Sewing Confrontations: Pants, Part 2--Muslin Time!

Whenever I try a new pattern, I usually do a mockup (or muslin) of it in some cheap fabric.  It helps me see if the pattern and whatever adjustments I’ve made actually work before I commit to cutting the fabric I’ve actually purchased for wearing.  Last week I wandered into WalMart and found: some pretty hideous and cheap giant pink gingham at $1 a yard.  SCORE!  

Full disclosure:  I actually like gingham, but not so much the 2" gingham for pants.

So with fabric in hand, I commence to dealing with the pattern.  As I mentioned in the first post, I’m using a pattern from a BurdaStyle magazine.  Here it is:

Let's get cutting!

Simple, right?

(lotsa photos after the jump!)

Sewing Confrontations: Pants, Part 1

confrontation

As I mentioned earlier, my friend Jessica over at Quilty Habit is doing a series this month called Sewing Confrontations, challenging fellow sewers to tackle some lingering challenge.  Being all super ambitious, and thinking I had all the time in the world when I signed up, I decided I would work on making myself a decent-fitting pair of pants.

Any of you who know me in real life know that I don't wear pants all that often.  7 days of 10--probably 9 of 10 in the spring and summer--you'll find me in a dress.  This is not because I don't like pants, or because of any exceptional twee-ness on my part.  It's really because a) dresses are easier to fashion into a proper outfit;  and b) it's much easier to find (or make) dresses that fit decently.

One of the first things you want to do when sewing garments is to anticipate possible problems.  I already know ready to wear pants give me all kinds of fitting issues, due to the following facts:

1) I'm tall, and long-legged.  I wear a 34-inch inseam, which is hard to come by.  Most stores' "long" pants are 32" or 33", which is not-quite-sufficient for me.  Or, (very occasionally) they go the other way entirely and offer 36", which is way too long.
2) My waist is both high and small.  My hips are both wide and long.  Sometimes a pair of pants will fit just about everywhere, and then I sit down and it's like I'm wearing legwarmers only, because they do not really cover anything anymore.  If the rise is high enough that everything's covered, and the pants fit my hips well, my waist is probably swimming. 
3) I have a fairly significant swayback.  For those of you who don't sew clothing-- a swayback is the term people use for that hollow at the small of your back, just above your hips--when it curves inwards dramatically, you've got a swayback.  Do you try on pants or skirts and they seem to fit everywhere except the back waistband is always floating in space inches away from your actual back waist?  You, my friend, are a member of the Swaybacked Sisterhood. 
4) I have full hips and thighs.  Sometimes pants in my size are tighter than they should be up top, but a larger size is so much bigger everywhere that that doesn't help. Usually at that point I just give up and leave without any pants. 

So knowing these things, there are certain lower-body fitting adjustments I am always on the lookout for, even when I am sewing dresses--lengthening the leg and hip, grading the waist in and hips out, and taking in or adjusting the back waist.  In skirts and dresses, these things are relatively simple to do, but how to translate them to pants?  These are the challenges I'm setting out for myself this winter. 

For this week, however, I need to get into the habit of actually constructing pants.  (photos after the jump!)

In Which I Make My Swap Item But Do Not Make The Swap

Let the record show:  that 2 potholders were, indeed, made by me for the November meeting of the Central Jersey Modern Quilt Guild.  I'm sort of really in love with postage stamp quilts, and so I figured I'd see just how much of a PITA it would be to work on one by making these little potholders.  It wasn't too bad, and I love the look. 

love these little explosions of color...

But, alas and alack, my car has decided we are fighting after 10 years together, and my work schedule is cutting the fool with me as well, so I didn't make it to the meeting to swap.  It's probably for the best.  I didn't finish stitching the binding on one, and the one I did finish was just unspeakably bad:

Dear self:  O for real, though?

I mean, really?  LOOK AT THAT FOOLISHNESS.  You'd think I never picked up a needle in my life.  Utterly shameful, that is.

I did, however, get to try out the new little 1040--still not happy with the stitches--and do some walking foot quilting, which I sort of made up as I went along.  It even emboldened me to get back to my bed quilt!  This weekend, PANTS.  I think.

Sewing Confrontations

My friend Jessica over at Quilty Habit contacted me a few weeks ago about a new series she's putting together:

The series is called "Sewing Confrontations" and she's asking a number of other bloggy friends this November to man up (or woman up, or trans up, as the case may be) and force ourselves to work on some sewing issue that we have been struggling with or avoiding.  Since my machines have been gathering dust on their shiny avocado-and-lemon-smoke exteriors, I thought this might be a good way to get back into things.  After all, it's football season and it's soon going to be too cold to even run errands.

I thought hard about something I have been neglecting but thought I could realistically accomplish in a month.  I'm not going to successfully free-motion the bed quilt I made for myself last winter by the end of November.  This I know is simply not happening. I've been putting off quilting it at all for a year.  I mean, it took me an hour last night to quilt straight lines on a POTHOLDER.  Yeah.

But you know what is bothering me and I might be motivated to do?  Pants.  Like many women, I struggle mightily to consistently find pants that fit worth a toss.  And once I do seem to find a brand and style I like, THEY CHANGE THEM!  Sometimes the entire style is revamped (so much for the J. Crew Favorite Fits that got me through grad school--were they only my favorite??)  sometimes they decide to get cheap cute with the fabric (*cough*GAPbrands*cough*) and they are no longer worth the money. (jump coming here!)

September's over?!

Hey y'all.

An update--there's been NO sewing or cooking round these parts--just a whole lotta flying around.  I've been on three work trips in three weeks--once to San Antonio and twice to Atlanta.  I don't travel a great deal (perhaps a little more than most of my co-workers, though), and I mostly enjoy it when I do (car service!  VIP rooms at nice hotels!  Good dinners!), but man I am BEAT. And currently addicted to tropical fruit salads such as the one above (and yes, I even have seasoning for my fruit). Also, Midge had to go to the hospital for extensive surgery, but hopefully she's ok now.  I have a wedding to attend this weekend, but hope to get some sewing done after that.  It's fall, so time for some skirts and tops.  I also haven't baked anything in a while, so I guess I'm due.  I can't believe I just missed an entire month.  All of a sudden it's getting dark when I leave the office.  WHERE DID MY SUMMER GO?

HELP! I need some opinions.

So, this:

is all sewed together.  Problem?  It's not quite big enough.  I need it about 12 inches wider on each side (so 24 inches longer and wider) so it can be queen-sized.  I am paralyzed about what to do next.  I would like to add a slim colorful border or two along with more of the cream background fabric.  Mainly, I can't decide whether it would be best to go: blocks, cream border, colorful border, cream border, or border this big block with a colorful strip (I'm thinking a fuschia-white polka dot) and then have the rest be the background fabric.  I think I definitely want the background fabric next to the binding. 

So any opinions, o quilting friends?  Would the border right next to the blocks overwhelm them?  Or would bordering with the background make this section look odd?  Maybe a fuschia AND a baby blue border?  AHHH PLEASE HELP ME.

Closer look at blocks (apologies for the blurry pic!): 

It was a LOT of zigzagging, dudes.  A LOT of zigzagging.

Happy Birthday to me (a little late)

The end of Milestone Birthday Month heralded the arrival of this:

Say hello to Midge!

I've finally acquired a Kenmore 1040--one of the 1970s Kenmore versions of the (insanely popular) Singer Featherweights. After trolling the local Craigslists for months with no luck, I bought this from another member of the Yahoo! vintage Kenmore boards, who shipped it to me all the way from Phoenix! I did discover though that the best sewing machine finds seem to be in this order:  1) South Jersey 2) Philadelphia 3) Jersey Shore 4) North Jersey.  The Central Jersey Craigslist is the pits, but more on that some other time, mayhaps.

I've been wanting a more portable machine for a while now, but have been nonplussed at the newer machines.  Phyllis, my Kenmore 1217, has a handy carrying case but she weighs about as much as two second graders (to me, anyway) so lugging her around is not much fun, especially when you have epicondilitis in both arms and live up a very steep flight of stairs.  Also, Phyl has a nice little cabinet to live in that I salvaged and fixed up just for her, and I think she's happy there. 

Midge, like Phyllis, dates from about 1971 and is colored in avocado green and some shade Sears calls "lemon smoke".  She is all metal, too, but only a 3/4 size, so she is a good bit lighter, though still not super light.

In comparison, she is the size of two Middlemarches.  And yes, that's my summer reading.  Don't judge me.

She also comes with the cute little rose-embossed retro case, in back of her there.  Phyllis's case has an extra compartment for the foot pedal and manual, but Midge's case only fits her in there (and very tightly).  The foot pedal has to be sandwiched into her harp area. 

I didn't just buy her for size alone.  She also has some stitches Phyls doesn't, like a stretch stitch and a mending stitch.  (Phyllis only does straight stitch, zigzag, and blind hemming.)  Midge has a center-homing needle, which will hopefully really step up my presser foot diversification.  Phyllis has a left-homing needle, and although it seems that was a fairly common design in the early 70s, it is very difficult to find presser feet that work with her.  I think people who have them hoard them.  Last year, after over a year of looking,  I found a Griest buttonholer AND a set of three feet (a bias binder, edgestitcher, and ruffler) for low-shank left-needle machines in the same week and you couldn't tell me nathan.

But Midge should work with any regular low-shank foot.  It's much easier to control her speed, so I might be able to actually work on free-motion quilting.  Her small bed will also, I hope, make attaching neck and sleeve bands easier, though I really was hoping she could be used as a free arm. 

Speaking of the tiny bed, see that little section in the front?  She also does this:

You can see the bobbin case and feed-dog lever back there.

More space!

What's that?  She's not quite long enough either?  Well let's lift this up...

HEEEEEEY!

What is that little thing I just pulled out to the front, you say?  Why, it's her accessories box:

Most of the original stuff is there, except the zipper foot, and for some reason someone replaced the retractable spool pin the manual says she has with a place to screw in a pin, which I don't like quite as well.

Anyway, I tested her out a bit last night.  The stitches seem to work just fine, though the bobbin winder is not quite cooperating.  At first the feed dogs didn't want to drop--a common problem with these machines--but they eventually gave in.  I'm gonna have to investigate the bobbin-winding issue--kind of annoying to have to load a bunch of bobbins before I can go anywhere, or to have to buy and lug one of those little machines that do nothing else--, but other than that I am pretty pleased so far.  I don't intend for her to be the primary machine--Phyllis is still the #1 in these streets--but I hope she'll be a good fill-in.