Monthly Archives: August 2008

seamstress on the move

This is my sewing machine Earl. He is a Bernina 707 minimatic, and we’ve been sewing together for, oh, some two years. I bought him in a sewing shop one sunny spring day, and meeting up with a couple of friends right after, he got his name by Tina, who thought he looked like an Earl.

I will soon be packing up Earl in a carry-on suitcase, and taking him with me as I get on a plane to move across an ocean. And therefore, I might be a little absent from the sewing for a bit, while I get settled in.

The sewing machine is coming along since I am starting my second bachelors degree! I will quite soon be studying Fashion Design at Columbia College Chicago. I don’t know if I’ll be a typical Fashion Design student or not – I assume they come in all shapes and colors like every other student – but for now, I don’t have any grand plans of becoming a fashion designer, in the designing sense. My heart has always been with the making, in almost all kinds of handicrafts. If it involves using my hands and ending up with a palpable result, I’m in!

With this degree, I am really looking forward to finally learning all the nuts and bolts and gritty details of constructing patterns, grading them, textile properties, tailoring techniques, draping, and generally all I need to learn to make really well made garments. And I hope to have lots to show for it while I’m learning!

So – if you’re living, or travelling through Chicago, feel free to drop me a note! We can make soap while watching Project Runway or something.

black dress pants

When I was younger, I would picture my grown-up self going to work at my office in high heels, and pressed dress pants or pencil skirts. An office job seemed exotic to me, and I guess all the woman magazines I came across pushed this visual image of the working woman. As a budding seamstress, this kind of office dress code might not happen very soon, but I can still wear my pants and my heels:

I wonder how my employer feels about the boy scouts?

This pair of pants and I have been through some rounds of disagreement. Firstly, the pattern I had wasn’t very good, and I ended up chopping off some 3 inches from the waist, and narrowing the legs by something like a third of the original width, I’m sure. High waisted, wide legged pants can be great, but the fit of the pattern was more dowdy than Marlene Dietrich. Even after the pants were all done, the legs were unflatteringly wide and I took them in some more.

For my first attempt at hip-yoke pockets for these trousers, I used some scraps I had of purple silk. After a while of using the pants I realized the silk would bulge out from the pockets while I walked – not a good look. The pieces had been too small to begin with, and it certainly didn’t look sophisticated. I eventually replaced the pocket lining with bigger pieces of black pinstriped wool, and they behave much more like pockets should now.

The last challenge with these pants has been that I cut them out from the linen fabric in the wrong direction. The give should be going across the pants, not lengthwise, but alas. I did remember this though, when sewing a pencil skirt out of the left overs of the linen. The office might come later – for now I have the wardrobe ready.

arrived: a package!

I was lucky enough to win a give-away over at Made by Petchy a little while ago – I was thrilled of course! Solveig has a great aesthetic, so I was really looking forward to what might come my way. Packages in the post are usually fun, but fellow crafters sending you stuff is a little bit like having a birthday.

Looking very promising and exciting indeed!

A vintage sewing pattern! And look how funky and fabulous this dress is! I am looking forward to making this dress, and I’m also really liking just looking at the envelope and enjoying the illustration. It’s taken me some years of sewing to get around to wanting a fantastic vintage pattern collection of my own – I’m very happy to have this in my collection!

It also seems like Solveig has noticed my like of aprons (which is a like we share), and this vintage apron was also in the package. I love the print and the color, and I’ve already rolled up my sleeves in anticipation of making something or another.

I’m impressed by how much it seems like Solveig thoughtfully hand-picked these things especially for me – she certainly hit the spot! Thank you so much Solveig, I adored it!

nostalgia and spinning

Sometimes I think I was born in the wrong century. I think I would love walking around wearing many layers of skirts, having to hike them up while walking stairs – thank you for that, Laura Ingalls Wilder. I don’t think I’d mind going back in time to, say, the 1860s for a couple of days, but I’m not so sure I’d want to stay there.

Maybe its more admiration than nostalgia I feel for the people of that era, and their self sufficiency. I am impressed by all the skills average people had, allowing them to raise, slaughter, prepare and make use of their own animals, building their own houses and clothe themselves. While I don’t necessarily feel that everything was much better in the olden days, I am sad that skills like these are not commonplace anymore.

Anyone who are skillful at what they do are impressive to me, but I am easiest to impress when it comes to handicrafts. Show me a talented and dedicated cobbler, or a bookbinder, or a glass-blower or piano-tuner, and I will be in awe, or want to be like them! I’ve had so different jobs on my “what do I want to be when I grow up”-list, but they are much alike – they are all about creating, one way or another. I too want to know my craft, and be really good at it. Now, I’m not planning on spinning being my trade, but that doesn’t need to stop me trying it!

spinning….

… and carding wool to be spun

The spinning wheel belongs to my work, a museum, and a co-worker showed me how to use it. Mom had some wool lying around at home that I could use, and she also let me borrow her hand carders. As soon as I started using them, I remembered the technique – I think there was some wool carding and crafting in my childhood that my hands remember!

It’s a fairly simple concept: the spinner pulls a section of the prepared wool apart, and the strands of fibres gets twisted to create yarn. How thin the wool gets pulled apart, affects the thickness the yarn gets. This is pretty much all the variables with a drop spindle; it’s all about the yarn and a weight and the weight set in motion. But add the foot rhythm and hand-eye-foot coordination of the spinning wheel, and it takes some trying and yarn breaking before it all comes together! Now that it’s going better, I’m finding the process quite meditative – I think it’s the rhythm of the pedal and the whirring of the wheel that does it.

As with other crafts, I get excited about the usefulness about this – I could technically go from cutting the wool off the sheep (for now I’ll leave the shearing to those who know how), to carding, to spinning, to finally knitting a sweater. Now, how would that be for “I made this myself”?