Piano

We have a piano in our house. Not a tinny keyboard, not even a full heavy electric job with pedals and weightings and what have you – no an actual, proper piano which RF bought from a charity shop in second year and hence has followed her within Durham.

(I have two housemates, both of whose names begin with an ‘R’, rather inconveniently for the purposes of this blog. She will hence be called RF and he will be called RM.)

Anyhow, she has just been playing it, rather lovely-ly, and I have been listening with my door open. Listening to a live piano played musically has a wonderfully calming effect on me – particularly if it feels spontaneous – if somebody is just playing for their own pleasure. Some of my favourite moments at home-home are when, just very occasionally, my Dad sits down to play and he loses himself in the music and I creep in and curl up on a sofa at the other end of the room, and I can just focus on him and his playing and the music, and without having to say or do anything just feel a part of that.

I need that calm, I really do. I don’t know how to articulate my life at the minute, but I know that the piano helps.

Catch Up

When you can’t do question 1i), let alone 1ii), let alone questions 2) or 3), and have been trying to do so for over an hour – and when you couldn’t do the last homework either but had to work through with the solutions – and when you don’t even understand the lecture notes four lectures in – …

Time to blog!

Erm, so yes! We’ve had internet for a while now, but let’s just say that fourth year doesn’t get any less busy than the previous three. That’s in a good way, mostly, but the new routine and the new house and the new people-circumstances are still taking some getting used to. I am still trying to learn to spend time on my own in the house positively, and more importantly I am still trying to learn how to work again, as it’s something I basically haven’t been doing for eighteen months, and, well, you just get out of the habit. I’m doing a lot better than I thought I would, actually, but I think I still give up too easily when the going gets tough – and that’s still way too often. The pressure’s on, to say the least.

In other news, J continues to be wonderful, I’m doing quite a bit with Quaker Meeting (and seriously considering applying for membership; explanation may follow in a subsequent post), and my Mum thinks I’m bipolar (, which I think is utter rubbish). I got out my clarinet the other day and had no lip muscles left whatsoever.

And that’s about it, really! I need to go and make lunch and head out. Oh, except that when I have a chance I will take some pictures of my new house, because it’s kinda cool, and some pictures of the garment that I made the week before coming back to Durham and am so incredibly proud of!

A Note On The Door

(I am still here, I am still alive, I am back in Durham where the internet has yet to grace our house with its presence. Nice to start with, but increasingly annoying when everything in the university relies on it. In the words of Christopher Robin, BISY BACKSON.)

Still At Home

I am ill. Not scary swine flu ill, but ill enough to feel pretty shit and not to have used the train ticket that I had booked for going up to Durham on Saturday. This sucks, although as lectures don’t start ’til Thursday and I was planning on avoiding all things Fresher-related anyway, I guess the timing could be worse.

My Dad is convinced that I have brought on the illness by anxiety, and as such the path to getting better is to leap out of bed, (wo)man up, and deal with it accordingly. I am yet trying to convince him that as much as there may possibly have been anxiety-related incidents involving crying and shaking and burying into duvets, a bug is a bug and the prospect of travelling again is even less inviting if I haven’t first got rid of it, which I can’t do by willpower alone. Grump. Parents. If he’s trying to persuade me that staying at home isn’t such a great option after all, he’s doing a bloody good job of it.

However the upside of one of the above incidents is that after yet another well-intentioned invitation to Talk About Things To Us, I am increasingly sure that I am going to take a gap year after university. Or a gap six months – whatever – because the wonderful freedom about leaving the educational system is that no longer will my life have to revolve around September starts and May exams. Maybe I’ll work, maybe I’ll travel, or maybe I’ll just stay at home and remember what bonfire smoke smells like in south Birmingham on November 5th, but what I will not do is refuse to give myself time and space to breathe. Maybe, just maybe, my ideal job will come up in the meantime and I’ll go straight to there.

But I won’t have to, because I will be free! I think that I need that light at the end of the tunnel.

Sustainability

One Sunday several months ago, I was sitting in the courtyard of a lovely little café in Durham called Vennels, eating lunch with various Quakers (as is something of a tradition among the younger – middle-aged people in Durham Meeting) and setting the world to rights (ditto).

F was telling us about how her daughter had spent part of her year abroad in a small town in Oregon where they had taken it upon themselves to live more sustainably and in greater community with each other. Residents could sign up to teach hour-long classes at a community centre for free in anything from knitting to accounting, and consequently share skills which might otherwise have been inaccessible. The council would come and dig a vegetable patch in your garden for free, even planting vegetables for you with the idea that once you had learned to grow and garden home-produce, you could help someone else the next year. I can’t remember any more examples off-hand and possibly they weren’t given – but what had really struck F’s daughter (and consequently F) was the degree to which these people had taken their own initiative. They hadn’t waited for someone to tell them what to do. They hadn’t been pressured into anything and they certainly hadn’t waited for the government to enforce regulations upon them. They had simply seen a problem and together started to work out a solution that would benefit everybody through give-and-take.

There have been various posts from various people recently on what our future holds for us, notably Jenny’s Apocalype or Liberal Democracy 2.0? and Dickie’s Crossroads. As Jenny says, I think the consensus is that the world cannot continue in its current way, and that sooner or later, all too possibly sooner, something is going to have to give. The Transition Towns movement, as I linked to in the comments of the above post, is a movement that is trying to prepare Britain for the time when Peak Oil runs out. Dickie’s argument that sustainability and climate change are two completely different issues is a slightly invidious one in my opinion, but I do think that he is right that the latter is focused on too much to the detriment of the former.

The problem is, is that we’re all waiting around for somebody to tell us what to do about it. We know that it’s happening, yes, and we’ll switch off our lightbulbs and recycle our newspapers like nobody’s business – and then go and sit down at our computers while the washing machine whirrs and sockets give out energy to appliances on standby. We tut at the sheer amount ending up in landfill, but yet we still buy more new stuff because we feel like having a new phone or a different outfit for the evening. I’m not saying that I’m any better here, incidentally, but it’s something I’m trying to be conscious of and something that I think that a lot of people don’t really appreciate – that sustainability is for life, not just for Christmas, so to speak, and that we’re all waiting for someone else to take the lead.

Some of you may have noticed the new icon just below the calendar on the right of my blog. It links you to the 10:10 campaign, a campaign which aims for its members to reduce their carbon emissions by 10% in 2010. And it’s not just about car fuel – it’s about food, it’s about consumer habits, it’s about household energy use, and it’s about promoting a lifestyle which takes notice of the world and the resources around us. Individuals and big businesses need to play their part.

It’s hard, yes. In technological terms we might feel like we’re regressing, yes. But surely we can’t have it both ways? If that technology is contributing to our world’s downfall, we may have to choose between the privilege of using it now and the privilege of living in a society with enough resources to support itself to a basic level in however many years time. Personally I know which one I’d choose in the long run, even if delayed gratification is not intrinsic to our natures.

And maybe everything will sort itself out, and our saving grace will appear, and God will come down from the heavens to keep us happy and rich and safe. We’re so convinced that it couldn’t happen to us that we shut our eyes on the fact that for many parts of the world, it’s already happened to them and they’re already dealing with the consequences. Let’s take our lead from that town in Oregon, shall we, and take some immediate responsibility?

Sundress

Last but by no means least, here is the most recent garment that I have made, and very possibly the one that I’m proudest of:

Alas I have finished it a little late – as the temperatures are dropping and the colds keep sniffling I fear that I will have to wait until next summer to wear it properly. Essentially it’s just a simple summer dress with casings for drawstrings (which are actually principally elastic) and large pockets. But I love the shaping of it – the way that it’s loose but not too baggy, the neckline, the proportion of the pockets.

I also love the middle section where the ties come out through stitched buttonholes. You can’t see, but I satin-stiched a rectangle around this section. This was in fact due to the fact that my Mum’s buttonhole foot was over 25 years old and had lost all grip, meaning that when I tried to sew buttonholes into the original dress foot the fabric tore and mangled: so that section is basically an appliqué, four beautifully easy holes stitched with the aid of a visit to our local sewing shop and a new foot. The middle bodice panel which you can probably just see (especially as I failed to wash out the blue magic marker pen before taking a photo) was the result of an Unfortunate Incident with the scissors; but again I really like the way that it’s turned out.

What you probably can’t see in the photo is the fabric itself. It’s a medium-weight white cotton but it has tiny little white flowers printed all over it, just adding some texture. White fabric is so hard to photograph in detail.

Pattern: BWOF 05-2008-111

Pinafore

Last autumn/winter, I came across this lovely needlecord on my all-time favourite stall in Durham market:
I think that this is one of those fabrics which are not so alluring in detail but work well as part of a larger garment. That said, I do love all of the circle patterns, and how they’re all slightly different to each other. Although actually that wasn’t my first reaction. My first reaction, visions of a pinafore* forming in my head, was, “You know what that needs? That needs some a deepish, bright pink to set it off!”

And hence this dress was sewn: worn here with tights and a long sleeved top as I suspect will be done for most of its life
The bodice has a bit of a story to tell, albeit not a fantastically long one. Beginner sewer attempts gathering. Beginner sewer misses a key feature of the steps involved in gathering and so beginner sewer ends up with pleats instead. But the said pleats are sufficiently symmetric that they can be a feature of the dress without going through the hassle of taking them out and re-sewing again.

Here’s the side view. It’s pretty fitted – that is to say very fitted due to a rather overenthusiastic swayback alteration on my part. The lump that you can see at the bottom of my back is where the zip ends and the surrounding material doesn’t hang quite properly. I should probably stop making clingy dresses now but it’s just the novelty of being able to make and wear something without the ability to fit a large swimming towel between the back of me and the back of it!

I’d quite like to make the other version of this pattern with a more flared skirt and a different bodice. I do like the gathers (/pleats) but it isn’t that flattering on the bust – again maybe a bodice that would work better without the need for an FBA!

*British ‘pinafore’ = American ‘jumper’
*British ‘jumper’ = American ‘pullover’. I’m still getting used to that one.

Pattern: New Look 6750

Graduation Wear

So this is the skirt and the top that I wore to J’s graduation.

The skirt was made first, at Christmas. It is a wrap-skirt, but it has a proper waistband and a generous enough wrap that it is quite possible to twirl around in on a windy day without fear of exposing oneself – and it does twirl wonderfully, especially with ruffle down the front. I didn’t want a tie at the side so I followed the suggestion of someone else who made this pattern and simply did two sets of buttons on the waistband, which worked really nicely.

The top, then, was essentially a free pattern in a book that I got given for Christmas. I altered it a bit, transforming it into an actual-covering-corset-style top as opposed to a tits-out-bustier and used one of my magazine patterns to work out how to add the gathering in the front. The standard fitting alterations are all there, needless to say, and instead of acutal boning at the vertical seams I merely added support with strips of interfacing (because quite frankly I’m not that masochistic!). I wish I’d got a photo of the back now – it’s just a straight backline with a cream basque zip, but it goes quite well with the shape of the skirt.

The material for both is silk dupion, bought from the market for £4 a metre, and the top is lined with cream polyester. After some comments on Facebook, however, I have a question for all of you: what colour is the silk?

Top Pattern: from Wendy Gardiner’s ‘The Complete Book of Sewing’ (altered)
Skirt Pattern: McCalls 5430

Cross Top

So this was the first of my unrecorded garments, in fact made in September of last year – a whole year ago!  It was my third ever garment and my first with a knit (stretchy) fabric. Knit fabrics are much harder than wovens (non-stretchy fabrics) I find, because basically you’ve got to get the tension of the material right when you’re sewing it otherwise it’ll settle wrong once you’re finished. That, and the fact that in my experience the cloth stretches all over the place when you’re trying to cut it out accurately!

Anyway, here we are: It was the criss-cross design which really drew me to it in the first place. This is quite a popular pattern and I had seen other versions which used piping to show of the construction. (In fact, if you make it from stretchier material and don’t sew up the very final seam, it can act as a wonderfully discreet nursing top! I got quite excited about this at the time – not, to add, that I planned on using that particular feature. It was just really clever, OK?!)

I’ve slightly fallen out of love with the fabric, I’ll be honest. At the time I bought it because I wanted something green and weren’t the flowers pretty?! In practice, though, the only occasion where I have actually worn this top sans-cover-up was at a jungle party. What I’ve realised is two things – one, that a pretty design on a flat sheet of fabric does not necessarily a good clothing fabric maketh, and two, that nice knit fabrics are flimmin’ difficult to come across in this country. If I ever go to America again I am finding a fabric chain and stocking up big time! Sewing’s clearly just more popular there (especially amongst those under the age of 65).

As for the pattern? Well, it was certainly nice and simple to get my head round, and is the closest I’ve ever come to something fitting just as is (in a size U, as it happens). If I recall correctly I didn’t even have to do my normal length additions, and the only significant changes that I made were stylistic – taking 3/2″ off the overall length at the bottom, and widening out the neckline curve (to a size X). I also did a swayback adjustment – incorrectly as I now realise. See all those wrinkles at the back? I should have created a centre back seam and done the adjustment there, rather than thinking that I could get away with it at the sides, but that’s experience for you.

If I’m honest as well this top would work better on someone with a flatter bust than I, as it doesn’t lie quite right on the front either and there’s no obvious way of compensating with an FBA (full bust alteration). But maybe I’m just looking too hard now!

Pattern: Jalie 2787

Sewing Chatter

So the photoshoot has happened and the results are currently being edited; later, hopefully, I will put up the rather overdue series of posts showing the output of the last, erm, year’s creativity. It really doesn’t seem that much now that I’ve boiled it all down, but personally I reckon that it isn’t bad going given that
a) I sew slowly. I’m still a beginner!
b) I lack concentration in a big way and rarely manage to sit at something for hours on end.
c) I have to make a muslin for everything that I make because I have yet to find a pattern which fits me straight out of the envelope without any alterations.
d) University! And not having a sewing machine at such! And being away! Sewing clothes really isn’t that portable a hobby, unfortunately, and while I dream of popping into John Lewis in Newcastle and coming out with my own, brand-new, shiny and technological machine, I fear that isn’t going to happen any time soon. What with saved up money I could probably afford it – that isn’t the problem. It’s that every time I half think about it, my Mum resists fiercely, saying that it wouldn’t be appropriate to have at university, and that I would spend too much time sewing compared to not enough time working. My argument is that if I used my free time more productively at university, I’d feel better about doing said work and get less bogged down in myself. Unfortunately, though, I don’t think that fourth year is the year to perform such an experiment. One year ’til I leave.

I have, however, been learning a lot over the past year, even if I have been simultaneously lamenting my lack of practical doing. I am a member of a wonderful, wonderful site called Pattern Review, where people post pictures of garments that they’ve made and (as one might expect) review the patterns that the said garments were made from. Among these reviews, and among the blogs that some of them link to is a wealth of information and experience that I have found both fascinating and thoroughly informative to read. Granted there’s nothing like doing it yourself to really make you learn, but the internet has been acting as an excellent gap-stop while doing it meself just hasn’t been possible. I also find it fun and inspiring to see what other people have made – after all, one the key satisfactions of making things is sharing the results with other people!

Primarily aimed at Fi (after her recent comment on one of my Drivel Space posts), but perhaps of interest to some of you others, here are some of the sewing blogs that I follow: [If you are the owner of one of these blogs and have followed the link back here, erm, hi! I'm Lucy, and I'm one of your lurkers! But I do like following what you've been sewing and I hope you take that as a complement :-)]
- Two On Two Off
- Subversive Sewer
- Sew A Beginner
- Amanda’s Adventures in Sewing
- Fehr Trade
- Assorted Notions
- Miss Celie’s Pants

Recently, I’ve also found yellow warbler knits, needled, and potentially Knitting the Blues as well (- thank you, Fi, for those last two).

Anyway, I should get back to the photos. Sorry, Flix – more freaky faces coming up!