A month of months

I have always struggled with photography. One of the goals I set after I lost my job was to finally learn how to use my camera. On the recommendation of a photographer friend, I went to an actual camera store, and bought what they recommended, which was a Sony Cybershot DSC-RX100 (a point-and-shoot). I got it in 2015, right before I got my phone that takes better pictures, because I usually have it with me. And "better" being relative.

My detailed goals with photography are to take pictures I don't have to do any processing to afterwards on the computer, and to take more interesting photos. My library has access to Lynda.com, and Ben Long, who is an absolutely fantastic instructor, has a series of beginner photography courses. After taking his two exposure courses, I finally know what the aperture, shutter speed, and ISO do. And what stops are. I am starting to be able to make informed decisions about how to shoot based on the light and how shaky my hands are. I am just now taking the beginner composition course.

I'm not really on any picture-sharing social media sites anymore, and I wanted to post it *somewhere* because I really like it and wanted to brag a little. If you click on the image you can make it much bigger, and actually see the veins in the leaves. This is a pretty impressive little camera!

Or: Can I remember how to make shoes two years later?

I had an idea in my head of what I wanted the shoes to look like - a side lacing ankle boot out of green corduroy!

I finished shaping my lasts at the end of May. I just took a little off the toes to make them shorter.

I also went through my fabric at the end of May, and this is maybe where I got the idea I wanted green corduroy shoes?


Who knows. I'm certainly not keeping track.  Now that my fabric was organized, I pulled out the above three fabrics as potential shoe candidates. From left to right: the very last little bit of upholstery fabric from my chair project; a not-great soft leather that is grey on the hair side, but a wonderful tan suede on the other; and the lower legs from a pair of green corduroy pants - origin unknown, but I definitely had it in the mid-90s.

I finished designing a pattern by the end of June.


The first iteration, made out of paper pieces glued together and wetted to form around the last, seemed to have a lot of stress points. I also realized I might need a center seam in the top quarters, which I didn't want.


I made two more iterations of the pattern. From right to left: 1st, 2nd, 3rd, and my last. No, not the last pattern, the last. The shoe last. Nevermind.

The pattern is... not great, but I thought "maybe it will look different in fabric?"  "Maybe I should not try it in the green corduroy I'm so excited about?"



In the above picture, one of the iterations scanned into inkscape, traced, and printed out.


I had so little of the upholstery fabric left I ended up cutting the top quarter with a center seam anyway. Thphphbbbt.

Earlier in quarantine, Jalie announced... actually, I can't remember how it happened. Did Jalie announce a free pattern? Did I read about it on a blog? Who knows. Anyway, the Jalie YOKO top is a free pattern that is basically a square with sleeves, so easy, right? Ha!  And it looks like something I'd want to add to my wardrobe.

It's a really cool pdf where you can turn on and print only your size. No multiple lines to follow.

I went through my fabric stash in... April? and realized I had a lot of annoyingly small scraps of stretchy fabric that I probably couldn't do anything with.

Or could I?

I would recommend Claire Shaeffer's book for the photos alone. She has a great collection of couture.  The two items above specifically are constructed by sewing striped fabric together to make different fabric.  The one on the left has been seamed together to change the order of the stripes, and the top on the right has been seamed to prevent the lowest stripe from being teal.

If Chanel can sew stripes together, SO CAN I! My garment would definitely not be couture, though.

So how to get stripes out of the scraps I had?  I wanted to figure out how tall I could cut the strips and have the exact width needed to fit on all my pattern pieces, with none leftover. Reduce, reuse, recycle.

I needed some sort of math equation to figure that out. I felt like I knew how to do this - it was on the tip of my tongue - I just couldn't get my brain to work!  Bias strip calculations are similar, but didn't help because they have the height specified, ie 2", 3", 4.5", etc. It's simple to figure out how many strips you'd get from a square that way. I thought I could reverse engineer that and figure out something iterative from that. Would I need limits? Integrals? Did I need calculus for this?

So I set it aside for a bit. How long? Who knows these days.

When I came back to it, I played around with different stripe configurations on the model. I like the way I look in larger stripes. I wanted something that would be shaded from top to bottom, light to dark.

And what do you know, the YOKO top size T is evenly divisible into 2" and 5" sections.


I just went ahead and assumed I had enough fabric. Enough grey fabric.


I vertically seamed the fabric together, cut 5.5" and 2.5" high strips. I laid them out on the pattern pieces. It was not quite the gentle gradient from top to bottom that I wanted. If only I had a lighter shade of grey.

 
I cut them to torso and sleeve widths, then seamed them horizontally to make the final fabric. I was short by about 2" of one color, so I subbed in a different color. But I had enough of everything else!


This took a loooonnnngggg time.

And done.


Where the shoulder in the right side of the photo below starts to curve down is where my shoulder starts to curve down, so it's an accurate line-up of the stripes in the sleeve to the stripes in the torso when I'm wearing it.

It's a great lounging-around-the-house item. Nice scrunchy neck, nice scrunchy sleeves.

It would, however,  be more comfortable if there weren't a million serged seams with different amounts of stretch.

I want to make another one! From one piece of fabric, this would probably take an hour to make. And maybe a medium to heavy weight stretch knit. This would be dreamy out of sweatshirt fleece.

And, of course, I found the perfect shade of light grey after I finished and went through some OTHER fabric. *shakes fist at the sewing gods*

Last April 2nd¹, I ordered and received a fabric recycling box from TerraCycle. It was $103 for an 11"x11"x20" box, but it was slightly smaller than that.

It filled up super quick². So I p a c k e d it. Tiny scraps leftover from cutting, clothes that I replaced that were stained or not structurally sound anymore. Thread. A lot of things I wouldn't think could be recycled.

It effectively took a year to fill it to where I really couldn't put anymore in. With the current situation, I held on to it a little longer because I wasn't sure about shipping.

Instructions for returning it a year later were hard to find - they weren't in any of the emails I received. It's not obvious on the website, either, it's in their FAQs. You look at the label, figure out the shipper, and drop it off.

I also recycled some items at H&M that were too big to fit in the box. You get a 15% off voucher³. And it's free. But do I really want to buy their clothes? After getting some of their t-shirts with weird fitting, not really.

Either way, I have to go out somewhere and carry a thing.

So, observations, not conclusions.

¹ Yes, I know, it feels like approx. 567 days since "last" April 2nd, but I mean 2019.
² Like, maybe two months?
³ With a very old expiration date!

A Nic Cage movie based on a Lovecraft short story, this was in turns creepy, scary, beautiful, and unpredictable¹. I was really excited to see Colin Stetson's name pop up right away as the music credit, and that did not disappoint². My friend said she was wavering between thinking the sound design was a little too much and just right. This movie was an experience. And definitely horror.


1 I'm assuming it's unpredictable. I haven't read the short story, so I don't know how close an adaptation it is. I'm assuming HP Lovecraft didn't write about smart phones.

2 His 2011 album History of Warfare Vol. 2 has stuck in my mind since it's release. He plays bass saxophone. The sounds and layers he gets out of that instrument are amazing.

A pointed look at wealth and privilege, which is not surprising given that was the subject matter of Snowpiercer.

( Spoilers: )

In April, I cut up a bunch of clothes and made news clothes. One of the things that resulted was a haori from the Wiksten pattern. I had to do a bunch of piecing and I drew lines where some of the piecing happened.


The dark blue linen used to be an SCA garment similar to this tunic, without the front gore. It was a really wonderful way to use up an entire amount of yardage. However, I wore it once, and regretted not wearing it again. The haori is another way to efficiently use fabric.

The collar is silk dupioni from my stash that I also had to piece.

The inside (which you can wear on the outside - this is reversible jacket) was the lining for a robe that I also never wore. I didn't have to piece that as much.


I always have problems with fusible interfacing. I've never not had it bubble. The smaller collar piece on the left is cut on a different grain than the rest, and the interfacing seemed to do worse. ?



I wear this jacket so much!

Ok, I’ve watched this twice now. And i was tempted to start watching it again tonight. Epic swords and sorcerers fantasy with a little silliness. I’ve got both the book and audiobook on hold at the library. 🎶 Toss a coin to your witcher! 🎶

A woman’s mother dies and then her family starts experiencing a series of terrifying events culminating in one of the most unexpected endings of a horror movie I’ve ever seen. It was so good!

I just finished reading Overdressed by Elizabeth L. Cline (2011). In it she talks about how fast fashion is bad for the environment, workers, and, well, fashion.  One of the ways to she says we can mitigate the effects of fast fashion is refashioning. It was timely because - I did that!

I have been doing that with my clothes and thrift store clothes for years, decades at this point.

Earlier this year, I went through my closet and sorted things into piles: keep, toss, mend, I want a new one, and I wish this were something else.

I made McCall's 7439 c. 1964 size in black corduroy with Bemberg Cupromonium Rayon underlining a few years ago.


I made the collarless version. I thought it would be a nice basic wardrobe piece. It was not.

I've had Simplicity 3369 c. 1960s size 14 on my to-make list for a long time.


Could I get this jacket out of the dress?!?

Since the dress had raglan sleeves and the jacket had set-in sleeves, it looked dicey. I held the jacket sleeve pattern pieces to the bodice pattern piece and kind of held it over the dress. (Suuuuper not technical or precise.)

Surprisingly, the finished dress bodice was pretty much the same exact width as the jacket pattern.  The jacket pattern just had straight side seams. I could just reuse the bodice! 

The sleeves looked ok? So they could stay attached!

Which was weird because it was a really fitted dress. They were both a size 14 - maybe the pattern companies all used the same fit models and slopers?

But oh well, I just wanted to make something, so I dove in, removed the side zipper, ripped the side seams, took out all the darts, took off the skirt, and started laying out pattern pieces.

I still had scraps in my stash.

So, would there be enough to make it? Yes! Sort of.

The skirt made the jacket longer (with pieced lengths), filled in the side seams, and lapel facings (which are pieced).



The sleeves were almost long enough as is - the cuffs, when undone, were a lot of extra length.

Scraps made up the collar and finished the lapels.

And the corduroy was done. Slivers were leftover.

So sturdy cotton pajama fabric lined the collar and pockets, and extra lining to cover horse hair canvas that should have been under the underlining.


Because the lapels had so many pieces, it's super bulky and won't iron flat. Do the buttons and buttonholes work? No! But I wouldn't be able to button it anyway because it's a little snug.

But I don't care! I love this thing. I've worn it approximately 34 times more than the dress. It's exactly the sort of crumpled, vintage-y looking jacket I wanted.