Thoughts on clothes

I'm trying to organize my clothes and plan for college. This isn't really sewing related, but tangentially it is.

Pants/shorts:
I have three pairs of pants, namely one pair of jeans, one pair of black twill pants, and one pair of black poplin pants. I have one pair of shorts, which I wear once a year for cleaning out our pond. I also have a pair of "work jeans" with paint marks and glue on them, and a pair or two of sweat pants. I also have my karate gi pants.

Shirts:
I am really lacking in the shirts department, I know. About a year ago, I realized I barely had any shirts. My stunningly creative way of dealing with this problem was to go to the craft store and buy several T-shirts. Yes, those uni-sex shapeless things that are basically dyed undershirts. We all have our problems. Mine are my shirts.

Skirts:
I have a lot of skirts, but many of them don't really work for day-to-day wear. The ones that do are a black knit ankle-length skirt (that can double as a dress), a white and black skirt that hits just below the knee, a blue linen skirt about the same length, a blue corduroy skort, and (for the days I really feel like pushing the envelope) a floor-length knit skirt made out of pink, purple, black, and white squares cut from T-shirts. (Examples of skirts that aren't day-to-day wear include a long black velvet sheath skirt.)

Sweaters:
Meh. (I've been saying that a lot lately.) A lot of my sweaters are getting old. I could probably use a few more of them.

Dresses:
I have nice dresses. I really do. I have three dresses I can wear on a fairly normal day--a flowered sleeveless one, the Simplicity 6699 I just finished, and a brown shirt dress from Kohl's, which is shorter than most of my other skirts and is therefore a bit more casual than the other two. I also just ordered another dress from Lands' End. (The thought of sewing that many buttonholes gave me a headache.)

Shoes:
I have a pair of black ballet flats, two pairs of slides (black and brown), a pair of workboots (which double as hiking boots, canoeing boots, and anything-else-that-might-get-messy boots), and one pair of knee-high boots, which are brown. Because of some undiagnosed walking abnormality, I rip every shoe I wear to pieces. For real--I think my longest lasting shoe since I went through puberty has been one year. Because of this problem, combined with my strictly limited budget, I have to wear cheap shoes. (Yes, I have tested--the high price/quality shoes fall apart just as fast as the cheap ones.)

Other clothes:
I'm pretty sure I have more fancy clothes that a college student really needs. I have more pajamas than anyone needs. I have a bathing suit, a bathrobe, many hats, and I'm blanking on other categories. Except underwear, but I feel no need to discuss my underwear on the internet.

So why am I posting this? Because it's your turn to chime in. What do you think I need to buy, or, if you think I can make it, do you have any pattern recommendations? This question is directed at anyone with an opinion--you do not have to have gone to college. It would be immensely hypocritical of me to limit opinion-giving to only those people who know what they are talking about, after all! So, ready, set, opine away!

(Now watch this post not get any comments at all..... :P)

May wrap-up

In May, I finished six sewing projects. The first one was A's prom dress. I'm still on the look out for photos of it in action, by the way. I feel a bit cheater-ish, counting this as one of May's projects, since I did the vast majority of the work in April, but I figure it all evens out in the end, especially since I have a project that was done 98% in May which I'll count as part of the June wrap-up.

The second project was pajamas for B. I drafted this pattern myself, and it turned out pretty well.

The third project was Simplicity 2690. Since I posted about this, I took the shoulder seams in a bit, which makes the shirt less floppy. Next time I think I'll just cut a 6 in the bust.

Fourth was New Look 6807. I am quite pleased with this shirt and will probably make it again at some point.

Fifth was pajamas for B's doll. Sigh. Let's say they eventually worked out and leave it at that.

Last but not least was my seersucker dress from New Look 6699. I like this dress a whole lot. I think I should have made the center front a little bit narrower, but it's okay. I may well wear this dress to my graduation party.

This wasn't a great month, but I did knock several projects off my to-do list. I'm pretty sure I added a good deal more, though. Oh well.

Various random notes

This post will be a bit of a mish-mash. First, we'll start off with a photo of my sewing table:
Not too messy, but not that great either. Sorry the photo is a little blurry. The camera batteries were dying, so I couldn't take another photo. (You'll notice that dead camera batteries will be a nearly omni-present theme in posts with photos. My camera uses batteries extremely quickly and the rechargeable batteries we have are nearing the end of their lives and hold very little charge anyway. Sorry about that.)

Now, on to today's finished object, a pair of pajamas for B's doll Manny, made to match his. These pajamas were a mess and a half. The rise wound up far too small and the waist far too big, so I did some last-minute changes in the form of an added waistband, a good two inches taken out of the back seam, and some shirring to make everything a bit tighter. It looks pretty silly up close, but the shirt covers it up. And anyway, people, this is a pair of pajamas. For a doll. Let's keep this in perspective.

The other thing I worked on today was the shirt I "finished" yesterday, New Look 6807. I mentioned already how I'm not happy with the neckline. Although I raised it at least an inch, it's still awfully low for my comfort. I was originally going to rip out the neck band and add more gathers to the front to make the neckline smaller, but I decided to add a pleat to the center front instead. This kind of negates the gathers, but it saves a tremendous amount of time. It doesn't look that bad, either:
(As a matter of fact, the photo actually makes the pleat look a lot more bumpy and weird than it does in real life.)

So far, so good, right? Only sort of. I also mentioned there were some weird wrinkles in the back. I had cherished hopes that this was just an odd symptoms of the neck bagginess and that pleating the neckline would do away with this problem. No such luck--they got much worse, and now the back of the shirt is extremely wrinkly and bizarre looking. It's hard to describe, so I'll just put up a photo:
Is that not weird looking? I've never seen anything like it, even in RTW clothes, which almost never fit properly. My original thought was that the shirt needed a swayback adjustment, but now I'm not so sure. There seem to be an awful lot of wrinkles for that. The back of the shirt also gaps out a bit at the neck.

What I can't decide is how this shirt would actually wear. My dressmaker's dummy is covered with some sort of cloth which makes her anything but slippery, so fabric often hangs differently on her than it does on me. Her shoulders are also a little wider than mine. Perhaps the thing to do is to put on the shirt and wear it for a few hours and see if the wrinkles are less noticeable or something. To do that, though, I think I'll have to wait a few days, as it's currently about 55 degrees and rainy.

In the meantime, I'll do some internet research and see if I can find a way to fix this problem. This is definetely the most interesting fitting challenge I've met so far--all my other problems have generally been a matter of taking in shoulders or bust seams.

Ha! I was right!

I was right! That doesn't happen all that often around here, so I'll just bask in the glory...I was right....I was right....

Ahem. Sorry. It turns out I did have more black thread. A sister had borrowed it. So I was able to finish B's pajamas during karate class last night. (I stayed home because I was still coughing a lot.) Here are some pictures:


B doesn't pose well for photos. His face always looks weird. Oh yeah, and please ignore the mess.
He's a tiger, after all, so why not act like one?

These pajamas didn't work quite perfectly. For one thing, I have neither a stretch stitch nor a zig zag stitch on my machine. I just set a fairly long stitch length and hoped for the best. It worked pretty well, but I think the hems (which I topstitched) got a little stretched out. I also sewed the collar in backwards. Duh! Oh well, B doesn't care, and it's just pajamas, so I didn't bother ripping it out and sewing it in properly. You can also see in the first photo that the strip is off-center. It's centered in the back. This was due to a miscommunication between me and my mother. While I was laying out pattern pieces, she looked at the bottom layer of fabric and said something about lining the stripes up. I thought she said they were lined up. Turns out she actually said that I *should* line them up. Oops.

That's a pretty long list of problems, but the pajamas don't actually look that bad. Well, I think the long legs look really weird, but B specifically requested them that length.

Tidy Tuesday

Wow, is it Tuesday already? I think my sewing table is looking a bit better than it was last week:I didn't clean up much at all. I've had a cold this week, so there were some tissues, which I removed, along with some bits of trash. But I didn't do any real cleaning up. (For the record, the water bottle and my cell phone actually do belong there. My sewing table doubles as a bedside table--you can see my bedsheet in the upper left hand corner.)

In the bottom left and bottom right, you can see B's pajamas, patiently waiting for their new thread. Do they sell machine thread at ACMoore?

Um, wow....

I ran out of thread this morning! I wasn't aware it was possible to run out of plain black sewing thread, but I have managed it. I thought I had a whole other spool, but I can't find it anywhere. So B's pajamas are on hold until I can get to the store. And they were so close to done, too! All that's left is one leg hem, the edge of the shirt, and the neck band. Three little seams! Ugh. Perhaps I shall try to improvise a home-made cone stand long enough to finish them, as I do have four serger cones of black thread. Or maybe I'll work on one of my many other projects....

The best laid plans....

Yes, I know, I just posted a list of what the next order of business after the prom dress will be. But I'm changing it. My sister Teresa needs a coat that will block the wind for her to take to Notre Dame with her next year, so I'm going to make her this coat. I'm not sure what collar I'll use yet. While I was browsing coats on the McCall's website, I saw this lovely coat. The green version, with the belt and rose, is to die for, isn't it? I need a lighter coat to wear in the spring and fall anyway, so I decided to get some fabric for this coat along with my seersucker and the fabric for my brother B's PJs.

Well, although seersucker was 50% off at JoAnn's, I really didn't see anything that I felt like buying. Even 50% off, it was still pretty expensive by my (admittedly cheapskate) standards. Besides, most of the prints were quite young-looking, and as an 18 year old who looks like a 14 year old on a good day, I think that wearing a print suitable for a 12 year old would be a bad, bad idea. So I didn't get any seersucker. For my coat, though, I found this lovely fabric, which is a light/medium weight linen:
Isn't it gorgeous? I wish I had taken a picture of it drying on the line--the effect of four and a half yards of it is wonderful. I found pink and black buttons that match quite well.

As an aside, I must say that I was greatly surprised when I checked the size chart on the coat pattern. Apparently I should cut myself a 4, the smallest size in the envelope. I'm generally used to cutting a 10 or a 12 in the Simplicity patterns I inherited from my grandmother. Have McCall's patterns been vanity sized much more than other brands, or have all new patterns fallen victim to vanity sizing? I loved being "large enough" by pattern sizing that it was easy to find patterns for me. Many of the McCall's patterns on the website now don't seem to come in anything smaller than an 8.

For B's pajamas, we bought this animal print:
This is most certainly not what I would have chosen, as it's stiffer than I would like. I am not a fan of animal prints, either. However, this was pretty much the only patterned knit in the whole store that wasn't pink or pastel. Is there really no market for 8 year old boy fabric? I didn't find a PJ pattern I liked, so I think I'll create my own. There are plenty of free shorts patterns out there, and I can trace a T-shirt he likes for the top. I also need to figure out how to make binding for the neck edge, but I know I've seen a tutorial for that somewhere on the internet.

On an unrelated note, I added up how much fabric I have. The total came to slightly over 68 yards, but that includes some remnants and other pieces of fabric that aren't even close to full width. On the whole, I'm okay with that total, although I personally find a stash intimidating rather than inspiring and would like to sew it down some.