baby got shirt!

all finished. i brought the side seams in... oh, a few inches. look, i have a waist, and i like other people to know it's there also, okay? that little rumple up near my right shoulder is not poor stitching, i just didn't pull the shirt on properly. it actually doesn't sit like that normally. apparently my sewing skills actually surpass my ability to dress myself. given how long i've been sewing, and given how long i've dressed myself this is cause for some concern.

best bit? the fabulous use of the embroidery stitches on my machine. normally hidden by the pocket flap, so only i know they're there:


worst bit? i was hammering the cool copper-coloured studs in (yup! no wussy buttons here. studs come with these angry looking spiky prongs and you need to hammer them in), and i was telling Badly Coloured Boy a terribly interesting story about the IRA. I looked up at him to emphasise the climax, and slammed the hammer down onto my thumb.
bruises are notoriously difficult to photograph (trust me - my hypochondriac self has tried. So. Many. Times), but you can make out the ugly blacky-purple smush on the edge of my thumbnail, i hope.

my howls of anguish rather detracted from the end of the IRA story, by the way.

reasons why i rule

i have pretty much sewn a shirt that pretty much fits. still have to do the cuffs and the side and arm seams. and the buttons. but, y'know. i made collar! there is no need for you to see the World's Ugliest Collar Stand Facing Job. some scissors and some yanking and noone need be any the wiser...

sew u think you can make a shirt, huh?

i'm thinking i should have signed up for the wardrobe refashion challenge, given that i keep making tops and dresses and my poor student status means i probably won't buy any pants (which i don't intend to make myself yet) this year. or at least for the first half of the year.

i've been trying the shirt out of Sew U. Frustratingly, while her patterns are 'for sizes 2 - 18' there are actually only 4 sizes to cut - extra-small, small, medium and large. And she doesn't state what measurements any of those are exactly. apparently a medium is somewhere between a 34.5" and 35.5" bust (also note the non-standard measurements she uses?). so i'm stuck making a mystery-sized shirt for my 34" bust. which is a pity, because it's a very flattering pattern so far (that or i made the darts a wee bit big, resulting in a more fitted than intended shirt).
anyway, i'm stuck right now because i sewed a pocket on a bit crooked, and the facing isn't as straight as i'd like, but i don't actually own an unpicker... so no sewing till i can beg/ borrow/ steal (tried to buy - spotlight didn't have any left) one.

because i'm making the cowboy shirt i need to cut the little pointy yokes. and because i'm using plaid, i need to make sure all the stripes are doing the same thing. and because geometric mathsy stuff was never my strong point, and i have a bit of a cold which contributes to Stuffiness of Brain i actually had to cut seven yokes, instead of two, to get them pointing the right way. it's not helped by the fact the plaid is different on the vertical to the horizontal. it's helped greatly by the fact my fabric is completely reversible.

what have i let myself in for?

i'm feeling a little bit squicky about my dissertation. see, my genius idea was to take all these disarrayed opinions, sort them out, and say who was right (in my eyes). sadly, one of those learned authors has already done just that, and come to the exact same conclusion as me.

so i kind of need a new angle, and am torn between stretching my current idea to fit; or throwing it aside completely and cutting a new one (of the same cloth).

and instead of actually working on this, i'm blogging and eating copious amounts of chocolate and rocking gently back and forth and being otherwise evasive.

more wendy! more!

this one doesn't gape so much, and i made the back a little narrower. i deliberately cut the facing in the opposite direction to the body. only problem? i cut one piece upside down (the stripes have two narrow line to one side of a wider one, so it shows). couldn't be bothered to recut, so just left it. i feel very lazy in retrospect. but i got the stripes in the bust and the lower body to match up! i am so couture!

you can't really see it, but the binding is tartan. i was going to make tartan covered buttons for the trim, but the shanks on my self-covering buttons are really long, and when sewn to the top they sag, and don't look very nice. you can see the bottom one sadly drooping there. so I'm a bit stuck for a trim right now. Maybe I'll just put a brooch on it. i have a cute little silver swirly leaf brooch that fits perfectly.

aside, are you american? want to help me out? want fabulous australian goodies? go check out my desperate plea for a(nother) BBW pattern.

next stop? i'm so close to finishing anatolia i can taste in (mmm... woolly!)
then i'm going to make a cowboy shirt out of that brown-ish kind of checked fabric below.

happy birthday me!

it's my birthday today. this time last year i was in venice, at the cafe where byron had breakfast, toasting myself with glacee chestnuts. this year i'm in my own little (rented) place (that i share with badly coloured boy), but closer to friends and family. and my new baby. this is mathilda:


she's a bernina 830, bought second-hand to celebrate the anniversary of my birth. the exact same model as my mum has (coincidence. the first second hand bernina we could track down). together we've learnt buttonholes, and tested all the embroidery stitches. in short, everything mum told me not do until i had mathilda serviced. tomorrow me and Tildy are going to try and sew another Simplicity 4111.

and, just as i sat here typing this, badly coloured boy handed me his gift - a copy of this. it's been so long since i've had an art book, and this is just so inspiring. it reminds me of so much i'm forgetting - delacroixe vs david. courbet and the birth of modernism. see, i actually have a degree in art history. i just don't use it for anything other than lecturing bored acquaintance and feeling superior.

wound up!

i borrowed clementine's retro little ballwinder (and her superior winding skills) to sort out the rest of that merino. the stripy gingham (yup, more stripy gingham! remind me to post the chair cushion i made sometime too) is tied to the ends, so i don't lose them.

ostraya day

for the non-australian 'mongst you, today was australia day. national holiday to celebrate... y'know. like, straya (which is how our country is pronounced in our oddly lazy accent).
it's also the day that the publically funded national youth radio counts down the listener-voted hottest 100 songs of the last year. so for many young-uns, australia day = hottest 100 day.

and what did we do?
this, of course:

a bbq was so patently obvious that people turned up with packs of meat without even knowing whether we owned a bbq.
look, we did throw prawns on the barbie! For me, who does not eat the piggy-animal (pork chops, and pork sausages, i think, for others). the pot has potato salad with chilli mayo in it. and there was other bread, too. solid, basic barbie food.


today was the hottest day this summer by far. 41C! 106F! so what these photos don't show is the afternoon we spent laid out like lizards, with sweat-sheens, listening to the radio and drinking revolting quantities of beer.
then after our guests left, badly coloured boy and i drove across down to the nicest beach we know. we went swimming in the gloaming with quite a lot of other people still down at the beach. the water was the clearest i have ever seen it. it was clear like a swimming pool. BCB couldn't swim up and grab my ankles because i could see him every time.
driving home at night we saw the fireworks put on over the river next to the city, through gaps in the trees. and now i am eating toast for dinner. quite a lovely day.

spotlight goodies

the closest spotlight to me is in the process of closing down (lease is up, the landowners want to put in a car dealership). everything is half price. i also had to stand in a queue to get my fabric cut for at least an hour. i actually sent badly coloured boy to go buy a vacuum cleaner and iron while i was in the queue. he shopped around a bit, bargained a decent deal, then drove back to find me still waiting to get my fabric cut.
some people were buying terrifying quantities of fabric.... like, no exaggeration, maybe thirty rolls. some remnants, some needing to be measured out. what i thought was a counter full (full!) of stuff to be reshelved turned out to be some lady's 'to buy' pile.


only the heavy cotton weave on the right had to be cut. the denim and stripes on the left were all remnants. which was kind of neat. because i was looking high and low for the two middle rolls, because i wanted to buy a bit. couldn't find them anywhere, then saw a lady wheel them out on a trolley. $7 and $5 for the rolls, respectively. though my terrible camera skills don't show it, the navy and white striped roll has a quite unusual weave. in the middle of each white stripe some of there is, like... less warp (or weft?) threads, so the bareness makes an extra stripe. sort of the optical illusion principle in the invisible stripe scarf, on a much, much finer scale.

when it came to trims, i bought all the gingham bias binding they had left (only three metres!); half the blue and green tartan; all of that pretty crochet stuff. and some wooden buttons that were 50c and $1 each respectively, though the spotlight people threw in two free buttons to get rid of the tube.


also bought another pair of clover needles, and a zipper to match the denim (i'm going to try to make a pair of short shorts... the denim has a wee bit of stretch in it, which should make up for any weird shaping my inadequate skills produce).

now, i actually need to get onto sewing some stuff.

liberty fabrics

god i am lusting after this soooooo badly. the colour scheme is so uncompromisingly fifties. i think it'd make a wonderful built by wendy top.
the problem with this fabulous built by wendy top is that it encourages me to imagine the squillion different prints that it could work with. like, eiffel towers, say. or toile de jouy (i love this stuff, in any weight, for any purpose).

last year in london, before i was really into sewing, i bought a pre-cut metre of liberty lawn at the actual Liberty store in London (possibly the most fabulous department store in the world. can you imagine changerooms with tiny tudor windows onto the outside world? and tudor handcarved balustrades?). Anyway, the fabric. It was the Ianthe pattern (that you can see on that linked page, under the subheading '1890s'), in purple and aqua and fuschia, and on sale cost enough to make me cough a little. i couldn't understand how these other women were walking away with armsful of this fabric. until i realised later how much the retail price was. and the other day when i actually unfolded and measured my fabric, i found out the 'metre' was more like a metre and a half squared. i paid really a very, very good price.
my point? um.... if any londoner reads this and fancies custom purchasing me a sale-price piece of pre-cut lawn from the liberty store i can organise a swap of australian bits and pieces that would certainly make it worth your while. bear it in mind. perhaps they have a mid-year sale?