Dear Patchwork Dreams

So, four and a half years eh?

It’s been good, it has. But I’ve moved on, and so have you. Not everyone wants to read about sewing and knitting, and that’s what I’ve been writing about recently. So we’ve been stuck in a bit of a limbo between us. Not quite a personal blog anymore, not quite a themed blog. I’ve grown up and moved into the workplace and that has major internet privacy concerns, y’know? I no longer feel that I can write about my health or my day or whatever without having to vastly self-censor at every turn.

So I’ve decided that it’s time we left it here. I’ve set up a new blog elsewhere where I can write about crafty stuff to my heart’s content without having to be anonymous. That feels so good! (Although, people will now see what hideous faces I pull when a camera’s directed at me. You can’t have it all.) I won’t have to feel guilty about that either, because it will do what it says on the tin – and if that’s not a tin that people are interested in then they can leave it on the shelf for others to take home.

I will leave you here, although I’ll probably do an image overhaul at some point. No point paying out for Custom CSS for an obselete blog, although I won’t leave you looking too scruffy, I promise.

So… I guess that’s it then. So long, and thanks for all the fish.

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If sewing and knitting is your thing, and/or you would like to visit my new blog then leave me a comment on this post with your email in the comment settings, and I will mail you the new address. I would like to be able to keep the two blogs unlinked to each other as much as possible for internet-privacy reasons, if that’s OK.

The Eternal Dilemma

The past few days have been lovely. J and I have been up with his family since Boxing Day, and it’s very much the sort of house where Christmas means snuggling down, eating a lot of rich food, and not doing a lot – a complete anathema to the house in which I grew up, but I’m really quite enjoying it.

Anyhow, lots of doing nothing means lots of guilt free internetting for me. Roobeedoo’s fantastic post of ten days ago on The Image of a Working Woman has been milling around in my mind a lot since I read it, and the combination of these two things (along with that vague resolutions culture that tends to sneak up around this time of year) has resulted in an afternoon spent mostly on Pinterest trying to work out something of a plan for myself and my work wardrobe.

When I first started out in the workplace eighteen months ago, I had a very limited work wardrobe having spent most of my student years in jeans and hoodies. But I am picky and a perfectionist - I was not going to settle for ‘just OK’ working clothes. Everything I bought had to enhance my look somehow. It had to make me smarter, more confident (but not old and boring). It had to be a ‘piece’ that would work together with others. It had to help turn me into the professional that I wanted to become. In the absence of well-fitting/ good quality fabric/ warm clothes from the shops, I was going to sew EVERYTHING!

Um, yeah.

So eighteen months on, I do have more variety than I once had. I probably dress more smartly for work than I could get away with, and my clothes are eminently suitable for my university administrator role. But in order to progress to my chosen career in the World Of The Corporate*, I will need to do a bit better than that. My plan is to build up a wardrobe of ‘key pieces’ that can be dressed up (in the future) or down (in the present) depending upon the combination.

This afternoon’s musings have produced this hypothetical frankenpattern for the queue: BWOF 02-2009-108 with the neckline of BWOF 11-2012-138, destined for a mustard-yellow cotton interlock that I bought the other day for bargain monies at Abakhan’s. Wearable under a cardigan or a suit jacket. Strong colour, work-appropriate yet interesting neckline, comfortable, and reasonably fitted.

The ‘Jacket, Shoes, Hair’ and the regular wearing of make-up can wait for another day.

Female readers of my blog, how do you get around this?

*eep.

Vintage Wiggle Dress

Along with most of the sewing blogosphere, my eyes basically fell out when the November issue of Burda magazine came out and it contained the following pattern, for a 50s wiggle dress in updated sizing:

I had. to. have. this. dress. The great thing is that it’s designed for curvy girls – designed to highlight and flatter a small waist/large hips because that’s what was in fashion at the time. (I love the look of the 60s boyish shift dresses, but just… no.)

If you are interested in technical information, I really just suggest that you go to Melissa’s post here. I did find it very useful to have her notes to refer to, although I must admit that I took the easy route and used chalk to trace all those darts rather than thread tracing. Due to a couple of fabric issues, I had a much closer deadline than intended, and, well, it worked. I did baste the curved seams for pressing, however, and used some machine tacks at the point of each in order to help maintain their shape once the basting came out – I wanted the fullness over the bust in order to avoid having to work out an FBA. A compromise option on the top two darts was to stitch close the top two thirds in order to keep the shape of the curves.

I did my normal length alterations, which in the case of the waist area actually turned out to be too much – see those horizontal wrinkles in the back? The length of the skirt is not one that I *ever* wear, but for this dress it felt appropriately grown up. Oh, and I did swing the skirt’s side seams out by 8° at the back on each side. When you have a bottom as large as mine, even normal straight skirts can look like wiggle skirts without trying…

The dress got finished at 5:30pm for a drinks reception starting in town at 7:30pm. Positively relaxed timing!

New Dawn

So we’ve moved, and are settling into our new house.

When we first started the process of looking, I didn’t really want to think about it. I don’t handle change at all well. I never have done – and especially if that change involves moving out of a huge, gorgeous rental house with a really nice landlady. I think at the back of my mind there was also a nervousness about the permanence of this particular house move. Wherever we went to, we were committing a lot of money and a much longer period of time than I have ever moved into a new place for before.

I feel like I’m making excuses, because for a number of weeks I was really quite low about the whole thing and I have a feeling that I looked like a bit of a spoiled brat. Buying a house aged 24? Fantastic! A nice house in a sought after road and a convenient location? You lucky thing! It didn’t feel like that. The day that our offer was accepted I was too low to barely even care. It smelt funny and looked really small compared to where we were currently living.

Four months later, though, and I am feeling lucky and I am feeling excited. I know that this house can and does work for us. We’ll need to put up a few shelves to help contain All My Stuff, but that’s not a big deal. There’s some pointing that needs attending to at the back upstairs, and ideally we’d fix the front door so it isn’t such a wrenching pig to get open. These things take money, and that’s the distinct down side to owning your house – that you are totally financially responsible, just after the buying and moving process which is already expensive enough.

It does feel like ours now, though, and it smells like ours too. Just got to finish unpacking.

A nice perk? Getting-up-for-work sunrises like the below. This mobile phone snap doesn’t do the sunrise in question justice by a hundred times over – but look at that framing! The little white smudge is smoke rising from somebody’s chimney.

I think we’re going to be really happy here. We are really happy here.

Signed, Sealed, Delivered

J and I signed some papers today.

Subject to contract? That baby’s ours!

Eep.

Why Size Matters

Stop sniggering.

The little illustration here answers Roobeedoo’s question on my last post with a much more striking impact than words ever could – how can I claim to have the measurements discussed here while still looking so thin?

Well behold: this is Lucy (with more like her old measurements, but they’re not that far off). She’s clothed this time you’ll be glad to hear, trying on Simplicity 2451.

Lucy is 6’0″; Roobeedoo is 5’3″. Convert those heights to inches, and it’s easy to see that Roo’s height = Lucy’s height x 7/8.

So let’s see what a 5’3″ version of Lucy with the same proportions would look like (standing next to the original for reference):

A 36″ bust has been multiplied by 7/8 and is now a 31.5″ bust. A 30″ waist becomes a slender 26.25″, and those 42″ monster hips become a rather more manageable 36.75″.

What would happen if we only shrunk her height but kept those ‘key measurements’ the same?

Ignoring the new person’s squashed head, we’ve got a completely different body shape!

So that, my friends, is why I have to buy many shop clothes in a size 16, and that is why woman should not measure horizontally alone. That second picture may also explain some of the issues that I’ve had stemming from my height over the years…

Thurlow Muslin

So, a couple of accompanying notes.

The diagonal wrinkles at the back/sides are caused by me slapdash-ly pinning out 1/2 inch there – those’ll go when I do it properly and I’ve got a waistband pulling the centre up. Some fabric needs taking out of the back legs on the outside seam, and, erm, ignore the wonkily pinned horizontal wedge on the back… I gave my bum more room than even it needs.

But look. Look. My first ever trouser muslin:

Do you know what this means? It means that after hours of research, and hours of thinking, and one amazing pattern… I am going to be able to make my own trousers.

Tasia, I think I love you.