Bowtie blouse

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

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

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

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)

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

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

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.