Apple Shaped Pear

Behind every pear is an apple waiting to ruin a good sewing project.

Happy Birthday, America!

In honor of July 3rd, Best Husband and I sent Above Average Toddler to daycare and enjoyed our day off by getting breakfast out on the town, taking a nap, and engaging in our hobbies.

BH played some video games, and I absconded to my sewing room for a few hours of guilt-free sewing.

Today I decided to fight my natural inclination to work on a dress or something fancy and went purposefully cas (pronounced: kaj, short for "casual"). 

McCall's 7286 hit the spot and I pulled out the double-sided striped/polka dot black and white knit that I got a fabric shopping trip ago.

Looks cas, right? And I didn't mean to rip off the inspiration pic so literally, but lately I've been feeling like I should wear more stripes. Doesn't everyone get that feeling sometimes? And I've read that horizontal stripes are actually not the devil for wide people, unlike we've been told all these years. 

So then the big decision was if I was going to do the contrast on the side panel thingamajigs. More on that later. First: housekeeping.

Materials needed to lengthen pattern

I am long waisted and I hate when shirts don't extend past my hips so I decided to take this pattern up on the lengthen/shorten line.

I originally thought I'd lengthen it by 1.5 inches, but then I placed my double sided tape too low so 1" it had to be!

It's important to roll with the punches when sewing.

You can see in the above picture that my method for lengthening the pattern was to grab some of the extra blank pattern instruction paper, cut it up, and then use the handy line along the edge as a guide to line up/straighten the two pattern pieces once they were cut apart.

Here they are reassembled.

I don't have a cutting table and I didn't want to take over the dining room table yet again so I made do cutting this on the floor.

Honestly, this gave me heartburn and a back ache. Ug, really need a big flat surface in my sewing room. 

Next up came the big decision: do I keep the stripes on the side panels, or....

...do I flip the fabric over and do the polka dots?

So I asked Best Husband what he thought and he vehemently argued for one of the versions. And I followed his advice. 

Husband!!!

[Aside:

As I type this, I am watching the "90's classic" (according to HBO description) "He Said, She Said" starring Kevin Bacon and the exquisite Elizabeth Perkins. They use this framing device of the scene according to "him" and then the same scene according to "her."

I imagine that if my life were this movie, this would be the "he said" version of the above decision:

/end Aside]

[Actually, not done yet.

Aside, continued:

Speaking of "He Said, She Said" - people really knew how to dance in the '90s. There's one scene, not pictured below, where Elizabeth Perkins is just being a graceful little swan out there on the dance floor, just grooving to the beat of her own inner goddess and I'm like, I want to be you. I want to know what it's like to live free like those in the '90s, before all these bad things happened.

What innocence! The streets were paved in Laura Ashley prints and people still thought Pets.com was going to be a thing.

Now here we are:

Swish, Swish Bish

/end Aside.]

Since I'm sewing a knit I needed to pull out my ball point needle.

I don't love sewing knits because I don't have a serger. Sometimes I do the double-needle thing, but for this shirt I just did the triple stitch setting on my machine. I didn't take a picture of my machine so I used this picture I found on the internet that explained my thoughts better than I could.

Here's what the stitch looked like on my test strip. I stretched the fabric a bit to test it out and it was nice and sturdy and I didn't have to do my double needle thing and so it was decided.

It came together pretty quickly and I found the fabric to be pretty easy to work with. Once I attached the sleeves, but before finishing the neck or hem, I decided to try my new shirt on. I was feeling good about it, and it was really comfy. 

I wander over to the mirror and....

Hello Frump City!

Oh what's that? The side panels create the optical illusion that I have no waist and that my middle is basically a circle of misery?

Here are a few more pics of my, I mean my husband's, bad decisions.

It's almost as if I went into this project with the sole intention of turning my pear-shaped body into a genetically-modified apple.

UGGG!

But let's look on the bright side.

PROs:

• I do like this fabric.
• I like the pattern. It was really easy and fits nicely.

Now let's look on the dark side.

CONs:

• I should have known better. You can even tell in the initial photo before it was sewn together that the shape that was created with these contrast side panels is not flattering.
• It's summer and this shirt is definitely more appropriate for winter, or at least a day in the fall in New England when it's bitterly cold and you realize global warming is real and we're all headed for an ice age and this is really just the beginning and we should all start learning survival skills to prepare for a future like "The Day After Tomorrow."

So where does that leave me?

I'm not going to give up on this shirt, I'll tell you that. I've invested a day off sans-Toddler on this shirt and guess what? I'm going to fix it.

To be continued...

A Garbage Can of Her Own: Philosewphical Thoughts

When I was a kid, I had one garbage can, the one from my room. When I went to college, I took that garbage can with me. When I got my first apartment, I had to buy another garbage can for the kitchen.

As my life has expanded, it became increasingly necessary for more garbage cans. First an office trash can, then a nice flip top one for the bathroom, then one for the baby's room. Life is an accumulation of garbage cans.

Today I realized I needed one more garbage can, for my sewing room. This marks an important transition from sewing being an activity I perform in other spaces to an activity that has a room of its own...and a garbage can of its own.

"A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction," Virginia Woolf once wrote...in a room of her own. If that is the case then surely a woman must have a garbage can and a room of her own if she is to sew poorly.

There is more than a little irony in the fact that I, as an ardent feminist, take such enjoyment in an activity that has for centuries symbolized "women's work." How would ol' Ginnie feel about modern women using their leisure time and a room of their own to sew garments that could easily be purchased?

Alas, these are philosewphical thoughts for another day.