keep moving

note to self:

yes, it is woven fabric, and yes, it is undyed pale tannish, and yes, it feels natural to the touch, but the fact is that if it doesn't feel like it wants to be sandpaper or possibly roof shingles when it grows up, you really need to verify that it's your remaining supply of canvas and not, say, a roll of undyed cotton muslin that you forgot ordering in 2021.

*sigh*

at least I came to my senses before I got beyond 'cut piece 1 and 2, make markings, baste edges of piece 2 together'.

Please, dear sewing bloggers of the English-speaking world, please remember that some of us are sewing for people of masculine gender presentation. When you write and photograph your tutorials for fly-front trousers, please remember that your instructions may be accurate but we can only spare so much mental energy to swap out all uses of 'right' for 'left' and vice versa, or mirror-flip all your images to reflect this.

It's bad enough that going to pattern websites for the Big Four companies gets me 90% patterns for women's clothing, with men's patterns seemingly limited to 'button down shirt, boxer shorts, chinos, gym shorts, steampunk costumes'. But it would be nice to be able to construct the zipper on a pair of trousers for someone of male presentation without having to do mental gyrations.

Thanks.

The universe came after me for announcing that I was cheating on the quilt yesterday. Power outage hit my town around 2. I don't have a 'work the treadle with your foot, modern weakling' machine. Wound up launching into hand-quilting on the blanket.

Power's back on now, obviously, so yeah I could have waited and stitched it once the lights were back on, but yesterday's estimates from the power company indicated that they might not get everyone's power back up until noon on the 21st. I couldn't afford not to start by hand.

It's faster than I thought. I'll show y'all photos when I'm done.

dear self part 2:

if you have cut out a bunch of equilateral octagons and squares from the last piece of posterboard you have left, and you intend to trace the outlines on the wrong sides of quilting fabric on the ferry ride to work, and you put the fabric in your backpack along with some thread and a needle for the trip home, it kind of behooves you to remember to put the posterboard octagons and squares in the backpack too.

*face*
*palm*

guess I know what I'm doing at lunch.

I bought two lengths of silk at a store called Baccia Tessuti on the trip to Italy back in April. Today I actually got around to cutting into one of them, having made a muslin from polyester satin (I figured it'd drape about the same, plus polyester satin is stupid cheap as far as practice fabrics go) some time back.

The people on Reddit and sewing.patternreview.com who advised a spray called Terial Magic beforehand were 100% right. It's a liquid stabilizer. Like spray starch, but stiffer, and without the part where spray starch is made from a food product and can attract bugs. Once the Terial Magic dried, I have been able to cut the entire robe's worth of silk (I think it's georgette) without the kind of fraying which commenced within seconds of cutting the satin.

HOWEVER.

The product came to me with a spray top of the sort you see used for bathroom glass cleaner bottles, and a very long tube attached. The tube would probably have been about right for a Windex bottle or a generic 32-ounce spray bottle from the hardware store, but it was much longer than the 16 ounce bottle of Terial Magic was high. I assumed I needed that much tube for whatever reason and did my best to coax it into the bottle and use it as it came.

Bad idea. The top wound up coming off mid-spray because the bent, pressed tube basically made it impossible to keep the top screwed on. I wound up cutting the tube short with a pair of scissors and was able to use it, but I spilled a distressing amount on the back hall carpet.

Ah well. I'll let you know how the project goes once I start sewing the pieces together.

This is one of two robe patterns I bought from Thimball on Etsy. Figured I'd sew them up in polyester satin and see which worked better before I cut into the fabric from my parents' anniversary trip to Italy.

( Eight pictures behind the cut. )

After a few initial fumbles, I have my first four Flying Geese units for the quilt I'm trying to make for my nibling's Christmas present.

( This block involves She-Hulk: Attorney At Law. )

As it stands, I inadvertently wasted two panels of the She-Hulk fabric by misreading the directions when I was cutting, but TBH I chose to do this fabric first because I had slightly more of it to spare and could cut at least one more square out of it. We'll see how it goes from here.

Working on the robe version of the Charlotte top from Seamwork. I think this pattern may have been the item that most caught my eye when I first opted to subscribe to their site. I bought fabric for it and the Monroe pants that the model is wearing, but didn't cut into it for more than a year, largely because when I looked at the pattern pages there were SO MANY PIECES.

Recently I cut out all the pattern pieces for an anorak, for which I had bought the fabric last December. I realized, coming to the end of the cutting of the last pattern piece, that as much as I would need a rain-resistant jacket in winter, I really didn't want to start on it just yet. It's like flipping a coin; you realize what you actually want the result to be as it's falling. So I got out the Charlotte pattern and saw that there weren't quite as many pieces as I'd feared- the pattern makers just had three different versions of certain pieces. One for sizes 0 through 10, one for sizes 12 through 16, one for sizes 18 through 26. And other pieces were 'this is piece A, it is for sizes 0 through 26, it is only for version 1 which is a non-belted pajama top, this is piece E, it is piece A but for the robe version'. There were still a lot of pieces, but not the huge number I thought.

Didn't count on the size of piece M, though. It's a big curved thing that runs from the hemline in the front over the shoulder to the hemline in the back, and it requires staystitching along both curved edges to prevent distortion/stretching during the work, and it is slightly asymmetrical, and there are multiple notchy points and circles that have to be lined up with the circles on other pieces. It's longer than my self-healing rotary cutting mat, too. And it's marked 'cut two'.

I seem to have cut piece M slightly too long and not quite properly in terms of width near one end. I put the notches in as best I could after clipping the paper piece to it as securely as possible; some of the notches aren't really visible due to me cutting it not quite right and that aforementioned asymmetry. I did the circles with a chalk pencil as best I could, mostly by running a needle and thread through the paper to form Xes and then lifting the paper just enough to color within the area defined by the X. I'll just be quietly grateful that the seam allowances in this pattern are 5/8" so I have a little wiggle room in the areas I didn't quite cut. This ain't couture, this is me working with polyester satin that cost $3.50 a yard, tops. I just don't have the patience to cut a second pair of this piece and I also don't think I have the fabric for it. Not if I want to make a matching pair of pyjama pants, albeit more like my cloned PJ pants than the Seamwork Monroe pattern- I don't need the huge and billowy, I just want something to cover my legs, and be shiny about it.

I've done my notching and circle-marking and staystitching on my other pieces. The next step involves interfacing on four of the smaller pieces before I can start lining up anything to sew. I cut all my pieces and staystitched yesterday but today was Notching and Circlemarking, and Trimming Extra Edge Bits on most pieces (but not piece M, I wasn't going to cut off that much in case I was still somehow getting things wrong). There were a lot of ittybitty pieces to clean up.

I am taking a break, kthx. There are blueberry muffins in the fridge.

Did some math and it looks as if I can probably make a moderately respectable cloak out of the curtain panels, so long as I don't mind it being only a little bit longer than knee-length. I'm talking proper pull-around-you cloak, not a cape. I am neither Lando Calrissian nor Billy Batson; I don't expect to make a cape look good.

I am also not a superhero. Edna Mode does not apply.

Anyway, while a couple of cosplayish sites talk about making a fantasy cloak with hood from a single curtain panel, I'm not sure how wide their panels are, so I'm going to stick with the numbers and techniques in the Online Fabric Store tutorial on how to make a hooded cloak with a lining. If I have enough fabric left after cutting the main cloak, I will make the hood out of what's left. If the structure of the curtains is such that I fall short in this category, I will wander over to their velvet section and buy a yard of something in beige or taupe or gold polyester velvet to use instead. At home I currently have eight yards of purple polyester crepe-backed satin, which I had originally planned to make into pyjamas. It may wind up being the lining on the cloak instead. Not like it costs much; I can get more of it from OFS when I actually get around to making pyjamas. And deep purple strikes me as a good interior color.

I have to finish my quilted pillow front project first. Last night I realized I had attached about 27 triangles to other triangles incorrectly. Given that I was using the 1.5 stitch setting on my machine, there is no way on God's green earth that I'm going to go back and rip all of those seams. I'm going to grab one of my backup fabrics, cut a bunch of similarly sized triangles, stitch the little bastards to the extant ones so that they give the impression I deliberately split that part of the pattern into two fabrics, and proceed from there. After that I'm gonna wanna do something nice and simple, so that's either going straight to the curtain cloak or just banging out a pair of capri-length bike pants for cycling to the ferry in the morning.

( Rode my bike to the ferry and then to work. Took this photo in a machine room before changing into my Grownup Clothes. )

Pattern for top is Greenstyle Creations' Waimea rashguard, color block variation, with standard length and short sleeve options. Size I. Fabric is Sew Dynamic athletic knit, 245 gsm, in Enchanted Geode and Whale Shark colors. Thread used was primarily Gutermann recycled polyester Mara 100 rPET royal blue and light blue, with seams serged using Maxi-Lock thread from Wawak.

The bottom is also handmade, although that one was done a month or two ago. Greenstyle Creations Spark tights pattern, size H, bike shorts length. Fabric is Sew Dynamic AK 245 in Night Sky and Geo Misty Trees, printed crossgrain (I hadn't realized that this would result in horizontal stripes, I wasn't looking at the grain direction on the shorts pattern when I bought the fabric). Also Gutermann Mara 100 and Maxi-Lock thread.

Air hose is because I have no full length mirror and rode my bike to work this morning so the photo was taken in the only place where I could set up the phone for a selfie and have a blank wall behind me. Which is to say, in a room with a backup portable AC unit with a ventilation hose running into the ceiling. Sorry.

Resource URLs:

https://greenstyle.com/collections/womens-tops/products/waimea-rash-guard
https://greenstyle.com/products/spark-tights-pdf-pattern-sizes-b-m
https://www.sewdynamic.com/collections/athletic-knit-245-us
https://www.wawak.com/thread/thread-by-use/all-purpose/gutermann-mara-100-rpet-100-recycled-polyester-thread-tex-30-1093-yds/
https://www.wawak.com/thread/thread-by-brand/maxi-lock/maxi-lock-serger-spun-polyester-thread-tex-27/

... almost forgot. The reason I use the Sew Dynamic fabrics is because Sew Dynamic sells Repreve for consumers. The cloth here is made entirely from recycled polyester and a bit of elastane (Spandex, whatever). I think it represents the use of something like 15 or 16 plastic bottles per yard. Sew Dynamic also offers recycled-fiber swim fabric, but that uses nylon, so instead of post-consumer plastic bottles the recycled content of swim fabric mostly comes from scrap generated by the carpet industry.