoonist and so hers are far more cute than what I'll probably ever produce, but I thought I could at least get something going that would give me a semi-realistic idea of what patterns would look like on me before I sewed them up.

Here's a few of my first takes. I made a digital croquis first by having the SO take pictures of me in my bra and underwear, and then painstakingly drawing an outline around the image to get my shape. I'm not quite brave enough to post the result on the internets since it is essentially a line drawing of my naked self, but I'll show you some of the dressed-up versions. For starters, here's a dress that I made a while ago, but I would like to remake in colors closer to these ones:Here's a Mad Men style dress that I thought would be pretty hot, and it turns out that it looks a little boring on my virtual buddy. Good thing I didn't order any double knit yet:This dress looks pretty fantastic, though. I tried to replicate the print that I bought, which is a large scale orange print of what looks like fireworks on a cream background. The drawing looks so good I'm feeling very motivated to sew it, now!And last, a more work appropriate Biketopus, in a jacket and black pants.
Pretty fun, eh? I still have to play around with the tablet more and figure out exactly how to use the thing, but I think it's been pretty useful already. The main thing that I can't figure out is how to make the lines of my drawings look smooth and not all herky-jerky. I'm not sure if I just need to work on it more to develop a more steady hand, or if it's actually a software issue. Right now I'm just drawing stuff with the pen in Photoshop, and that may not actually be the right tool for the job. I'd like to believe that it's a software issue and maybe something like Illustrator would work better for me, but maybe it's just practice. I guess that wouldn't be the end of the world, eh? I think I could spend quite a lot of time virtually sewing!

Tandems and trust issues

2010-06-29T09:20:00.000-07:00

While we were out in California, my SO treated me to a little early birthday present: a spin around wine country in a tandem. We've been talking about riding a tandem together for a while and he happened to find a bike shop that had several for rent at a reasonable price, so we decided to test drive one and see how it went.

I've only had one experience with a tandem once before this, and it wasn't an experience that I was necessarily eager to repeat. On the last night of an extended stay in Portland, a friend of mine picked me up and took me out for dinner on a tandem (this nice yellow one here). It was very Portland, very sweet, and very terrifying. If you're a person of a certain height (read, short), then you usually end up in the stoker position at the back where you have no brakes, no shifters and no ability to steer. The bike is pretty much controlled by the person in front of you, and if he or she is tall then s/he also obstructs your view of what's coming. You basically just have to pedal and trust. My Portland bike companion had good intentions, but our bike styles were not exactly compatible. He had us whizzing down hills while I quite literally shrieked in the back. At one point I think he actually paused to check on me because I'd stopped shrieking!

Much as I love the idea of biking on a tandem with my SO in theory, I was still pretty nervous when we got on the bike. But, I was willing to give it a go because I knew that he would be trying his hardest to make it a good experience for me, or else I'd never get on a tandem with him again! Getting started was a little shaky because you have to coordinate your movements until you can get going fast enough that you're not in immediate danger of falling over. Even once we were going, it was still a little freaky because I had the distinct feeling like we were tipping over too far to the right. Does my SO ride crooked, somehow? I don't know, but it was unsettling.

Since there's not much to see ahead on the tandem (aside from someone else's back), it's a great opportunity to look around. We took a 12 mile loop around a valley filled with vineyards, and it was a beautiful view. It was nice to be able to check this stuff out and not have to always be looking at the road ahead of you. And the best part about being on the tandem was that it was like having an electric assist bike, powered by my SO. We whizzed around that 12 mile loop in maybe 50 minutes or so, and while I was pedaling, I really wasn't busting my butt (sorry, hon!). Towards the end of the ride we seemed to be getting the hang of starting and stopping pretty well, and made it through the last few stop signs with not too much trouble.

So, will there be more tandems in our future? I'm not sure yet. It would be a good option for touring for us. Instead of always going at my (much slower) speed, we could be going at the average of our two speeds, making us much faster overall. I think over time we'd get pretty used to each others' biking styles as well, and I would probably feel less freaked out about not being in control. It would suck a bit to have a permanent view of his back when we went traveling, but I would also be able to pedal and look around, so maybe that makes up for it. But if I'm being really honest, I think I'd still rather be in front. Nothing is more calming than having your own set of brake levers.

Tough day on the bike

2010-06-27T09:30:00.000-07:00

Some days I have great bike mojo, and then other days it seems like I just can't hit my stride no matter how hard I try. Yesterday was one of the latter days for me, unfortunately. My SO was going out to Watkins Glen to ride in his very first official bike race, and since it was supposed to be a pretty nice day for biking and I've never been to the race track I thought I would go along. I knew it was going to be a longish ride and have some fairly substantial climbs as well, but somehow I really underestimated my abilities here (or was just having a bad biking day), because it ended up being a very long day!

We took the bus partway up the hill to save us a bunch of climbing, leaving about 20 miles to go to the race track. Almost immediately after getting off the bus we had short but nasty steep stretch, and with me feeling still a little stiff and somewhat queasy from the bus, this didn't go well at all.

That little red blip at the beginning there? Yeah. That almost made me turn around and go home right there! I stuck with it, and the rest of the ride into Watkins Glen was pretty nice and mostly gently downhill. To get to the race track we had to climb again, and quite a bit. By this point we were quite late, so the SO left me at the bottom while I slowly spun my way up in granny gear. This wasn't fast, but it wasn't miserable either and I did make it up just before the SO was set to launch.

This was the first time I'd been to a bike race (unless you count the highly informal Cascadilla hill climb), and it was fun to watch the goings on of the race bike set. My bike looked highly out of place there, and I got one slightly snarky comment about my "classic" Brooks saddle. The SO's race kit came with all kinds of clinical looking goos and potions. I tried a package of the Hammer Heed drink in lemon lime (I figured I could use some electrolytes after sweating my way up the hill), and it was nasty. Sorry, Hammer.

Watching the SO race was quite fun, and I'm a bit sorry that I didn't get to take a spin around the race car track. He was all by himself after the first lap, and for a minute I thought he was in the lead! It's a bit hard to tell where everyone is on the race track since there was another group that started a minute ahead of his class. Little did I know that getting separated from the group is almost a sure sign that you've fallen behind, not pulled ahead, at least in the first round. By the time he'd finished he was pretty convinced that he was last, although it turned out to be not quite that bad.

We had a long downhill and then another climb to get out of Watkins Glen. I made it through that alright, but by the time we reached the top my legs were really done. With not too much power left in my legs I started really feeling the pressure on my butt, and all along that long flat yellow stretch in the elevation map above I was just waiting, waiting for the downhill to come and save me. We made it back to Ithaca in the end, but really not a moment too soon for me!

So, I'm not sure what happened here. This was a long ride (probably the second longest ride I've been on) and a lot of climbing, but it felt much harder than it needed to. I had to have the SO rub some tiger balm on my poor legs last night, and I can't even look at a bike seat today. I'm guessing there will be a lot of sitting gingerly and not a lot of biking for me in the next few days!

Happy Birthday to me!

2010-06-25T09:14:00.000-07:00

Yesterday was my 29th birthday! Yay! I love celebrating my birthday -- people you haven't heard from in ages call you to say hello, you get free drinks, and of course great presents. I got the gift that keeps on giving this year from my SO: a subscription to Burda magazine! A year's worth of Burdas seems like a great way to build up a base of patterns to work with. They come in a range of sizes, there's tons per magazine (including plus size and occasionally petites), and even the crazy patterns might have some elements could be repurposed (like cool sleeve patterns or whatnot). I won't start the subscription up until we move to our new apartment in August, but I'm very excited to start seeing what rolls in every month!

He also made me a sweet card with a customized Burda cover featuring my finished version of the self-drafted chiffon dress:

Isn't that cute? I finished this dress just in time to go to a friend's wedding in California, and it was very comfortable to wear. I'm so enamoured with this pattern that I might (once again) push aside the SO's promised sports coat and make summer top using this pattern instead. Or maybe I can somehow work on both at the same time? So much sewing, so little time!

On being meat-free in meaty places

2010-06-22T13:17:00.001-07:00

It was around this time last year (give or take a week or two) that I decided to try out eating exclusively vegetarian. I was in a car with a friend talking about food politics, and we both came to the conclusion that although neither of us was especially comfortable with the idea of eating meat, we both kept eating it out of habit, convenience, and of course tastiness. Out of this conversation, "project bacon" was born: We decided that we would try eating vegetarian for a month and see just how difficult it really was. Although I'd been eating less and less meat over the years anyway, I thought that going full on meatless was going to be too difficult. What would happen when I went to a restaurant or to a friend's house? Would I find myself undone at the sight of bacon and then feel guilty about eating it?

Turns out, it wasn't nearly as much of a problem as I thought. Social situations have been a bit awkward at times, and the only meat I've eaten in the past year was my mother's thanksgiving turkey, mostly out of a desire not to make it an issue at the dinner table (this year I think I'll be able to get away with eating the tofurky). I still do like the smell of bacon, but I haven't really had an overpowering urge to eat it. Frankly, if I had I would have eaten some by now, both because I lack willpower and because I believe in making environmental/social justice life choices that work for you. There are a lot of ways to be better to the world and to other people, some of which will make you more miserable than others. I'm perfectly happy living without a car, but take away my hot shower and I'm a truly cranky person.

I've always thought of these things as personal preferences, which brings me (in a long winded way) to the point of this post. I've been thinking of myself over the past year as a person who is happy not eating meat, but my recent trip to California made me think a lot more about meatless eating and infrastructure. I think about this in transportation terms all the time, because there are some places in the world (California is a bad offender here) that are obviously not built with pedestrians or bikes in mind. Trips that would be perfectly manageable on foot become really unpleasant when there are no sidewalks or crosswalks to speak of, and it changes the way you relate to the world around you. What this trip made me realize is that this is true for vegetarian eating as well (at least in my case). Not only is it difficult or impossible to find tofu in some places, but it changes the degree to which I miss and want to eat meat.

Our flight path took us through a rather long layover in Memphis, and it became obvious to me pretty quickly that this was not a place designed for vegetarians. Trying to eat meat-free there was very much like trying to walk in places not meant for pedestrians: you find yourself doing the culinary equivalent of tromping through bushes and sprinting across freeway entrances. Getting a vegetarian meal would basically require subtracting the meat (where possible) from what was on offer, which would result in pretty boring meals: sandwiches with veggies and a sad slice of cheese, etc. I had nachos without the meaty chili, which was fine for one night but would probably cause serious unhappiness if I had to do it every day. My poor SO has even fewer options, and usually ends up eating fries in situations like these. With his steely German willpower I'm pretty sure he'd stay vegan even if it meant fries for weeks, but I know I wouldn't survive as a vegetarian in these circumstances. I don't deal well with the feeling of deprivation that comes with being a meat-free eater in a meaty land.

Needless to say, I was glad to come out on the other side of the airport system and find myself in California, where the SO and I could eat at an entirely vegan Chinese restaurant (me above, with my fresh rolls and salty plum lemonade) and many other places where meals could easily be made meatless. A friend took us out to Burma Superstar for an absolutely stunning lunch:

I could eat this food forever and never look back. We had the tea leaf salad and the rainbow salad, fried yellow bean tofu, coconut rice and vegetarian noodles. I can't even tell you which dish was my favorite because they were all so good. Too bad they don't have a Burma Superstar Ithaca outpost, because I have a feeling there's no way I'll be recreating a 22 component salad on my own any time soon!

Self-drafted chiffon dress

2010-06-10T07:02:00.000-07:00

It's starting to take shape! After draping, drafting, muslining and cutting, my chiffon dress is finally starting to look like a dress that I can try on, and I'm starting to feel a bit less paranoid that I may have just killed my gorgeous chiffon. See, it's actually looking pretty good!

The lighting in this picture is terrible and doesn't do the fabric justice, but you can see that the fitting is coming along nicely. I messed around with the gathers on the top tonight trying to get them just so -- I had a weird poufing thing going on over one boob. While one side turned out exactly the size I drafted it, the other inexplicably grew during sewing. Go figure. A little extra cutting and tucking and now it's looking better.

I was hoping to be able to get away with wearing a nude colored bra under the top, but unfortunately the chiffon is a bit too sheer for that. I tried on a tank top under the dress, but that's really not a good solution. The tank top pushes the center of the dress away from my chest, which really distorts the lines of the dress. So, I'm going to have to come up with some other way to line the dress. Probably I'll try drafting some triangle-shaped cups out of the black batiste lining fabric and see if that looks good.

Really though, these are minor problems to be worked out when compared with the major triumph that is a deep V dress that doesn't gape in the front or only cover half of my boobs. Seriously! I have never had a top that fits me this well, and I'm psyched. More to come soon!

Refugee plant is tasty

2010-06-08T12:17:00.000-07:00

Ithaca friends take note: your refugee plants are welcome with me, especially if they happen to be tasty plants! A friend of mine is going away for the summer, and so she left behind her cute little thai basil plant with me. I popped a couple leaves in my leftover pad thai that I heated up for lunch today.

Last year the SO and I tried growing some plants out on our back patio, but we were thwarted at every turn: the back patio is too shady, it rained all the time, and the squirrels! Those merciless little jerks ate everything they found tasty, and dug up the rest just for fun. The SO, normally a nice, calm vegan man, actually threw rocks at the squirrels one day. They were that bad.

This year we've put some pots down on the front porch where the squirrels seemed less inclined to root around, and we tried one of those upside down tomato plant hangers in the backyard. So far so good on both counts, but you never know. So, friends with plants that need babysitting be warned that your plants are not indemnified against squirrel loss!

Bikes galore at the Ithaca festival

2010-06-05T21:29:00.000-07:00

The Ithaca festival parade is definitely not your average small town festival parade. It has a fire truck and a marching band, but the rest of it is more like a cross between a protest rally and a hippie carnival. This year we had a save the deer protest group, a float that drew huge cheers from the crowd protesting a proposed drilling project, and some random bits of Ithacana like the "Volvo ballet" with station wagons dressed in tutus and the chain saw marching band (my personal favorite). Bike advocacy groups of all stripes were also out in full force this year, and I present a mini-photo essay of Ithaca's bikes for your viewing pleasure.

First up, a e-bike group named the Buffalo St Chargers. I don't think I've ever seen a single e-bike in Ithaca (although it certainly makes sense, what with all the hills we have here), so I was kind of surprised to see a whole gaggle of them in the parade. Check out this e-cargo bike:

Next we have the Bike It! folks, who are biking to the US social forum in Detroit this month. The SO and I have gone on a few of their training rides, and they're cool folks. Here's a Bike It! tandem crew:

A random lady in a "bee on a bike" costume. I have no idea what group she was associated with, but the costume made me laugh:

The TCAT parade bus, with a bike in the bike rack. I love that they have racks on the buses here, although I admit I don't use them very often because of an irrational fear that my bike is going to somehow come loose and get mashed under the bus. I know, that's not actually going to happen, but it doesn't stop me from being all paranoid about it:

And last but not least, my SO, who decided to ride with the FLCC crowd this year in the parade. The parade theme was "singing in the rain" and he wanted to decorate his bike accordingly. Half an hour and a whole lot of zip ties later, he came up with this:

He strapped our watering cans and umbrellas onto the bike racks (and inexplicably, left the watering cans full of water and rather heavy. He really likes to make it hard on himself!) I helped him complete the look with a towel sarong. Amazingly, he was not even close to the most outlandishly dressed FLCCer.... I'd have to give the prize there to the other half-naked biker wearing some hot pink fluffy shorts. Ah, Ithaca.

Culotte slips for summer skirts

2010-06-03T09:04:00.000-07:00

Summer weather is here in full force in Ithaca, and I've started unpacking some of my summer clothes. I really like changing over my wardrobe... there's something that feels optimistic about stuffing those sweaters to the back of the closet, like winter is never going to come back (ha!). I also really love unpacking clothes that I haven't seen in a while, and in some cases even forgot that I had.

One of the recently unearthed items is a light cotton summer dress that I bought a few years ago, but it still seems new to me because I haven't worn it much. Why? Because as much as I like dresses, it's kind of inconvenient to wear them in the summer. Your skirt blows up when you hop on your bike, and (if you're built anything like me) your thighs chafe if you walk around too long. In the winter this doesn't seem to be as much of a problem since I'm not on the bike as much and can wear tights for walking around, but in the summer the hot, sticky weather makes me (ironically) inclined to avoid dresses.

So on the recommendation of the interwebs, I decided to try out a culotte slip (also known as a split slip). It's basically a pair of loose, lacy shorts to wear under a skirt, like a slip:

I ordered a three pack to try out (in black, white and beige). Yes, I realize that I could have sewn some of these myself, but for $25 I thought I'd just order some and see if I liked the concept. I've worn the black and the white pair now, and so far so good. They make walking and biking around in a skirt _much_ more comfortable. They do add a bit of bulk, though, especially to skirts that are already lined. Maybe it would be better to omit the skirt lining on future summer dresses and sew up a matching pair of these instead. It would be a great way to use up a spare yard of silk or cotton lawn!

Fabric Mart feeds my chiffon obsession

2010-06-02T16:19:00.000-07:00

I was browsing around the sewing blogosphere a few weeks ago and happened on a post (not even sure where now) about someone's recent fabric haul from Fabric Mart. I think I've been to a Fabric Mart in real life and was not terribly impressed with it, but I clicked along anyway and was really, really pleasantly surprised. They had a bunch of designer fabrics (including the Vera Wang chiffon that I made my Chantilly dress from), and a beautiful selection of couture silks. This one caught my eye immediately:

I can't even tell you how psyched I was to find this! I love prints in bright, rich colors but I'm getting a bit tired of flowers, and I was really excited to find a print that was a bit more abstract. It's even more beautiful in person, and now I'm currently obsessing over ways to sew it up.

I think I'm going to try making the BurdaStyle Jenny dress, or rather something inspired by it:

The flowy top would be perfect for this silk chiffon. The only problem with this pattern is the deep V neck. Deep Vs do look good on me, but they're such a hard fit when you have ample cleavage. I asked about this when the pattern was posted and got some helpful tips from people on the forum, but in the end I figured that it would probably be as much work (if not more) to alter the existing pattern piece than it would be to just make it myself. I'm already planning on changing the skirt to a bias cut A line anyway, so really it makes sense to just try drafting it myself from scratch.

I've already started on drafting the top (no pictures yet, though). Basically I took a piece of very lightweight cotton and draped it on myself, pinning it at the shoulder seam and just under the bust. Then I gathered enough fabric to cover my breast, and then marked where the side seam and shoulder seam fell by just drawing on the fabric. I used that to draft two pattern pieces for the back and the front, and then made a muslin to test it out. The armholes ended up much too small (totally fixable, though), but the fit in the bust is great! I hope hope hope I actually have enough chiffon to make this dress now (I had a blouse in mind when buying it so I only got 1.5 yards, although it is wide). But, if not, I'll have a deep V pattern that (for the first time ever) actually covers my breasts. Are you excited? I sure am!

Nap time

2010-05-23T06:04:00.000-07:00

The biketopus has been out of commission for the past few days. I spent most of yesterday trying out different nap spots in the house -- the couch, the hammock, the bed, the hammock again... Looks like I'll be doing that for much of today as well.

Hopefully I will feel more perky in time for our bike vacation next weekend. In the meantime, you can find me in the hammock...

DIY fabric!

2010-05-13T20:34:00.000-07:00

I've been spending too much time today idly poking around the internet, but along my travels I made an amazing discovery: a website that lets you design and print your own fabric! How have I not managed to see this before? It's called Spoonflower.com, and it looks like you basically just upload an image file and they print it out for you. The fabric choices are really great, too -- not just boring quilting weight cotton, but also cotton sateen and cotton lawn. I'm drooling over this now.

I'm ABSOLUTELY going to try this out at some point, but since it's a little spendy I'll have to think about what I want to make first. Perhaps not surprisingly, my first instinct is to make some sort of science inspired design. Imagine, for example, an electrophoresis stripe pattern in a cotton lawn:

I can see that being amazing with this pattern, which I just so happen to have coming my way when my SO's parents come over from Germany this summer.

I'm also totally obsessed with the Brainbow mouse images, although my SO thinks this would be ugly as fabric:

Or what about another amazing neuron print based on something like this, with two different contrasting colors:

Don't you just want to make some fabric right now? Some day, some day!

Birthday crafting

2010-05-10T13:00:00.000-07:00

My SO's 30th birthday was a few weeks ago, so there was lots of birthday crafting and cooking going on around here! He's tricky to buy for, and I usually just end up pestering him until he gives me a good gift idea and then get him exactly what he asks for. This year it was a mini video camera. You can check out his blog, where he's already got up some bumpy shots of us on the bikes. He's quite happy with the present (although I kind of regret it since it means I'll probably end up in a lot of videos!), but I wanted to do at least some things for him that involved more skill than just handing over my credit card.

First, I tried my hand at making one of his favorite cakes, an apple marzipan cake that his mom used to make for him on his birthday. When he was living in Germany, his mom would actually mail this cake to him -- that's how efficient the German post is, you can get a spoilable item to the other side of the country in 24 hours, no special services required. Meanwhile, I'm a mere five hours away from my parents, and I'm still waiting on a package that my mother mailed weeks ago. Sigh!

Here's how the cake turned out:

He says this isn't what it looks like when his mom makes it, so it's possible that something went amiss in all of the weight to volume conversions that I had to do on the recipe. Appearances aside, this was a pretty tasty cake! Very sweet, though... one slice later and I was taking a sugar-induced afternoon nap.

The other present that I made for him was actually something that I'd promised as a Christmas present, but was obviously veeeerrrry behind in finishing. I got him a wooden serving tray, and told him I would paint him a design of his choosing on it. He likes eating on the couch with a tray and is always complaining about the trays that we have -- too small, too flimsy, nothing just right! Here's a picture of the tray a month or so ago, halfway through painting:

The image is from The Trip to Panama, a German kid's book from a series that features a tiger and a bear (this edition is in English, though). It's really cute, and I had a fun time painting this. Here's what it looked like in the end, after a bit more painting and many coats of stinky spray varnish:
I love how the bear is sitting on a pillow on the couch. I always accuse my SO of just sitting down without looking to see what's actually on the couch first, so it seems pretty appropriate. At some point I may try to figure out some way of making the surface of the tray more heat proof, but for now it works well.

The only downside to all this crafting is that now I've exhausted my supply of SO gift/craft ideas. I think he needs to get another bike soon so I can help him outfit that!

Wedding dress done!

2010-05-06T18:58:00.000-07:00

Yay! The summer wedding dress is finally complete. I finished off the last of the hemming tonight... I nearly finished last night, but I was tired and afraid of messing it up in the final step and being really annoyed later. So, I saved it for tonight and it went pretty smoothly, although I did make one tiny little nick in the chiffon when I was trimming it to make the baby hem. I really need to get some duckbill scissors at some point, because I find myself doing baby hems a lot these days. My Pfaff also has a rolled hem foot that probably would have worked well for doing this, but I haven't taken the time to figure out how to use it yet and I didn't want to mess up on this dress.

I'll get my SO to take some nice pictures of me soon, but for now here's a grainy mirror shot on me. The sewing dummy doesn't fill it out very well, so it's not a fair impression! The fit turned out really well despite the fact that I didn't make a muslin, and it has great coverage so I can wear it with my normal bras.

I made a straight size 10 in this pattern, with very few alterations. As you can see I had no problems with the shoulders and the bust, which are normally big problem areas for me fit wise. The gathers over the bust in this pattern make it easy to squeeze a few extra inches of cleavage in there with no fit problems -- It's probably just a little less gathered on me than on someone who's closer to the envelope measurements. The waist turned out true to the size on the envelope, unfortunately for me in this case. The pattern promised a finished waist of 31.5 inches, and since my waist is closer to 32 inches this was a bit tight. To get more room in the waist, I modified the pattern by taking out one set of darts in the back (there are four back darts in the pattern), which gave me about an extra inch in the waist. I made a pintuck along the line where the darts should have been to preserve the lines of the pattern. An easy fix without any redrafting!

Another small modification that I made was to underline the back panel with lining fabric, both to make it easier to make the darts and because the chiffon was so sheer that it would have made for an ugly seam at the back waistline. The pattern calls for lining and underlining the front waist and collar pieces, so I'm not sure why it doesn't suggest you do the same for the back as well. I also cut an extra inch off the hem to make it a just above the knee length. I'm pretty short, though, so if you're tall and making up this pattern you might want to add a couple inches just in case!

Phew! Okay, that's all for now. I've typed enough for tonight. I'll get my SO to take those pics, and I'll let the pictures do the talking for the next post!

Wedding dress in progress

2010-04-29T08:37:00.000-07:00

Just a quick progress pic here -- I took this a few nights ago to show my mom how this dress is coming along. I have a few weddings to go to this summer, and I'm getting a head start on fancy dress sewing to make sure that they actually turn out nice enough to wear to weddings!

This is the dress that I'm planning on wearing to my brother's wedding in July. It's make from Colette's Chantilly pattern, which is a pattern that I think is totally gorgeous but somehow doesn't seem to have been as popular as some of the other Colette patterns dresses (at least based on user-submitted pictures). The fabric is a silk chiffon from Fabric.com that I got a fantastic deal on -- I think it was part of the Vera Wang fabrics that went on sale a few months ago, and I got it for two bucks a yard! The lining came from my NYC fabric shopping splurge, and it was also two bucks a yard. So, all told I think I spent $16 on the fabric for this dress and will probably have enough left over to make a flouncy sleeveless blouse or something.

I'm basically finished the bodice of the dress now (I finished the topstitching on the collar after taking these pictures). Now I just need to baste the skirt on, put in the zipper, and hem the bottom layers. That's still quite a bit of work for me at least since I'm a rather slow sewer, but I always find it's a lot more fun to work on the final stages of putting something together when it starts to actually look like a real piece of clothing.

Woah!

2010-04-23T06:57:00.000-07:00

So you know how I've been struggling for months now with a ridiculously green tank? Buying flocculants and changing the lights schedule and doing everything I could think of to get rid of this nasty floating algae infestation? Today the tank lights pop on in the morning to this:

Woah! Okay, it's not clear by any means, but it's also not thick pea-soup green that makes it impossible to see my fish three inches away from the front of the tank (and really, that linked picture was not the worst of it -- it was pretty bad for a while there). I don't know what happened in between yesterday afternoon and this morning, but I'm damn pleased to be able to see my fish again. The plants are looking a little worse for wear, which is understandable since they've been fighting for light with the algae soup for months. Maybe now they'll have a fighting chance!

I'm going to consider this a good omen for the weekend. Happy friday, folks!

RIP, Nemo

2010-04-22T13:00:00.000-07:00

Advance warning: This post is about fish euthanasia. So, if you don't want to read a sad post, this one's not for you.

I had to put down one of my fish today. My sweet vegan SO doesn't particularly want to listen to me talk about fish euthanasia, so I thought I would blog about it here.

The fish in question was named Nemo. I don't ordinarily name my fish but this one came to me already named, by way of friend who was moving out of town and needed to find her fish a new home. So, Nemo joined my tank in 2008 and has been living there happily ever since. A few months ago she started changing color, with her scales getting slightly darker. I wasn't too concerned about this since she still seemed to be eating and acting normally. I figured this might be the fish equivalent of going grey, since she was getting up there in fish years.

Yesterday Nemo didn't come up to feed, and when I looked around in my (still green) tank, I found her near the bottom, floating at an odd angle. She wasn't dead, but she seemed to have lost the ability to right herself and was pale and not moving around very much. I thought it might be best to leave her since there wasn't any infection or anything that I thought I could treat, but today I saw one of the other fish picking on her in the tank. That's not a good way to go. I considered setting up the spare tank I keep as a hospital tank so that she could die in peace, but she seemed so listless and weak already that it seemed like euthanizing her would be the best option.

It's been a while since I've had to kill a fish, so I did some research on methods over at Wet Web Media. I wanted to make very sure that I was using a method that would be effective but not painful. I opted for using clove oil to anesthetize Nemo (since I had it on hand), followed by freezing. The combination of these methods seemed to be the best way to address the limitations of each: Some people said that clove oil alone was difficult to use because it was hard to tell when the fish was really dead or just anesthetized, and opinions were mixed on whether freezing a conscious fish actually caused pain. I used the clove oil first, waiting ten minutes or so until there was no visible movement, and then put the container in the freezer to ensure that Nemo didn't wake up.

I'm pretty sure Nemo died of old age (I'm guessing she was at least three years old, which is fairly old for a platy), but even fish deaths of natural causes still get me down. I guess it's inescapable part of owning any kind of pet, though.

So, RIP Nemo. You were a hearty little fish. Nemo is survived by one offspring, a small but fast orange male platy who's still alive and well in the tank.

Nom nom nom

2010-04-18T14:19:00.000-07:00

Not much to say here, except look at these gorgeous cinnamon buns that I made (or if you're German, "cinnamon snails")! Last week I had a cinnamon bun craving that just would not go away. While I was tempted to just buy a pack of the Pillsbury buns in a can, I knew I'd end up eating them all myself (since they're not vegan) and living to regret it later. I finally got up the motivation to make them from scratch using the Vegan Brunch recipe. I cheated a little and put the dough in the breadmaker instead of making it by hand and that turned out quite well. These took a lot of time to make but weren't exactly time consuming. There's a lot of rising time in there, but not a whole lot of work. So, if you haven't made cinnamon buns before, try it! They're pretty damn tasty.

Discount shoe shopping

2010-04-15T09:24:00.000-07:00

I'm in the DC area at the moment for a work trip. It hasn't been the most entertaining trip ever, but it has produced some fringe benefits: namely, a nice new pair of shoes!

Normally one of the first things I do when I get within spitting distance of a major city is google around to see if they have a Nordstrom Rack. The Rack is crack to me (ha! I swear that was unintentional). Basically they have a bunch of old stock from Nordstroms and they sell it off at discount prices, sometimes really discounted if you're willing to sift through the sale racks. Some of my favorite things to wear came from the Rack (aside from things I made myself, of course!) and I love going there just to treasure hunt.

Now I know there is a Nordstrom Rack in the DC area because I've been there before, but it's quite far away from where I'm staying at the moment. Even this might not ordinarily be enough to stop me, but I'm trying to put myself on spending lockdown lately, and a place like the Rack about the worst place in the world to visit when you're trying to be thrifty. Instead, I opted to take a walk out to a store called DSW. What does this stand for? Discount shoe world? Designer shoe warehouse? Who knows, I'd never heard of the store before. But, it was about an hour away (a good distance for a walk), and I thought it might be a good way to limit myself to making at max one frivolous purchase.

Turns out that this place is great! I'm totally going to add this to my roster of stores to visit when on treasure-searching breaks from work trips. The prices for their regular stock were good, but the discount room at the back was fantastic. I turned down a lovely pair of Sofft pumps that were about $40 (but unfortunately too similar to other shoes I have), and I settled on a pair of grey pumps in the end. They're by a company called Naked Feet that I'd never heard of, but the shoes are amazingly soft (and will hopefully also be amazingly comfortable). Here's some stock photos from the web:

I got the dove grey color, pictured at the far right. Pretty sweet, eh? I paid $35, regular $125. I was tempted to wear them right home with the grey/black jeans I was wearing, but I think I'll be wise and wait until I have more ready access to bandaids before I try to break them in.

Another travel perk -- Watching Project Runway in real time! If I get off campus early enough today, I'll go get some take out food from Chipotle or something and watch in my hotel room tonight. Life is good.

1000 miles!

2010-04-11T11:09:00.001-07:00

Ta dah! I finally make it to my goal of 1000 miles on my bike odometer yesterday, on a pretty trip out towards Spencer to the Biodiversity Preserve, a nice little area that's about ten miles away from our house. According to my trip odometer I needed exactly 20.5 miles to get to 1000, but I found that when I got home I was still at 999 on the total odometer, which for whatever reason is always a little off. So, I actually cheated and spun the wheel for a minute or so to take this picture :)

Just for fun, here's an image of how far 1000 miles would get me from my house in Ithaca:

Looks like it would take me about to Brunswick, GA; almost all the way to Florida. Pretty impressive, eh? Now, it's taken about a year to accumulate that many miles on my bike, but it's still pretty cool to think about how small little bits of everyday riding adds up to big distances over time.

It took me a little bit longer than I expected to hit the 1000 mark. Originally, I was hoping to make it at about the end of March, but all things considered I think I still did pretty well. I think biking inside on the trainer is a great solution for me over the winter, but as soon as it was at all nice enough to bike outside, the trainer came down pretty quickly. Doing a few quick sessions on the trainer during the week is great, though, and I wish it wasn't quite so much of a pain to have the trainer set up in the kitchen so that I could still have that option. I've been vaguely thinking about taking up jogging so that I can have a low-cost activity that doesn't require a lot of planning or scheduling. The only problem is that I kind of hate jogging. Maybe I could learn to love it, though?

Custom fitted pants, the finished product

2010-04-08T16:49:00.000-07:00

Okay, my custom fitted pants are finally complete! Are you ready for the virtual fashion show?

These pictures were taken just moments after I finished sewing the buttons on, so you'll have to excuse the unpressed hems and other weird wrinkles.

Okay, impressions. Despite my frustrations with how these were turning out halfway through, I think they look great in the end. They hang very smoothly from my body and have a very easy fitting shape, and I lowered the waistline to just where I like it so it's very comfy. I did find that on my first wearing out that the silk lining was not exactly the best choice, though. I don't know if I needed to make an ease pleat or reinforce it a bit more or what, but I did actually rip some of the stitches in the lining a bit when I sat down quickly and they must have pulled in some weird way.

I learned some interesting things about fitting my body from this experiment. For example, one of the things that I noticed when I was making the pattern pieces is that the back waistband was very curved, while the front pieces were almost flat. This makes a lot of sense if you look at me from the side, since I'm kind of straight up and down around the middle in the front and sloping in the back. This will be good knowledge to have for future pattern alterations, and I can think of a few patterns that I made that had pieces that were too straight (and therefore gappy at the back) or pieces that were too curved (and therefore dug into my waist at the front). Drafting my own pattern from a block was also incredibly fun, and really encourages me to make a bodice block. Oh, the cool blouses that I could make then! I did make a few errors when drafting my pieces, but obviously nothing bad enough to keep these from turning into pants at the end of the day.

My main problems with this project were really related to the linen. I'm a bit bummed out at how baggy these pants are after wearing them around for a day, even after my reducing and interfacing and twill taping. These are not supposed to be close fitting pants, they're designed to be comfy in a fabric with no ease, and so maybe linen was just a bad choice for a first go. They'll be very nice for a loose fitting spring pant, but they're just not quite what I had in mind. I think I'll have to make these up again in a non-stretch fabric that will be more stable, and that will give a better indication of whether or not these are truly the perfect pants. Oddly I've had two pairs of pants self destruct this week, so maybe that's the pants gods' way of telling me I should try again. Maybe a brown twill?

Nice ride, with a brownie halfway

2010-04-08T16:26:00.000-07:00

I stole this neat little map thing from my SO's blog from the ride that we took this weekend. He suggested that we try a sunday ride with the Finger Lakes Cycling Club. They were planning on going to Taughannock and back so it was a ride I thought I could handle, but when we showed up in the parking lot and saw a bunch of guys with spandex and aero bars, I was a bit worried. Sure enough, we set off towards the park at a pace of 13-14 miles an hour. That kind of pace would be fine for me in the trainer and for half an hour or so, but I knew this was going to be trouble for me in the long term. Sure enough, I started to drop behind after we hit a hill half an hour in, and the SO and I decided to break off and do our own route instead.

We took a nice ride into Trumansburg, going up the hill on a long but not too steep path, and when we got into town we stopped at Gimme! Coffee for a snack. I'm a big fan of snacking in the middle of rides, and I told my SO we should plan the next ride around a good place to eat. It was a lovely day for a ride, and although I was pretty tired afterwards I had a fantastic time. The only downside of the ride was that I didn't wear any sunscreen, and now I have little lobster red arms and the beginnings of a farmer's tan. I guess I'm out of practice with sunscreening myself!

My bike odometer is now at 980 miles... one more ride, and I hit the 1000 mile birthday! What should I do to celebrate?

Beignet skirt

2010-04-06T19:52:00.000-07:00

I finished this project a few weeks ago, but pics are still slowly trickling out of my SO's camera and onto the blog. So here you see me on what was probably the first day warm enough to wear a skirt (and matching sandals!) in Ithaca. The skirt is made using the Beignet pattern from Colette patterns, and it came together beautifully. Since the pattern says that it is very fitted at the waist, I cut a size 10 for most of the pattern but graded out to a 12 at the waist. This worked really well, and it turned out fitted, but not at all tight or uncomfortable. I used a stretch cotton for added comfort and for some wrinkle resistance, although it didn't turn out to be quite as wrinkle free as I'd hoped by the end of my first day wearing it out and about.

When I initially picked out this pattern I was worried that the high waisted slim skirt look wasn't going to be so hot on me, but I'm pleasantly surprised by how much I like wearing this skirt. Usually I don't tuck tops into skirts or pants because it always looks weird to me for some reason, but with the higher waist I think it works. I'll probably make this skirt again in a different fabric at some point, and maybe with a side zip instead of buttons. It would also be really fun to do a version of this with an even more fitted waist and a bit of plastic boning for a corset like effect. Maybe next winter I'll give it a go, but for now there are summer dresses to sew!

Fun with kitchen gadgets

2010-04-05T19:01:00.000-07:00

I look like I'm having fun, don't I ? And I was having even more fun eating the delicious noodles that came out of this funky looking contraption that my SO brought back with him from Germany. In case you haven't guessed, this is a spaetzle maker. When my SO lived in Berlin there was this delicious spaetzle place right down the street from his apartment where you could get these noodles with cheese and onions, sort of like a German mac and cheese. As soon as I was confident that I could pronounce "kaese" and "spaetzle" well enough to be understood, I went to that shop as many times as I could without risking total cheese overload. For around 4 euros, you could get a tiny salad and a giant plate of fresh, cheesy noodles covered in sauteed onions. Delish.

I wasn't at all confident that we'd be able to reproduce that noodle goodness here at home, because spaetzle making seems to be something that there's a lot of lore and mysticism about -- no one will tell you how much water to add to the recipe, for example, so you just have to guess at when you've made the dough thin enough that you can actually get it through the press but not so runny that you just end up with sad little disintegrating blobs on the other side. Somehow, magically, we managed to produce noodles on the first try. It was fantastic watching those long strings of dough hit the water and become delicious lumpy noodles! I had fresh ones for dinner with some cheese, onions and mushrooms on top (my SO tells me that my addition of mushrooms is decidedly NOT Swabian. Whatever, it was really tasty). The next day I made the leftovers with more onions and cheese in a pan so that the noodles got a little crispy and the cheese got nice and melty.

In addition to how surprisingly easy this was to make, I was also surprised at how not nutritionally terrifying the recipe was, for the dough at least. I thought I was going to discover that I'd actually been eating four eggs in a serving with a little pinch of flour to bind them together. For this batch I only used two eggs and a cup of flour, which sounds pretty reasonable to me for two meals (at least until you start dumping loads of cheese and onions in, but so be it. I'm no stranger to loads of cheese and onions). Do you think the Germans just like to keep us thinking that this stuff is terrible for you and impossible to make anyway so that they can have all the noodles themselves? Your secret is out, Germans!

Custom fitted pants, take one

2010-03-31T00:05:00.000-07:00

After slowly but surely turning my custom fitted pants sloper into an actual pants pattern, I sat down tonight to start cutting and sewing. My SO is still away in Germany, so I had the evening and the house to myself to sew. Whee! I tried to really take my time on these pants and go slowly and carefully, making everything as neat and professional as possible. Behold the loveliness of this single welt pocket.

And my fly front zipper, inserted with the Sandra Betzina method (this is an awesome video and makes putting in the zipper much easier than I would have ever imagined). I don't mean to toot my own horn here, but it's looking pretty good, eh? I'm quite proud of how these are turning out so far.

After I put in the zipper, I went to pop these on for a quick try on in the mirror, and was horrified to find that they're HUGE. Like, falling off, inches too big huge. I was seriously not expecting that, since I know that these pants fit me after having tried on several muslins for the research project already. Arg.

I've come to the conclusion that it's probably the linen. I've heard that linen "grows," I just didn't think that it could grow this much. I compared the pants to one piece of the original pattern, and they're probably more than an inch bigger just in one piece!

I'm trying not to be too bummed about this, because I think it is fixable if I can manage to keep myself from getting too discouraged to do the work it will take to rehab them. For starters, I reduced the size of the waistband and used some of my newly acquired twill tape to make sure it doesn't stretch out.

I was planning on putting some twill tape in here anyway, but I decided to put in two rows for good measure. Next I think I'll have to go back and try to take in the pants by a few inches at the sides. That makes me so sad, because I did a really meticulous job on finishing the seams and now I'll just have to slice it off. Such is life, I guess. Hopefully it will all be worth it in the end!

NYC garment district, I heart you

2010-03-25T17:29:00.000-07:00

Seriously, if I lived in New York City, I'd be down there all the time, checking out the remnants and picking up just a little bit of this or that. Things which I've looked for in half a dozen stores around here and failed to find were there in bucketloads in NYC. Sigh.

I went to three stores while my SO and I were on our mini vacation. First stop was Paron fabrics, which wasn't actually the store I intended to go to, but we ended up there anyway because it was the only store that was open on a sunday. It wasn't a giant store, but it has a fantastic 50% off room and the salespeople were really nice. I picked up three pieces of fabric from the sale annex, all 50% off:

The middle one is a lining for the dress I plan to make for my brother's wedding, and since I needed a good bit of fabric I was determined to find something cheap. This was only two bucks a yard! Good deal. The fabric on the left is a really soft shirting with stripes. Now that I have the power of the FBA, I'm determined to make the classic button down shirt that I've never been able to wear before. The tag said it was a Banana Republic remnant. I asked for two yards, but the nice guy at the store gave me the last yard that was on the roll for free, so I got three yards for $13. The flowery fabric was one that I just couldn't resist. It's a silk chiffon, and I noticed after I bought it that it's Besty Johnson remnant. It was still $10 a yard, so not exactly a steal but also not wallet-breaking either. I haven't decided exactly what I'll do with this yet, but some sort of floppy, cute blouse that I can wear with my Beignet skirt is likely what will end up happening with it.

The find of the day, though, goes to my SO. While I was pawing through the chiffons, he noticed a sign in the corner next to a pile of buttons: "Buttons. $1 each or $25 for the box." I walked right by this until he pointed out that the boxes were HUGE.

Look at all these buttons I got for only $25 bucks! After having spent ten dollars recently on a dozen red buttons, this box is going to pay for itself pretty quickly. Six different colors (they look a little funky under the flash here, but they're browns, blues and blacks), all different sizes, and enough for tons of projects. This thing was heavy to drag around after I got it, but still worth it. I already gave a few buttons to friend in Philly for her coat.

On my way back through NYC at the end of my mini vacation, I stopped at New York Elegant Fabrics, which was the store I had planned on going to. It was huge and wonderful, just as I'd imagined it, but unfortunately elegant fabrics = expensive fabrics. Since I already had my Paron finds I was happy to just browse, but on my way out I noticed a little rack of remnants and of course had to paw through that. Most of what they had there was pretty small cuts (averaging around a yard), but some were still big enough for a skirt here or a blouse there. I ended up buying these:

The green wool with the cool pattern is a pretty small piece. I'm a bit worried about whether it's actually enough to make something, but I thought for $7 I'd take it home and see if I could squeeze a short skirt out of there. The black fabric is an incredible lightweight wool that was originally $50 a yard! As soon as I touched it, I was sold. It just feels so, so luxurious. Buying fabrics by touch is something that I do miss, since I do mostly web based shopping these days. I bought 1.25 yards for $30. It's 60 inches wide, so I think I might be able to do a really classy black blazer with this.

Finally, I stopped by Pacific Trimmings and got some twill tape, some cord for making my own piping (which I just could not find for love nor money around here), and a lightweight zipper for the wedding dress. All of these things are things which are pretty new to me, so I was a bit bumbling in the trim store. Eventually I just asked someone about the zipper, and the saleslady just grabbed my swatch and came back about ten minutes later with the perfect zipper. Weird experience, but very efficient!

All in all, I can't imagine a better place to be a hobby sewist than NYC. Except that maybe my habit to stash fabric would probably clash with my terribly small apartment if I actually did move there. Maybe it's time to put in an application for that NYC job?

Live from times square

2010-03-21T12:03:00.000-07:00

Yep, that's right... I'm sitting in Times Square right now, enjoying free wifi courtesy of McDonald's and resting my feet. The SO and I took a little trip to NYC this weekend. He's flying out of Germany today (he's on his way to the airport right now, in fact!) and I'm going down to Philly for a day or two to visit a friend. I'll blog more about our weekend when I have a wifi connection fast enough that I can actually upload pictures, but for now let me just say that I finally got to go fabric shopping in NYC, and I am currently carrying a ridiculous number of buttons in my suitcase. Life is good :)

Spring weather biking

2010-03-19T07:04:00.000-07:00

Biking outside... what a novel idea! Much as I really do like biking on the trainer inside during the winter, it was an amazing experience to be outside biking again over the past few weeks. It's been sunny and breezy here, just warm enough that with a sweater or a bike jacket you can hop on and go. Biking on the trainer just can't compare to the lovely free feeling of getting somewhere all on your own power.

My SO and I did two rides together in the past weeks, the first a quick sunday ride up on South Hill, and the second a ride out to Taughannock park. My SO has a map of the second ride on his blog, but I stole some of his pics to repost here. Here's me with my ridiculous knee socks on the second ride:

The trail at Taughannock park that leads to the waterfall was actually open at this time of year, despite the fact that it was pretty icy and slippery. We slipped our way down to the falls anyway to get a look at it in its iced over state. There's a huge mound of ice down there at the bottom of the falls, although the falls itself isn't frozen (I don't know if it ever freezes over in the winter.... seems somewhat unlikely).

The other ride up South Hill was definitely more challenging for me. It was one of those rides (like so many rides in Ithaca) where you spend 40 minutes climbing, 10 minutes on top of the hill enjoying the view and then 10 minutes zipping down the hill at speeds that terrify me. I should have known better than to say yes to this ride when my SO started by saying, "Well, if you're willing to do a little climbing, we could go this way..." I guess it's time to reset his internal biking-with-partner sensor that helps him distinguish between rides that will make me smile like this pic, and rides that make me wish there was something even lower than granny gear.

A final great thing about outdoor biking is that in these two short rides we went over 30 miles, putting me at about 950 in my winter biking challenge. Do the miles count if I wasn't actually on the trainer? They were certainly easier to come by, so it feels a little like cheating!

New foot!

2010-03-18T12:04:00.000-07:00

I finally got around to doing some sewing errands today... I popped over to my friendly local Pfaff dealer to pick up an invisible zipper foot because they have a 20% off feet sale this week. It's just a little plastic doodad that looks like this pic here, but it retails for thirty bucks! It's kind of an expensive thing to buy just for putting in zippers, but the zipper on my Rooibos muslin just really isn't as invisible as I would like it to be. It seems there's a limit to how accurate I can be with my normal zipper foot and without endangering my fingers.

I also dropped off my wool crepe fabric that I'll use to make the "real" version of the Rooibos at the drycleaners today. Apparently it's only $7 or so for them to pre-treat it, which seems perfectly reasonable to me since it would probably take me a good hour (and an annoying hour at that) to steam treat it myself. Obviously I won't have the dress done in time to go to NYC this weekend, but I did finish my Beignet skirt. It looks great! My SO took a few quick snaps when I got dressed this morning. I'm tempted to pull them off of his camera now, but I'll resist doing this because I know he'll be annoyed if he doesn't have a chance to "process" them (whatever this means for digital pictures). Pics to follow soon!

Rooibos fitting

2010-03-06T09:58:00.000-08:00

I've been rewarding myself with some sewing time this week after a tremendous push to get some stuff done last week, and as a result I've been able to finish my Rooibos muslin! I decided to make a "wearable muslin," because the idea of using all that fabric only to later wad it up and chuck it annoys me. What do people do with their muslins when they're done? Make rag rugs? I don't know. I'm not exactly the most eco friendly dresser what with my penchant for buying new fabric and all, but I still can't get behind the idea of making something that I know I'm going to throw away.

I opted to make a muslin using a combo of things that I had in my stash (the bird fabric from Ikea) and $3/yard black broadcloth from Fabric.com. At least this way I'll probably get some wear out of it instead of just chucking it at the end of the day.

So, fitting. I'm really glad I did a muslin of this first, because I definitely had some fit issues here. First, the body ended up being too big for me. I cut a 12 and ended up taking it in by 1 inch on each side, so I figure that means that I probably should have cut a 10 and will do so for the final version. Even with 2 inches out, it's still plenty roomy enough to not be clingy. So yeah, I think we're good there.

The top on the other hand, now that's a whole different story. Looks cute enough when I'm just standing there, right? But it's really too big. This is definitely obvious from the back, where you can see I've got some gaping and some off the shoulder issues going on.

From the sides, it's even more obvious that something just isn't quite right. One side looks not too bad, but the other side (my right, the left photo on here since I'm taking this in a mirror) has some major gap problems. You can see my bra when I'm just standing here hanging out, let alone when I'm actually moving around. You can also see in the right photo that the neckline jumps away from my body a bit in the front, although not as badly as in the back. Big siiigh there. These fit problems are exacerbated a bit by the fact that I probably used a little bit too much interfacing here and so the fabric isn't conforming to my body so well, but the issues remain.

I would say that all signs point to this top needing a full bust alteration. I was hoping that I would be able to get away with not doing an FBA in this pattern, since Colette patterns are supposed to be drafted for a C cup and can fit a D cup. Now to be fair, I'm a D or a DD depending on how you measure, so maybe I was pushing it a bit, especially in such a fitted pattern. I think I'm going to try to start with the size 8 pattern piece and alter that one. Now, here's a really radical idea -- I think I'm going to try to do a two sided FBA, meaning that instead of adding 1.5 inches to each side, I'll add 1 inch to the left boob and 2 inches to the right, to compensate for the fact that I'm a cup size larger on one side. I'm not sure how well this will work. It could end up just drawing attention to my lopsidedness, but I *think* that it's actually going to work out well. We'll see. Obviously more muslins will be in order (although I'll just make up the bodice this time).

For the back, I think the sensible thing to do is just take a little tuck out to bring the shoulders closer together. Unfortunately sizing down in the bodice won't help this problem, since the size 8 shoulders are pretty much the same as the 12. Normally I would applaud this since it means that the pattern maker recognizes that just because you have a big bust you don't also have football player shoulders. In this case it's working against me, though. Fortunately I think it's an easy fix. I tried tucking some of the extra fabric out just quickly with some pins, and it looks much better. This pic has about an inch at the top tucked out.

Since this piece is cut on the fold, I'll just angle it a little bit to get rid of that extra fabric, and le voila! Hopefully it will all work well.

I also started cutting out my Beignet skirt this weekend, and I'm already done the lining and the facing. Woot!

I am the statistically average woman

2010-03-05T14:16:00.001-08:00

As I found out today in my fitting for the custom fitted pants project, I am the statistically average woman. As it turns out, I am the height of the average North American woman (162 cm) and have almost exactly the average hip to waist ratio for "body group 2," which is the average body group for this study (a butt which is neither flat nor prominent). So, I am the average of the averages! Who would have thought? You'd think that if I was so ridiculously average I would be able to find reams of nice-fitting pants. In fairness, I have an easier time finding pants that fit than shirts that fit, because my bust size is definitely (ahem) above average.

I tried on my pants muslin today, and my friendly local pants-fitting grad student marked off the areas where it needed adjusting. She had me try them standing, sitting, and walking -- when I first tried them on I thought that they were much too big, but with a non-stretch fabric you definitely need some extra bagginess for sitting in comfort. I often forget this when I'm adjusting stuff myself, and then it looks awesome in the mirror but is uncomfortable to actually wear all day. Note to self -- try stuff on while sitting down in the future, unless I'm only planning on walking around and looking cute all day. I can't wait to get the final pattern so that I can make myself a pair of pants!

Bound button holes

2010-03-04T19:47:00.001-08:00

Since it was finally sunny out today, the SO and I did a little photo shoot of some of the projects I've been working on recently. What with him being somewhat of a perfectionist about this and all, not all of the pictures made the cut. The only shot my new Sencha blouse that he thought was acceptable was this shot from the back.

Fortunately for me, this pic does a nice job of showing the bound button holes that I did on the back of this blouse! This was a new technique for me. I've always thought that they look really cool, but I've never tried them out on a blouse. I figured that the basic idea was pretty close to doing a welted pocket, but somehow the idea of doing it at such a small scale and with a slippery silk charmeuse had me pretty intimidated. This blouse seemed just perfect for bound button holes, though, so I had to try it.

For the most part, I'd say they turned out pretty well. I had a few issues with figuring out how to finish off the bound button holes (ie, how to make it so that the button hole flaps don't show through on the wrong side, which would just not be cool). After doing a little research, the best way seems to be to put in the button holes before you put in the lining, then cut the lining and hand stitch the opening so that the button hole looks right from both sides. I thought since I had already put the interfacing on what would be the back of the shirt that I would just do them from the back and then hand stitch them from the front. This was fine in theory, but the hand stitching was harder than I thought (especially around the corners). I think it would have been better if I'd done it the other way around, but I'm still pretty pleased at how it came out for my first attempt. I'll definitely use this on other projects.

Coming soon.... the Sencha blouse from the front!

PS. My tiny tuck dress made it to the front page of BurdaStyle today! Maybe it's silly, but that totally made my day...

(Over)ambitious sewing plans

2010-03-02T13:11:00.001-08:00

Coming home to the mail yesterday was a real delight, because all of my sewing stuff arrived yesterday! How's that for good timing? I ordered much, much more fabric than I should have, especially given the amount that I have stashed away already. But somehow these things just have a way of getting out of hand.

It started with the Gorgeous Fabrics anniversary sale. I'd been eyeing up some wool crepe on there, and when it went on sale for 25% off that was just the incentive that I needed to buy. I bought the Colette patterns Rooibos dress a while back with my hemming income, and I loved the way that it was done up for the photo shoot so much that I wanted to make a navy/white version as well. Here's the fabric that I settled on:

A bright navy wool crepe, and an off-white Bemberg lining (the color is called "cool fluff"). I didn't want to go pure white, because I think that could end up being a little sailor looking. Isn't it super? I bought enough lining to make it fully lined, which I probably will do. I really want to make this dress up before my SO and I go away for our little NYC getaway weekend. Can't you just see me having high tea in this dress? Totally! I'm not sure if it's realistic to get this done before I go, but we'll see how it goes. I'm making a muslin for it now (in fact, my SO is on his way to the fabric store to pick up some interfacing for me. Don't you just hate it when you have everything you need but interfacing?).

While I was at Gorgeous Fabrics, I also had to shop around at least a little and see what else they had. I somehow always manage to talk myself into this based on the shipping costs... like if I'm going to spend eight bucks on shipping anyway, then I might as well stock up. Hoarder mentality at work there. Anyway, I ended up picking up a bright red stretch cotton twill, which I thought would be perfect for the Beignet skirt (again, loving the way it was done up on the website). The only flaw in that plan was that I didn't actually have the pattern for that skirt, so I had to hop on over and get that one, along with the Chantilly pattern.

I picked up lining for both of these projects on Fabric.com, which has officially become my new go-to store for cheap-ish fabrics. I used to buy stuff at Denver Fabrics because they have a great selection and stuff is cheap, but every time I've shopped there, something weird has happened -- they lose my package, they don't have a fabric in stock and neglect to tell me so I open up the box and it's just not there, it takes foreeeeever to get here, etc. I'm officially done with them now, because Fabric.com is equally as cheap, has free shipping over $35, and often has great coupons (I used a 25% off coupon for this order). So there, Denver Fabrics.

I got a hot pink stretch satin for the lining on the Beignet. I do hope this ends up looking decent on me, because it could very well make me look like I'm about four feet tall. Hard to tell without trying it, though, so I'm just going to dive in and see if I can make it work. It looks great on so many other people that it can't look that bad on me!

White outside, green inside

2010-03-02T09:59:00.000-08:00

It's been lovely and snowy here the past few days. Normally I'm not one to celebrate snow, but when I'm inside writing anyway, it's kind of nice to feel all cozy and snowed in. We got a really insane amount of snow a few days back, as you can see by the half buried cars on my street!

While it's all white outside, it's all green inside my tank. Boo. What I thought was a bacterial problem has now shown itself to be definitely not a bacterial problem. The tank is now fully, insanely green. Like, I can't see the fish if they're halfway back in the tank green. Big sigh. I guess this is what the WetWebMedia people mean when they tell you that killing off BGA with antibiotics isn't really going to solve the problem.

I'm a bit at a loss for what to do here now. I've still been doing weekly water changes, but do I do more? Less? Fertilize or no? Add a flocculant? Opinions are so mixed on what seems to be the source of the problem. Generally, most people seem to think that when you get a bad algae outbreak, it's because there's an overabundance of one type of nutrient, or a lack of another type that prevents the plants from actually being able to make use of the nutrients properly. I know it's not an excess of nitrate (can you say ZERO nitrate?). It could well be phosphates, but I don't have a kit to test for that. I'm tempted to keep adding fertilizer in case the limiting nutrient is something like iron, but it could be that I'll just be making more algae soup. Another tidbit that I found from the interwebs is that algae don't grow as well in blackwater conditions, so I could try adding some blackwater extract, which would probably be nice for my fish anyway. For the first year of the tank it was probably a little full of tannins from the driftwood, so maybe this kept me from having problems before.

For today, I think I'll just do a water change and be patient. But I'm setting the timer on this one -- if the tank looks this bad by March break, I will 1) do a 50% water change, 2) add flocculant, and possibly 3) add blackwater extract. It sucks majorly not even being able to see my fish.

I'm going to get a custom pants pattern!

2010-02-25T07:08:00.000-08:00

Just got an email back from the 3D body scan study saying that I've been selected to be a fit model for this pants project. Not much else to report until I go in for my fitting next week, but I wanted to share my excitement. Behold, the coolness of the virtual try-on machine:

I get to keep the pattern for the pants sloper, so now I just need to make a bodice sloper and I'm golden!

Snowshoeing

2010-02-16T07:03:00.001-08:00

Here's something that you may not know about Canadians: Most of us have never been snowshoeing. That's right, even with all that snow that we have up there, I've never strapped myself into some old tennis rackets and gone romping around in it. Frankly, I'm not really one for winter sports at all (skiing terrifies me), but when my SO started snowshoeing this winter I had to go at least once to see if this is a winter activity I can get behind.

The local bike store where we get our stuff is also a hub for lots of local sporting activities, including a weekly snowshoe outing. Glenn at Swan Cycles has a whole bunch of spare snowshoes which he nicely loans out to people who want to come hiking around with him in the forest near his house. Here's me, trying to strap myself in. Glenn did up the first shoe for me. His stayed laced up the whole trip, whereas mine started flopping apart about halfway through.

The walk we took was really pretty, though some fields and then eventually down into a (mostly) frozen riverbed, and we walked right along the river for a little bit. We crashed through the ice a couple of times, so I had some rather wet ankles by the time we climbed out of the riverbed and made it back up to the field.

That's me being a pest and interrupting my SO's lovely photography. He really likes taking pictures like this ("a single silo, in a desolate snow covered landscape..."), but I think the picture looks a lot better with me in it. My SO has posted some more pics, along with a fancy interactive map thing with geotagged photos. Nerdly, I know :)

All in all, I'm glad that I went, but I think I'll be sticking to monday night yoga instead. Not only do I have a big bruise on my thigh from tripping after getting getting a stick stuck in my shoe, but I have massive blisters from the aggressively paced tromping. These guys treat this as exercise, not just a nice afternoon walk through the fields. Unfortunately, the Biketopus is not built to hike fast even in normal shoes, let alone with big floppy things attached to her feet. I definitely would go again in a slightly more relaxed setting, though, because it was cool to be able to hike through the snowy scenery without being stuck in snowdrifts.

PS -- I hit 900 miles today of indoor biking! Only 100 miles to go until spring!

Cloudy fish

2010-02-14T08:00:00.000-08:00

Poor fish, nothing seems to be going right for them these days. I seem to have nixed the algae problem... I still have some hair algae and stuff growing in there, but the antibiotics really did clear up the nasty BGA. Now I have new weirdness in the tank, though:
Cloudy water. WTF? I honesty don't know what's causing this problem. A little interweb research suggests that the main causes of this problem could be diatom blooms, overfeeding, or bacterial blooms (usually from cycling a new tank). I'm definitely not overfeeding (fishies have been down to a once a day feeding schedule since the BGA problem happened), and diatoms seem unlikely given the color of the cloudiness. I'm thinking this must be bacterial then, perhaps a side effect of the antibiotics or something. Maybe my bacterial colonies are reestablishing themselves post-nuking.

The fish are looking fine and don't generally seem to care, but just to make sure I tested all the levels today when I did a water change.
Ammonia: 0
Nitrite: 0
Nitrate: 0
pH: 7.8

Looks pretty good. The lack of nitrates may eventually be detrimental to my plants, but for now they seem to be doing fine. The water sprite is even showing some new growth, which is very encouraging. I did a 20% water change and a bit of algae removal, but nothing else. I guess I'll sit tight with the cloudiness for a few days and hope it resolves itself.

Hello and goodbye

2010-02-09T20:36:00.000-08:00

I think that it's about time that I introduce my new sewing machine, the Pfaff Expression 2.0! Yay! I brought it home about a week ago, and already it's looking right at home in my kitchen. Behold:
My parents bought this for me as a graduation gift. Yesyes, I know I haven't graduated yet, but a trade in came into the sewing store, and I couldn't resist asking for my present a little bit early so that I could snag this great machine. It's just less than a year old and looks totally new. It has so many features and things that I hardly know where to start, and probably couldn't do justice to them all right now anyway since I haven't spent enough time sewing on it yet. I finished off the remains of a few projects as soon as I got it, and now I'm working on a silk blouse. This will be the first project done entirely on my new machine, and I thought it would be a good test to see how the machine does with a fabric that is difficult to work with. I'm almost done with it, so I'll probably post it sometime this week. Yay!

With the possibility of me getting a job in mind, I decided to sell off the old machine right away, so I wouldn't be tempted to think up a use for a "backup" machine and end up dragging it with me all over the continent. I posted it on craigslist and it sold tout de suite, for $50. I'm a little teeny bit sad to see it go, but honestly not very much. I'm kind of surprised about that, really. Whenever I get a new computer, I always find myself lingering over the old one for a month or so, because the old one is set up just the way I like it and I hardly have to think about using it, and the new one is, well, new. Somehow that doesn't seem to be the case with the Pfaff... maybe I spent so much time visiting it in the store before buying that it's like I'd had it for months! Still, respect is due to the little Kenmore that I essentially learned to sew with. Bye, buddy.
So, what to do with the proceeds from the sewing machine? I'm not sure yet, so I put it in a jar to be saved for something good.
I think that I'll keep all of the proceeds from selling stuff off in this jar, which will hopefully encourage me to get rid of a lot of stuff before we relocate. I still have a few semi-valuable things that I'll try to sell on craigslist, and I'm making a biiiiig garage sale pile. I'm going to try to get my SO to hide stuff from me when I put it in the pile so that I don't start having second thoughts and rescue it later on!

Biking plans

2010-02-08T13:05:00.000-08:00

My SO and I went to the Finger Lakes Cycling Club planning meeting/dinner this weekend, where people show pictures of bike tours that they've taken and plan for upcoming trips. I think that we are definitely going to sign up for this trip to the Adirondacks over Memorial Day weekend. It's a short trip which I think I'll be able to squeeze in even if the dissertation writing is making me crazy, and it's also a nice trip to do with the club since it's probably not a trip that we would be too likely to do on our own without a car. Years ago when I had a car, the SO and I went to the Adirondacks to do some hiking, and it was beautiful. We did one hike in particular that ended up at a peak where there was a old fire observation tower. I also remember being totally exhausted by the time that we actually made it to the top of the trail, about 1500 feet up. Behold, the very tired biketopus:

The biking routes also promise to be rather hilly -- one of the shortest routes (16 miles) has 1500 feet of climbing, and more in longer ones. Climbing is not exactly my idea of a good time, but at least I'm more practiced on hills after biking around Ithaca for a few years.

I got a little bit of biking in yesterday, and have now made it to 875 on the bike odometer. I'm probably a little bit behind in my 1000 mile goal, mostly because I've been back on campus more frequently now that the term has started. The ride to 1000 is now competing with my twice weekly yoga classes, and lately the bike seems to be losing! I'll be at home tomorrow, though, so maybe I'll try to get another ride in then.

Sewing sunday

2010-02-07T09:33:00.000-08:00

Technically I guess I did most of this last night and not on sunday, but hey. I finally got around to finishing this dress which fit so badly the first time that I tried it on. Fortunately after taking in the side seams, the fit was much much better. I think the waist ended up being just about perfect!

This is a picture of my first try on in the mirror (with my lovely knee socks, it's cold here today). The neckline is a little gap-y, so I put an additional snap on the front to tame that a bit. I also raised the armhole while I was taking in the sides, because it was pretty low on the original pattern. I think I raised it by an inch and a half, and you can still see my bra if I raise my arm all the way. I think I'll just leave it as is, though, and wear my teal bra with the dress so it won't be noticeable.

Here's a second try on pic to see if the neckline looks better with the snap, and I couldn't resist putting on the boots and the belt to see how the whole ensemble will look. It's sadly way too cold to wear this right now, but when we get a day that's less hideous I'll get my SO to take some proper pics of me to post on BurdaStyle.

In other very exciting news, I got a new sewing machine! I'll write more about the sewing machine later, but one of the coolest things about this new machine is the extremely pretty buttonholes that it makes. For this dress, I did slightly rounded buttonholes. They came out quite well for my first time using it, but when I was cutting open the buttonholes I clipped a good number of them and now they look all raggedy :-/ It's not really noticeable once the dress is buttoned up, but I'm sad about it nonetheless. I'll remember to be much more careful when I do the buttonholes on my vest.

3D body scan

2010-02-05T08:05:00.001-08:00

You never know what kinds of cool research projects are going on just rooms away from you in your own campus. Even after years (we will refrain from saying how many years) here, I'm still surprised at some of the stuff that goes on here that I had no idea even existed. For example, did you know that there is a giant, 3D body scanner only a few buildings over from mine? I didn't know this until today, but man, it's pretty cool.

My SO was thoughtful enough to grab a poster for me from the gym a week or two ago that was advertising a research study on custom fitted pants. The researcher was looking for people with "curvy butts" to get a 3D body scan, followed by a pants fitting. Not only does this pay money, but if you make it through to the end of the study you can request a copy of the pattern that was used to make the custom fitted pants for you. Score! So, I got up relatively early this morning (for me at least), and went off in search of the scanner in MVR Hall.

I wasn't entirely sure what this thing was going to look like, but it actually looks *exactly* like being inside of a giant photocopier with four scanners in each corner of the scanning box instead of one. You strip down to your undies and the thing runs a beam over you from head to toe, and you end up with a remarkably accurate computerized image of your body (maybe a little too accurate even -- I could totally see that one side of my bra fits better than the other, and I had to stop myself from going on about bra fit problems, despite the fact that her research is on butts).

Now I have to wait a week or two to see if I've been selected for the next stage of research were I get to try on the custom patterns. I told her if she ran out of money she could contact me for free, as long as I got the pattern in the end. Yes, dear reader, I know this is a pretty sure way to guarantee that she won't pay me any more, but getting a pattern made especially for me is worth more than ten bucks!

Stop: Winter time!

2010-01-31T18:57:00.000-08:00

Is my SO trying to remain anonymous here? Nope, he's just dressed up for a nice little trip to the grocery store, in full winter biking regalia. This includes a ski mask, neck warmer, a coat that probably came from a German army surplus, work gloves and a pair of cropped old man wool pants that came from the thrift store (too bad you can't see these in the picture, because I did a really terrific blind hem on those bad boys!). It's been coooold the past few days in Ithaca, though, so this isn't quite as insane as it looks.

I've been working my butt off on applications all weekend, and I'm tired times four. I'm going to settle into bed now with a tasty sour cherry cupcake, so goodnight, mystery reader!

Bacteria attack

2010-01-30T12:37:00.000-08:00

Okay, I finally broke down and did it -- I put the antibiotics in my tank today. I've been hesitating on this for a while, because I really don't want to cause some sort of disaster that would end up taking out all of my fish along with the bacteria, but my SO pointed out this morning that my plants are starting to look really sad. And indeed they are. My water sprite, which was once so prolific that it was nearly taking over they tank, is now all but dead, and my java ferns are getting totally sad and brown looking.

So I dosed the tank today, with as many precautions as I could think of -- I cleaned out as much junk as possible by hand so it wouldn't foul up the tank when it died, did a 20% water change, tested the levels (nitrates down to 5pmm this week, and the freakin' BGA continues to grow!). I also took out the bio-beads from the filter and stored them in a little tupperware container of tank water in the fridge. I don't know if the bacteria will actually survive for five days this way, but I figured doing this really couldn't hurt. The other filter media should have more than enough bacteria to keep the tank going, and if the antibiotics take those bacteria out this might work as a backup plan.

Nothing to do now but sit back, cross my fingers (or press my thumbs) and take the levels tomorrow AM. Send my fish positive thoughts, and my BGA very negative ones....

Bike tire changing

2010-01-27T19:26:00.000-08:00

Believe it or not, I've actually never changed a tire on my bike, or possibly any bike (that I can remember, at least). When I was living in Portland I had a few rather annoying flats, but I always wimped out on changing them myself. Portland is already such a bike savvy city that I felt pretty silly being "that girl" who goes into a bike shop and has never even changed a tire before, so instead I opted for being "that girl" who's willing to pay someone ten bucks to do it for her. When I was biking this summer by myself a lot, I figured it was probably pretty important that I take at least some steps towards learning how to repair a flat, lest I find myself in 15 miles from home with no way to get back. I watched some youtube videos, carried around tire levers and a spare tube, but never managed to run over anything bad enough to slow my bike down. Amazingly, I still have yet to get a single flat in the 1.5 years that I've had this bike.

Don't worry, nothing bad happened to my bike today, although I'm sure it will have a rough encounter with a beer bottle or something eventually. Tonight's tire change was entirely voluntary, although not entirely painless. My SO got a generator hub for me for christmas (yay!) and built it up for me, and I asked him to show me how to take the tire off of the old wheel and put it on the new one so that I could finally get some tire changing experience.

I'm pleased to report that I got the thing on and off mostly on my own, with my SO sitting over my shoulder and giving directions. The most difficult part was getting the tire back onto the rim, which required some help from someone with stronger fingers than the biketopus. Tire levers were flying everywhere, and I thought I was probably going to snap the tire levers (or my fingers) trying to get that stupid thing over the rim. Suffice it to say that if I had to change a tire alone in the wilderness, I would have arrived home pretty late/annoyed. But, I'm proud that I finally gave it a go. Do you think I should get this bike jersey now?

Oh, and I also made it over 850 this week, with my highest ever moving average: 15.09 mph over a 25 min ride. A 25 minute ride fueled by Lady GaGa, that is!

First day of school dress will have to wait

2010-01-24T18:39:00.000-08:00

Did you ever get to buy a new outfit for the first day of school when you were a kid? I loved doing this (along with buying new school supplies in September). I thought I would make myself a back to school dress for this semester, but unfortunately the dress looks like it's not going to make it in time for the bell.

I started working on this pattern, using some plaid fabric that I got from fabric.com:

The plaid doesn't have one inch stripes, but I figured that this wasn't really essential, as long as I took out tucks big enough to reduce the waist area by 50%. After reading up about the pattern on patternreview.com, though, it seemed like a lot of people were having trouble with the waist ending up a bit smaller than planned. Taking out just a little extra to make sure that the white squares are tucked out adds up, and people were suggesting to size up by one or two sizes to make sure that it didn't end up being too snug. I thought I could solve this problem by simply taking out a bit less than half on each tuck, thereby ensuring I'd have a roomier waist. Well, it turns out that the problem is just as annoying in the reverse.

Do I look unhappy here? Yeah, that's because the waist of my dress is now 40 inches, instead of the 34 inches that the pattern promised. I could go back and make each tuck a little deeper, but that sounds so unappealing after carefully sewing each of these 60 tucks or so to make sure that the plaids lined up. I think instead I'm going to just try to reduce the dress at the side seams, which will also make the shoulders a little less droopy (I'm not sure how these ended up so big on me as well. WTF?).

The bigger problem is, of course, that I now have no dress to wear for the first day of school :) What to do, what to do?

Canning chutney

2010-01-24T08:34:00.001-08:00

I finally got around to making some chutney this weekend with the two absolutely gigantic asian pears I bought last weekend. We're on the last jar of the green tomato chutney we made aaaaages ago, and so I thought I would stock up on some of the asian pear and red pepper chutney that I made a few months ago. The recipe is from the Millennium Cookbook, which is one of those fancyfancy cookbooks with time consuming recipes that become even more time consuming when you have to hunt down all the crazy ingredients that the recipe calls for first. This chutney is surprisingly straightforward, though: It has asian pears and red peppers (surprise), a sugar-vinegar base, some chili paste and roasted cumin seeds. With all the vinegar/sugar/spice in there, I think this one has a good chance of surviving on the shelf, so I made a big batch to can.

I've done some canning before using regular kitchen equipment, but this time I thought I would invest in some proper canning tongs to make the process a little easier. This did make a BIG difference. Pulling those cans out of the boiling water with barbecue tongs is a bit slippery and unpredictable. I'd say the rubberized tongs were totally worth the extra five bucks and kitchen drawer space.

After 25 minutes of rattling cans, and the fun sound of lids popping as they cool, I now have five nice jars of chutney. Nom.

I also made some spicy corn chowder for dinner, which unfortunately I didn't take a picture of. I always get really excited when this soup comes up at CTB, but my SO doesn't really get my love of this soup. Last night I made a veganized version of it so that he could finally try it, and I have to say it turned out really well! The CTB version is already vegetarian, but a lot of the internet recipes I found called for bacon. Ah, bacon. It's one of the few meats that I really do miss the taste of. So, I thought this might be a good time to bust out the bottle of liquid smoke that I've had in the cupboard for a while (impulse purchase at the grocery store) and see what that did. It's fantastic! A couple shakes of that stuff really did give the soup that smoky, bacon-y smell. I'm getting hungry again just thinking about it.

Impulse buying at the asian grocery store

2010-01-19T11:06:00.001-08:00

I am admittedly a huge impulse buyer when I go to the grocery store (okay, and other places too, but it's particularly bad at the grocery store!). This is one of the main reasons why my SO does most of the grocery shopping, because his rational German self is able to buy the one best brand of canned beans without getting swayed by cool packaging or the fancy chocolate on sale on the endcap. When I do the grocery shopping, I tend to forget to buy things like rice and end up carrying home a bunch of fancy sauces and weird vegetables instead.

This weekend we were out doing some shopping and popped into an asian grocery store in search of bok choy, which surprisingly they didn't have, but they did have a lot of other cool looking stuff screaming "try me!" from the shelves. I got a few asian pears for making some chutney later in the week, and this bottle of aloe beverage.

My first thought was, "woah, does this really taste like aloe?" Answer: Not really. It's fairly sweet, a bit tart, kind of chalky tasting, and past that I don't really have the vocabulary to describe the rest of what's going on in there. It's tasty, but I'm not sure I'd be running to buy this one again. This may not have been the best way to get the full on aloe experience, though, since this beverage is only aloe enhanced, so next time I may splurge and get the 1L size bottle of aloe juice that was next to it in the fridge. Or, just juice some of my aloe plant? Can that possibly produce a tasty beverage?

Oh, and quick bike update: 826.12, as of last night.

Ask and you shall receive!

2010-01-17T09:14:00.000-08:00

Guess who has a 40% off one item coupon at the moment? And guess who's going to get a giant Olfa mat today? :D

Want!

2010-01-16T10:51:00.001-08:00

Ah, these little Sephora sampler kits are just death for me... I can't resist the lure of 8! mini! items! So much variety! I've been wanting to try the Buxom lip gloss for a while, too. Maybe I'll be able to hold out long enough to see if it will go on sale after Valentines day.

Supplies for destruction and construction

2010-01-16T10:33:00.000-08:00

Much as I enjoy being a hermit in the winter, even hermits eventually have to leave to get supplies. First up, a trip to the pet store to get some supplies for destroying blue-green algae (BGA). I've been having BGA wars for the better part of a month now and am starting to get really annoyed about it. I've had my share of algae in the tank so far, but surprisingly no BGA, so I was pretty unpleasantly surprised to find a BGA bloom when I put in some new lights in December. Two weeks ago, I did a huge water change and scraped a whole bunch of it out by hand, and last weekend I did a 25% water change and more gunk removal. It's not as bad as it was, but my plants are still getting covered and beginning to look a little worse for wear. So, here are the supplies for my two-pronged attack:
I've decided to give the BGA one more good cleaning, and see if this will help things, and I also bought some clearmax to remove phosphates/nitrates. The nitrates are not particularly high in my tank at the moment (around 10ppm last week when I tested them), so this is probably going to make my plants pretty unhappy, but hopefully it will make the BGA unhappier. If the BGA is still back with force next weekend, then I'm going to consider just nuking it with some antibiotics. My friends over at wet web media advise against this, and I know it's a little risky, but we're getting into last resort territory here. Doesn't this BGA know I have a dissertation to write?

I also popped by Michaels to get some sewing notions, notably some loops for the tie back on the vest that I'm making:The fabric is a really awesome linen with teal and peach threads in it, and I'm going to make it into a vest and pants outfit. I thought I could use a little break from the quilt again and do a quick and easy something that I could wear around, and so I cut the vest out last night. I also wanted to try at least one vest before I draft one for my top secret project, which I will reveal soon! Amazingly, I managed to walk out without purchasing all kinds of stuff that I only kind of need, although I was sorely tempted to get a new Olfa cutting mat. I probably will break down and get one at some point, maybe Joanns has one of those nice 20% off one item coupons out.

Processor quilt in process

2010-01-15T11:37:00.000-08:00

Sorry, I know that's a cheap play on words, but I couldn't resist making it at some point!

Here's a shot of what I have so far on the processor quilt. This was taken about a week ago so I actually have a little bit more done than you see here, but it gives you an idea of what it will look like. This is pretty much the full length of the quilt and almost half the width, and as you can (kind of) see it's already starting to take over my kitchen. I can only imagine what a nightmare it's going to be to quilt this thing once I get it all pieced together. I blame the massiveness of this project at least partially on my SO, who requires an extra long blanket to cover up his ridiculously long German legs!

More high scores -- 807.51!

2010-01-14T21:10:00.000-08:00

One of my goals for this winter is to try and make it to 1000 miles on my bike, using the indoor trainer that my SO and I invested in a few months ago. While he finds it rather boring to be on the trainer staring at the stove for half an hour and pedaling away like a hamster, I actually really like this setup. When I work from home for the day my opportunities for exercising are somewhat limited, and it's nice to be able to pop on my shorts and ride for half an hour when I get sick of writing my dissertation without having to think about where I'll ride or how much time it will take me to get to and from the gym.

I was at around 750 miles on our winter solstice ride, and as you can see four weeks later I'm up over 800, which I think is not too bad considering we were in Canada for at least a week of that. With about ten weeks or so before we have even the hope of good weather in Ithaca, I'll have to ride about 20 miles a week to make it to my goal (which is about three rides a week, if I ride for half an hour at an average of 14mph).

It's kind of annoying to me that it will take three rides a week to get such pitiful mileage -- when I was living in Portland, for example, I was riding about 50 miles a week just from my daily commute. It's nice to have a setup where work is just far enough away to give you regular exercise, and the 10 mile round trip for me was perfect. I suppose now I have the rather hilly walk into campus as my daily commute, but unfortunately that doesn't show up on my odometer!

474 Hell yeah!

2010-01-13T18:46:00.000-08:00

Highest score EVAR for me in Scrabble today! Oh yeah. Here's the final board, and the final score was 474 to 251. This was a pretty seriously good game for me considering that my previous highest score was 421, but luck was also on my side: I got both blank tiles, each of which I played for a bingo, and the X, Q and J. I play on facebook with one of the professors in my department, and we're a pretty good match. Last semester he beat me quite a bit (increasing my beer debt, since we play for beer), but this semester I'm up on him 3-1 so far. Bet he's not too happy about this last game!

What writing my dissertation feels like, on a good day...

2010-01-12T08:50:00.000-08:00

Oh PhD comics, you know just how to capture the angst of grad student life. Sigh indeed.

Processor quilt... the project that never ends

2010-01-11T18:37:00.000-08:00

One of the reasons that I wanted to start a blog was to encourage myself to document some of my projects in process, especially ongoing ones that I get somewhat less excited about as they drag out over months and months. The processor quilt is one of these projects. I've had the idea to do a computer themed quilt for a while now. I toyed with the idea of doing a motherboard quilt and even started sewing something along these lines, but I wasn't really happy with the design. Then about a year ago (almost exactly a year ago, actually), I saw this photo in a Technology Review photo essay, and I thought, now that would make a great quilt. The geometric shapes, the balance between detailed bits and big blocks of color all just said "quilt" to me, and as a bonus the colors already happen to match some of my bedroom furniture and sheets. I bought some awesome batiks, started on a pattern, and got less than halfway through sewing the red blocks in the bottom part of the image before I just ran out of steam -- too much work, not enough gratification. I ended up putting this aside in the unfinished objects pile while I worked on some clothes and other little projects that came together much more easily.

Well, a few weeks ago I was once again feeling the itch to work on this project. I started working on the top part of the quilt this time, and have actually made some pretty good progress with that part. I'd say I probably have somewhere between 30-40% of the quilt pieced now, and it's already turning out to be huge (but cool looking!). I have a few pictures of the quilt in progress on my camera that I'll upload in the coming days. Maybe putting them out there on the interweb will help keep me motivated to finish it?

Hemming income = guilt free pattern shopping!

2010-01-11T17:59:00.000-08:00

A friend of mine has offered to pay me for hemming up some pants for her (which I should be pretty good at by now, considering all of the pants I've hemmed for my own short legs), and so I think I'm going to feed this income right back into my sewing obsession by buying some new patterns! I've been eying up the new Colette patterns line for a while and feeling too guilty to splurge on new patterns, but this is just the excuse I need. These patterns are goooooorgeous. So gorgeous, in fact, that I have no idea which ones to get. Sencha seems like a pattern I'll get lots of mileage out of and is probably a must buy:

I think I already have some fabrics in my stash that would be pretty great for this blouse. There's also a variation with front pleats and one with a keyhole neckline and a little tie as well. But which one of the dresses should I get? Both Rooibos and Oolong are pretty fantastic, and I think Macaron with look awesome with a sheer contrasting fabric on top. Decisions, decisions... but I guess first I should find some time to actually finish hemming the pants!