That's a Wrap Skirt!

Sorry for the brief absence! This weekend was a whirlwind of expected and unexpected adventures. I've got a lot to discuss now, and I bet you're just dying to hear it! First thing's first, though: all of the pajama pants are now DONE! Here is SM, modeling the scorpion pants we all know he needs now:

Now his legs are protected by a swarm of venomous arachnids!

My pants are also done, and I really like them, but I'm not great at taking photos of myself so you will have to wait a bit to see them! In lieu of a finished product, here is a random photo of my pincushion sitting on top of the fabric:

Artsy!

Now, once I was done with those pants, I scurried right along to my next sewing project, that flowery pink wrap skirt from the Sew Everything Workshop. Because I wanted to wear it to a party on Saturday night, this was my first sewing project ON A DEADLINE. I work well under pressure, and I can happily say that this was no exception. I tackled a few major new concepts with this project: darts, easestitching, and a sewn pull-through hole for the waistband ties. I also took a lot of pictures, because I *loved* how the fabric looked in the morning light from the window in my sewing room.

This is my first practice dart on a spare piece of fabric. Gorgeous, no?

I'll happily admit that I fell right in love with this fabric from the moment I saw it. A few weeks ago I got it into my head that I needed a flowy white skirt with a pink floral pattern on it, but I also didn't want it to be too busy. The color on this print was exactly what I wanted, and that unique white silhouette pattern seems like the ideal way to balance fancy with subtle. I adore patterns of all kinds, but they're hard to wear, and I'm always looking for ways to look interesting and unique without smacking people in the face with loudness. Anyway, I was happy to learn to sew darts on a fabric I loved, and here is the final, pressed result in the skirt:

Crisp!

After sewing the skirt's four darts and hemming the sides, it was time to add the waistband. I'll admit that I would've liked the ties to be a little longer, and they don't look perfect on the ends, but overall I think they turned out OK. The most interesting part was sewing a little hole for the ties to go through on the side. I had a little trouble translating the instructions to what was actually going on in the garment, because the hole was stitched at the seam of two pieces that would eventually be folded in half. Once I realized that the stitch that created the hole was the seam between the two pieces, I figured it out pretty quickly, and here is the result:

After this, I had to attach the waistband/ties to the body of the skirt, but the seams didn't quite match up the way they were supposed to:

 I have helpfully illustrated the seams that are supposed to align. Given this little conundrum, I decided to try out a technique that the pattern didn't explicitly call for, but which seemed appropriate: easestitching. I used the method recommended elsewhere in the Sew Everything Workshop, and put a single stitch with a very long thread about 1/2" from the edge of the "longer" piece (the the skirt body). I then tugged on these threads and used them to evenly distribute the wrinkles in the skirt body until the seams roughly lined up:

 I pinned it here and stitched, and... Voila!

Semi-Victory!!!!

The seams... Sort of lined up! Anyway, they are even, and it looks fine in the finished piece, even if it's not picture perfect. I made the very silly mistake of pinning the wrong side of the waistband to the right side of the body the first time around, and I didn't figure it out until halfway through the seam. Aside pulling that out and starting over, the rest of the project was relatively simple. Putting in the VERY LONG stitches along the top and bottom of the skirt and through the waistline was kind of a pain, because the fabric tended to get a little bunched up and wrinkled, and this got worse the longer I sewed continuously. Because of this, the tail end of the stitch, around the end of one of the waist ties, does look a little wonky. Does anyone know how to prevent or alleviate this problem? Pressing the finished product helped a lot, and it looks pretty flat and tidy in the end.

So, all in all, I'm very proud of this garment. It's the first thing that I chose and made completely for myself, and I wore it to that party Saturday night and got a lot of compliments! I'm still sorting through photos of my outfit from Saturday night, but here's a sneak peek to give you an idea of the finished skirt:

Glamorous!

Misaligned

Happy Monday, everyone! The pajama pants are almost all done: PS's are complete, SM's simply await hemming, and mine should be done by the end of the day. Soon I'll post a bunch of eye-candy (hopefully) of the finished products, but for today I want to talk about something that has consistently gone wrong in this project: alignment! No matter how hard I try to do everything right, cut every piece precisely, etc, I keep ending up with these sad little errors:

ARGLE
BARGLE
TOOMANY
PHOTOS










OK, let's break this down.

PROBLEM #1: PIECES DO NOT END IN THE SAME PLACE

Awkward

So this has happened every time: The inside of the front and back pieces of the pants are not the same length. For a while I puzzled over how to line them up, given this problem, and I decided it would be best to match the notches and let the ends line up how they might. This always resulted in what's going on in the above photo: the top corners are like a centimeter apart! What is going on? Is the pattern screwy? Am I doing something terrible with my cutting? Unfortunately, I only have a varnished wood dining-room table to cut on, so I put down a flat sheet of cardboard underneath the part I'm cutting so my scissors don't carve up the finish. I hope the little elevation off the table isn't doing this... Anyway, This eventually leads to the front and back edges being lined up wrong when it comes to sewing the crotch seam. I try to even it out as best as I can, and trim of the extra. But it makes me sad! So... any tips?

PROBLEM #2: SEAMS DON'T LINE UP RIGHT UGHHHHH

"Join us. JOOOIIIINN USSSSSS. LOOOOOOVE UUUSSSSSSSS."

See how the seam goes all zig-zag in the middle there? That is supposed to be a continuous vertical line, because it is the inside seams of the legs. They should meet up in the middle, but they do not. I don't know what to do about that, except... sew better? Again, I am lining up by notches, and I'm pretty sure those seams were closer together or correctly aligned when I pinned them, so at least a part of this problem comes from the way I'm sewing. Sometimes I catch myself pushing the fabric a little bit, so I know I need to check that bad instinct. But if anyone's got any more specific advice, I'd love to hear it. The worst part about this problem is I'm not even getting better about it! The above shot is my pants, which I made third. And here are SM's pants, which I made second:

See? Much better. So. Yeah! I'm getting worse. Or just fluctuating randomly.

ANYWAY, I don't want to be too much of a downer. For the most part, everything is going well and I'm SUPER DUPER THRILLED that the things I am making are turning into wearable garments. Here is a sneak-peak at the "Project Finished" entry:

YAY FEET!

BUT WHAT'S NEXT?????


Good question! Yesterday, I went out shopping again with my mom, and got all sorts of things for my next three projects. The first is a late mother's-day present for that same mom:

Yes, my mom liked the skirt I was wearing in my first OOTD so much that she wanted me to make her one just like it (shape-wise, not color-wise). I think I've mentioned before that we are cute people. Anyway, I'll be making view A up there on the upper-left of the pattern. Although View E intrigues me, and I may tackle it for myself in the near future. When this skirt is done, my mother has requested her own photo-shoot for this blog, so look forward to that!

Project #2 is a Sewing-Machine Cozy from the Sew Everything Workshop. Oilcloth seems to only be available in patterns best described as "mad tacky," but this is the one I liked the most. So there you go! I'm going to try to whip this one up pretty quick, so expect pictures in the near future.

I don't think I can fully explain why or how much I like the cat in this photo. LOOK AT THAT CAT!?

Project #3 is the "Breezy Easy Wrap Skirt," also from the Sew Everything Workshop. At some point I had a magical vision of making a skirt for myself in basically the exact fabric I managed to find, so I'm pretty excited about that.
If you have any tips for making these projects (which include gathering! and darts!), leave them in the comments. These will probably keep me busy for the next few weeks of spare-time-crammed-in-between-work-that-actually-pays-me-money. Have I mentioned that if you'd like me to sew you something, you should definitely ask me right away? I have ideas for myself, but I really want challenges and reasons to make all sorts of things. So please let me know if you want something. ALSO, since I really want to make kids' clothes, do tell me if you have children and would like me to sew something for them. It would make me super happy!

Periods and an Outfit of the Day

Hey there! The Pajama Pants Project is humming along nicely. PS & SM's pants are almost done - they just need to be hemmed! I've spent the past few days putting the little finishing touches on the pants that take them from being pants-shaped objects to being actual pants. I like to think of this phase of a project as "putting a period on it," which I think is a phrase that I learned during my art student days (Artists use writing metaphors, and when I'm writing I usually think in terms of making a drawing. Funny how that works.) Anyway, just like a period tells you when a sentence is done, even though it doesn't really convey any of the information of the actual sentence, certain small finishing touches are needed to bring any artistic project full circle. I learned this through experience during what art historians will someday refer to as my "pear phase."

"St. Agatha's Pears" - Jonathan Kindness, 2009. Oil on Canvas and a torn up piece of red fabric I found in a dumpster.

What do you need to turn a pear-shaped green blob into something that is recognizable as a pear? Turns out it's a stem! Witness:

        Pear-Shaped Blob             ------------>           Pear                      

Weird how that works, isn't it? The tiniest little details make something complete and real. Anyway, that's what's happening with the pajama pants, and I'll be posting the Completed Product for those two in a day or two.

Meanwhile, it's time for a little glimpse inside the world of Riley Reed's Exciting New Style! I present to you Gathering Pins's first Outfit of the Day:

Shirt: Gap
Skirt: Thrifted (Global Thrift in Waltham)
Socks: Banana Republic
Shoes: John Fluevog
Glasses: The one and only Wellesley Optical on Newbury Street! Mention this blog entry and... I don't know. Probably nothing. But tell my dad I said hi.

Photography by the inimitable [linearequation], whom I joined for lunch on this breezy and beautiful day last week. This skirt is an old standby for me - I do believe it is the first skirt I ever bought at a thrift store, and it was purchased as a sort of sidebar to the shopping trip that preceded this photoshoot:

Anyway, it's basically my "wear around the house when I just feel like wearing a skirt thank you very much" skirt, as it's cheap and breezy and fluttery and fun. Nothing too fancy, but suitably classy and feminine. I was going for a kind of funky but low-key look, something that might raise a few eyebrows but not start a riot. I wanted my hair to have a little more volume, but I like what happened there anyway. I forgot those glasses were transitions before I went outside, but I kind of like the sunglasses look in these photos. What do you think? Anyway, here's a few more shots for the sake of drama:

Backlighting. Intense.

What? I can so look in other directions. I could look in whatever direction I want, darn it. I just... happened to be looking in the same direction in all of these photos.

I don't usually like the idea of tucking a button-down shirt into a skirt. I always sort of assumed it would look goofy, but I actually kind of like how this turned out. I think it has a nice, sort of polished silhouette to it, though it did require a lot of tucking and adjusting throughout the day. So... what do you think? Did I pull it off? What looks good, and what looks awful? As you might imagine, there aren't a whole lot of places to turn for guidance on how to achieve a look like this, so any feedback from the outside world is helpful. I'll leave you with my glamorous outdoor runway shot:

My Very First Sewing Project! (Pt. 2)

Welcome back, friends, and Happy Mother's Day! It's time to hear a little more about my first foray into sewing. When I last left off, I was just getting into the first stitches of my roommate PS's pajama pants, and overcoming the initial hurdles of getting used to my machine.

It's... *gasp* ... My First Seam! Aww, isn't it cute... and kind of crooked and weird?
That's a seam only a seamster could love.

Anyway, as you might imagine, a lot of the sewing in this particular project is nice and straightforward: one big seam for the outside of the legs, and one seam for the inside. I think the hardest part about most of it was remembering which pieces were the fronts and which were the backs. I foolishly kept putting away the layouts and patterns and then dragging them back out again to remind myself. (By the way, I'm on my third pair of pajama pants now and learning from my mistakes - I hang all my unsewn pieces on the wall on a pant hanger, with their patterns!)

So that was all well and good, and then out of nowhere came my next big hurdle: CURVED SEAMS. While I loved the logic puzzle of constantly trying to figure out exactly what I was sewing (pants look really weird when they're inside-out and still missing their outer seams), I made some very silly mistakes in the haste of dealing with instructions more complicated than "Pin, Sew, Repeat." So we're going to play a little game: SPOT THE PROBLEMS!!

Funnily enough, I think I was actually taking this picture at the time because I was proud of nailing my first curved seam.

I feel like I'm forgetting one or two, but I know I made at least two errors here. The first one is pretty obvious if you're a sewer: See that vertical seam in the middle of the crotch, parallel to the curved seam I just sewed? Yeah... I sewed it closed, to the side. It's supposed to be open! That seam is a little awkward now.

The second mistake may not be obvious unless you've read the pattern: notice how little seam allowance there is in there? (That's the distance between the stitching and the edge of the fabric - it's supposed to be 3/8 of an inch) Yeah, so the pattern calls for you to trim the allowance in the curved area down to 1/4 of an inch... but just the curved area. The ones on the side are supposed to stay untrimmed (natural?) and get pressed flat like a regular straight seam. Welps. What's cut cannot be uncut, and I hope PS will forgive me for some slightly-less-than perfect PJ pants. Sewing a project for all three of us is an interesting prospect: whoever I make pants for first gets pants first, but they sort of get the pants with all the mistakes. I guess it's kind of like being the oldest kid in a big family? Anyway, here are middle-pants-getter SM's slightly-better seams, for comparison:

I probably need to stop doing this.

Uh, so that picture probably isn't super helpful if you don't know what you're looking at. It is the same seam as above, but from a different angle and with the pant legs spread out to the side. The creature's mouth is made of the two perpendicular seams (inside the legs) which are properly sewn open here, and that little forehead stripe is where I left the seam allowance wide so it could be pressed open.

Anyway, after all that fun stuff, I ended up with two pairs of what I like to think of as pseudo-pants:

That is to say, they are shaped like pants, but don't have waistbands and aren't hemmed yet. Also, due to the dark pattern, SM's look like giant drop-crotch clown pants in that photo, and that's pretty cool. As of the writing of this entry, PS's pseudo-pants have gotten a waistband, and my pants are all cut and ready to be sewn. But that's a story for another day!

I'll leave you today with a bittersweet and hopefully inspirational story. I work at a children's clothing store (whose name I won't mention because I'm about to be slightly critical of our merchandise, which is for the most part excellent.) Essentially my favorite customer right now is a little 4-or-5-year-old girl named Malia (I am guessing at the spelling). She came in a few weeks ago with her grandmother and spent about an hour and a half deliberating over dresses and trying on, I think, nearly every one in the store. She's absolutely wonderful: smart, shy, thoughtful, and full of initiative and personality. Every once in a while a kid comes in who is clearly doing all the legwork of shopping for themselves, and there's nothing to prevent me from talking to them like they are the customer. That is a very fun experience. Anyway, Malia came back a few days later with her mother for a few minutes, and as far as I can tell this was just so that Malia could introduce the two of us. She poked her head into the back room while I was working on sorting shipment, and sort of excitedly pointed me out to her mother like "Oh that's the guy who helped me!!!" I was honored, and the two of them came back a few days ago to buy some gifts for friends and some new pajamas for Malia. While I was ringing them up, another customer commented on how beautiful Malia is (she really is!) and how she looked like a princess (she kind of does!), and I thought this was cute if a little weird to say. Then I looked at the pajamas Malia was buying. They were covered in princesses! White, blonde princesses. Malia is neither white nor blonde. Malia is (as far as I can tell, and this is probably an unfortunate generalization) Indian. She's got dark skin and black hair. She's amazingly gorgeous, but the princesses on her pajamas don't look anything like her, and I think that's a little sad. I think that Malia should have princesses and whatever other sort of model of beauty or success that she wants that look like her. So I've added that to my list of clothes to make someday: pajamas with princesses of every color, size, and shape on them, for every little kid who wants to be a princess. So... here's a question: what do you think kids need to see more of in the world around them? What should be on their clothes, in their movies, in their books, etc.?

My Very First Sewing Project! (Pt. 1)

Hello again! Thanks for stopping by. Today I'm going to tell you about my very first sewing project (ever!), which is still ongoing. It all started when I was out shopping with my mother a few months ago for some reason or another, and she agreed to buy me my first sewing machine. It's a cute story, because we are cute people.

Here's my mom (left) with her big brother, sometime around 1950. Vintage fashion alert!

Anyway, my mom is totally cool, knows all about my "eclectically-gendered" fashion choices, and even knows (if she probably doesn't quite understand it) that I identify as transgender/gender-fluid. That being said, I didn't really feel like picking out a skirt pattern for myself on that particular trip, so we decided on a cutesy little family number for me and my two roommates:

Hello there, Simplicity 2823!

For now, I'm just sewing the adult pajama bottoms, as my mom and the saleslady at Jo-Ann agreed that that was a good place to start. No buttons, no zippers, no fancy darts or doo-dads. Just cutting, stitching, and hemming (with an elastic waistband thrown in there to test my skills and patience). I picked out some deliciously tacky felt fabrics for the three of us:

Pink skulls on a minty background for me! I'm worried that I might start blinding people if I wear too much of my own handmade clothing.

Scorpions for SM! I knew he needed scorpion pajamas. He knew it too, but only after I showed him the fabric.

 And... Uh! I forgot to take a picture of PS's fabric, a funky pink/green/brown/yellow paisley on white that you can see a bit of underneath SM's scorpions. Sorry about the oversight. Pictures of the work-in-progress will be forthcoming.

(For folks who know us personally, yes, SM's abbreviation nickname on this blog is indeed the same as PS's real-world initials. It's confusing for us too, so maybe I'll figure out new nicknames for them soon.)

Anyway, despite the fact that I was in a major LARPs-and-Papers-Writing Time Crunch of Doom at the time, I quickly dove into my new hobby, gearing up my machine as quickly as possible and finding videos on the internet when I got confused and lost. I also made frequent calls to my good friend [dragonwolf](let me know if I can use your real name) because she is the bestest and knows how to solve all my silly little beginner problems.

My Adorable Workspace, AKA the Dining Room Table. Actual size.

When it came to working from the actual pattern, my first task was to copy the right size onto new paper. I followed some online advice for cheapos and just bought some sheets of decorative tissue paper from a local craft store (which turned out to also have fabric - good find!). I put my drawing pens to good use and made new patterns in the right sizes and cut them out. This took a long time, I'll tell you what! It was sometime during one of the full days I spend moving big pieces of paper around my house, ironing them repeatedly, and using them to chop up fabric that I realized how much I enjoyed losing myself in this work. When I started sewing, I frequently ran into one of my biggest headaches:

Enlarged to show Infuriating Texture

For those who've never sewn, this is what happens when your machine sucks your thread up into your seam and chews on it for a while. It's ugly, ugly, ugly. I can't count how many times I had to restart seams because I lost the loose thread at the end to this garbage. At one point, I was keeping such a tight grip on it in fear of this that my sewing needle came down bent and snapped right off against the throat plate.

I'm sorry for posting this image, [dragonwolf], but this is how I felt.

Fortunately, after dealing with this nonsense for a few weeks, I finally got my copy of the beginning sewer's bible, aka the Sew Everything Workshop:

Your hair alone tells me all I need to know about how amazing you are.

Of course, right there on page 32, it tells me to "pull the thread through any guides or pins leading down toward the needle," and lo and behold, there's a little window right above the needle to pass thread through, which keeps it in place much better. I'm not sure if that's the exact solution to the problem I was having, but I'm pretty sure it hasn't happened since. Whew!

Well, there's a lot more to tell in this story, but I think I've gone on long enough for today. So, sewing pals, what's your biggest stitching frustration? What's the little thing that keeps going wrong and screwing up all your hard work? Or maybe you know some common problems and how to fix or correct them?