A month of months

I see a lot of books come in through work with titles like "Unexpected Soups" and "Unexpected Houseplants" or "Unexpected Knitting" and always laugh a little - like, did you not see that coming? You have to get ingredients or supplies.

I kind of get it now.

There's a knitter I follow (on ravelry) who not only knits sweaters at an impressive rate, but has embroidered some of them beautifully. One of the artists she got inspired by is Yumiko Higuchi who has written a few embroidery books, and work happened to have "Zakka Embroidery" available.

I looked through it and took it home to see if I would be inspired.

After some unplanned and random digging, I found the leftover floss from my western shirt, embroidery hoops, researched needles to see if I had the right ones (sort of), got out linen (her fabric of choice) from my stash, and started. Whoa. Unexpected.

The next morning, while running errands, I realized I was (unexpectedly) close to a store that was open that had embroidery needles, so ran in and got those. They worked much better.

After a few hours I had this:


And then I ran out of thread. And of course, this is the one color I had that was not DMC floss. But it had the equivalent color number on it! Off to JoAnns, the only store open late in the area that had embroidery floss.*

But would the color match?

I've embroidered before... 7 years ago. Pulling up those memories was  s l o w. There were stitches I made after which I said, "Oh right!" and then, "Not fixing it!"

I finished it up that night at, I think, 10:30. Despite the late hour, I noticed I was stitching much faster that when I started. Yay!

Then I thought, "What am I going to do with this?", figured out this little bit of embroidery would fit on the sleep mask pattern in the same book, and sewed it the next day.


So yeah, unexpected embroidery.

*One store is only open on Tuesdays for 5 hours?

Here in rainy Portland, you have to seize the opportunity when the weather turns nice. I photographed some projects, rather hurriedly, and a stripey French beret is the first in four - you can head over to ravelry to read more, or you can check out photos of it in flickr.

The second oldest project is the Asian dress I revamped into a jacket.  Prior to this winter, I got a sudden desire to have a quilted lounging jacket to hang around the house in as a change from fleece.

You may recall that I've been deconstructing RTW garments in order to find out how they're made and learn techniques to make my stuff look more professionally made.  Enter the giant, sort-of-cheongsam that would definitely have enough fabric to make a jacket I found while thrifting.  Of course, as usual, I forgot to take before pictures. *sigh*

It was floor length, zipped up the back, and had a placket on the front that closed with frogs. And surprisingly tiny sleeves.  It was shaped with two vertical darts in the back, and two darts in the front of the kind that start down at the waist and curve up to the bust point. I can't remember what they're called (is there a special name for those?), but they're the ones on every '70s Simplicity dress pattern ever.
I kept the basic bodice shape, closed up the back seam, and opened the front.  I completely changed the sleeves: I wanted long bell-shaped sleeves and used the instructions found on VintageSewing.info from the book Modern Pattern Design by Harriet Peppin c. 1942 for Bishop Sleeve or Peasant Type Sleeve. (Sadly, that website is no longer being kept up, however you can see it in its entirety by using the Wayback Machine.)

I also wanted it quilted and I thought silk batting would be appropriate.  There are so many types of batting available these days - bamboo, wool, silk, etc.  I also didn't have a bouncy foot for my machine (I never did figure out if it's actually a quilting or darning foot, but it does bounce) to do stippling, so gorthx graciously allowed me to use her machine.  I can't say I like machine embroidery any more than hand embroidery, but I like the result.  The embroidery also drew the fabric up quite a bit, so the entire thing ended up a bit smaller and the darts now point to ... destinations unknown.  I lined it with a simple cotton from the indoor outside sale (don't ask).