Damselfly's Delights

Autumn Is Flying In

September 1, 2020 damselflysdelights3 Comments

All my best efforts at posting more often have obviously not worked at all! I give up worrying about it. It is what it is. I seem to do a little better with Instagram. Sorry, not sorry. Though I do ramble on more than most on that platform. Which is why I don’t give up entirely on blogging. Words matter as much to me as images. Each reflects and expands on the other.

Anyway, here I am. Another month and it’s already cooled down outside and it’s starting to have that “back-to-school” smell in the mornings. So nostalgic. This was a generally cooler and wetter summer than usual. I can tell because the grass is still mostly green. We don’t water it and it’s usually pretty browned by August. Plus I don’t feel that I’ve been enslaved to the hoses and watering can trying to keep my veggies and flowers alive like I usually am in summer! A couple of soakings a week and they’re good. With this weather, some things survived much longer than they usually do (peas, cabbages and last year’s kale, for instance) and some things didn’t do as well (tomatoes, bush beans). Though every year is somewhat different I guess. I didn’t have a chance to donate some of my produce to my kids so I’m struggling to use up stuff before it goes squishy. It’s a yummy challenge: winners get eaten and losers get composted! Win-win. Heh.

As everyone keeps saying, it’s been a very strange last 6 months! Our lives are being impacted in ways that we’re only just starting to get a handle on. It’s possibly more subtle for me as a senior who owns her own home with a yard to get outside in, kids who are grown up and living their own lives with their families, and no job or lost income to worry about. But I can still feel others’ frustrations. I keep hoping for some systemic changes in how society works now that people have had time to stop and reflect, to give up old unsustainable ways and learn new better habits. But I keep being disappointed. So many people want things to improve but they can’t seem to make sane choices. And we won’t even discuss the political scene. Ugh. Okay, I’ll quit now. Before I get into a rant about insane people having way too much power and how nobody seems to be able to stop them! Isn’t that how Hitler and Mussolini and Lenin and Idi Amin and Mugabe and Pol Pot and so many other evil dictators got loose? Quitting now…

Let’s talk about what I’ve been up to in the past month, shall we? I showed you the next project I was planning, the Lac Button-Up Dress. It turned out just the way I wanted.

If you recall the fabric is a viscose/linen blend that I dyed in July. It’s a bit blotchy but in a good way. Plus I conveniently had 10 perfectly matching buttons in the stash. What are the odds? I quite like this slightly longer length, just below the knee. I think I added about 5″ to the original pattern and I’m only 5’3-1/2″ tall so the original is pretty short. I cut self-bias binding for all the edges which lies much flatter and nicer than the dreaded facings. I also re-drafted my inseam pockets (there’s no pockets in the pattern) to be wide enough to tack to the front princess seams so they don’t flop around. That worked really well! The bodice fits just a little too loose to be comfortable without a t-shirt underneath but that makes it better as a layering piece. Here I’m wearing it with a vintage undershirt dyed in my Japanese indigo.

Next I got stuck into making the new Muna and Broad Banksia Bralette pattern. I used scraps of leftover knits and raided my bra-making supplies for fold-over elastics and powernet lining. This pattern is unique in that it includes optional “slings” from powernet that keep the girls separated and cooler. The first two efforts were a little frustrating because I felt as if I was too compressed.

I decided to cut the third version with a size larger for the front and no slings. That one fits very nicely and gave me more coverage under the arms. However, in an effort to rescue the first two bralettes I decided to do some surgery on the slings.

Top: charcoal bralette before; bottom: brown bralette after.

Yes, I crossed the slings the opposite way on these two! And the brown version has no powernet lining because it was a very firm knit all by itself. You might hopefully be able to see how I reduced the coverage of the slings in the brown one. I just kept snipping a sliver at a time as symmetrically as possible along the top and bottom of each sling and trying it on until the girls sighed in relief! Now they are comfortable bralettes with a surprising amount of support. If you’ve seen the Banksia pattern you might also note that my underbust band is narrower than the pattern since I only had 1″ elastic, not 1-1/4″ or 1-1/2″. I think this is quite wide enough for me because I’m on the smaller end (!) of this pattern I don’t have a lot of room on my torso for a wide band. I angle right out from my narrow underbust (aka “the shelf”) and wide bands just tend to curl up. So I have enough bralettes for now but I think this is going to be a handy pattern in future, especially if I expand it to a tank with a built-in bra. Muna and Broad already have released an expansion pattern like this but I’m not going to bother purchasing since I’d have to do some re-drafting anyway and I don’t need the included swim bottoms. Not hard to just work with what I’ve already got.

Next, I went with another Muna and Broad pattern, the Glebe Pants. I’ve wanted wide-legged pants for awhile now but I didn’t think I quite fit into this one’s size range. Just. Barely. On the smallest end! I love that. I printed out size iii and it fit perfectly. No changes at all except that I shortened the cuffs by an inch and narrowed the waistband because again, I only have 1″ wide non-roll elastic.

Notice how nicely they pair with my cropped Kalle?

The fabric is a brown stretch linen in a fairly heavy weight. I lined the pockets with batik quilting cotton scraps because I also managed to get another garment out of these 3 yards of 52″ wide fabric. I’m very good at Pattern Tetris!

I wear this type of pinny all the time. I couldn’t quite fit a York so I went with my own pattern that I usually make in a knit but it works fine in a woven too. The inseam pockets are only one layer topstitched in place. You can barely see the topstitching and the pockets can’t move around at all. Also takes less fabric! I used a cotton quilting fabric as bias binding on all the edges. The V-back was a little tricky but I managed to get it to fold under smoothly.

I realised later that everything I’m wearing here was self-drafted. The brown linen pants and the black lightweight linen top were made a couple of years ago. This outfit is very Me!

For the next project I’m attempting some casual pants for Thom. I’m having some fitting issues. Which may be all in my mind. Hmmm… These are more slim-fitting than his usual style but I want him to actually wear them. So I’m dithering. Just cut out the damn pants already, Damselfly! It’s only fabric.

Stay well, my dears! Wear your mask, wash your hands, keep your safe distance. Everyone is counting on you! And it’s the absolute least you can do to help the world get over this obviously extremely lethal pandemic.

Kalle Take Two

August 13, 2020 damselflysdelights4 Comments

I wasn’t especially happy with the fit of my first Closet Core Kalle, the cropped version that I showed in the last post. I decided more work was necessary at the shoulders as well as going up one size in the upper chest area front and back for just a wee bit more wiggle room. It was quite an involved process since I was combining several adjustments at the same time: sloped shoulder, forward shoulder and high round back. All this changed the shape of the back yoke quite a lot and also took a large wedge out of the front shoulder seam. I took a little more from the back armhole by nibbling another wedge out of the back bodice at the armhole edge. In order to counteract some of the narrowing that all this caused on the sleeve, I lowered the underarm where it curves from the sleeve into the body of the garment. All this in turn necessitated remeasuring the cuff pieces. I had to add to the back cuff and take a little bit away from the front one. Whew! In the end though, the fit is a whole lot better.

This time I decided to make the dress version of the pattern with the pop-over button placket, collar and inverted pleat. I used the narrower band collar piece for the collar stand and shaved 3/8″ off the collar to match because I thought the original collar was a bit too oversized. I also added 2 pockets instead of one because otherwise this dress has no pockets. Should have put inseam pockets in, shouldn’t I? Next time for sure. The fabric is a narrow handwoven, tie-dyed and batiked cotton from deepest stash. Must have been lurking there for at least 25 years! Bright and cheerful enough for you? Even though the patterning is completely funky and there was no matching anything anyhow, the fabric was quite lovely to work with and pressed and sewed like a champ. The buttons were little turquoise plastic ones salvaged off something ages ago and they matched very nicely.

The fit on this second Kalle is very much improved! As well as the shoulder changes, it grades from a size 12 at the neck to a 14 at the bust, 16 at the waist and 18 at the hip. Four sizes is quite a large range, eh? Also this is the dress pattern as drafted for 5’6″ and I’m only 5’3-1/2″ and it’s still quite short, although I suspect some of the extreme hi-lo hem curve has been removed since the pattern photos. Anyhow, all my adjustments worked like a dream even though they had me scratching my head whether or not I did it all correctly. Yay! Now I have another good pattern to add to my collection. I may succumb to a tunic version yet! I wouldn’t mind experimenting with long sleeves as well but don’t think I’ll be buying the expansion pack that Closet Core has available. A simple sleeve, tower placket and cuff shouldn’t be hard to draft myself and save the cost (which comes to over $9 CAD) to put towards something else. I’d still have to adjust the upper edge for my revised sleeve opening and shorten the length as usual for my T-rex arms anyway plus I already have a tower placket pattern so why not DIY?

So then there were about 2 yards left of the fabric so I decided to make another wearable muslin, this time for Thom. I tried out the Wardrobe By Me Tropical Shirt. The only fit adjustment that I made was to straighten out the waist curve because he’s pretty much the same measurement at chest, waist and hip. (Unlike me!) I did debate with Christina from WBM about her pattern sizing for men which I have found rather confusing but haven’t really gotten a satisfactory answer apart from “European sizing is different” and “Euro men are smaller”. Uh-huh. Thom’s 40″ chest which is a size M practically everywhere else is an XL in WBM sizing. The largest size offered, 3XL, is only a 45″ chest which seems a rather limited range to me, at least on the top end, whatever you label it. Anyway the finished measurements were what he expected so that’s what I made. And was just able to squeeze it out of the remnant piece.

There was no way to choose where the patterns ended up since there was so little fabric to work with. My friend Melanie says he has owl eyes! Hah. Now you can’t unsee that, can you? Instead of the pocket pattern I used a spare one that I’d cut out for the Kalle and decided that it wasn’t looking right there. It works fine here. There’s only tiny fabric scraps left, which is what you want, right? Thom is quite happy with his new shirt and it’s now dubbed the Aloha Shirt. He says he will wear it while holidaying in Las Livingroom and Puerta Backyarda! There will be more, especially as his collection of short-sleeved summer shirts start to wear out. Some are upwards of 15-20 years old now and the best ones are linen, ramie or a linen/cotton blend. He wears them all the time when it’s warmer, preferring them over t-shirts because not only are shirts cooler, he can keep his glasses in the pocket.

One change I might make to this pattern in future is to add to the 1cm (3/8″) seam allowances at the side-seams and the top of the sleeve so I can sew flat-fell seams instead of having to overlock them. So much nicer inside and more durable for shirts. I used flat-fells on my Kalle which was easy because it started with 5/8″ seam allowances. On the dress the seam finish was even flexible enough to accommodate the curve under the arm where the body morphs into the sleeve but I did have to clip a little into the seam allowances underneath the top of the folded layer before stitching it down to get it to lie flat.

So what’s next? I seem to be on a bit of a sewing roll! I suddenly decided to use my lac-dyed linen/rayon for a longer version of the Peppermint/In The Folds Button-Up Dress. More on this one soon. I’ve made a few changes to it since I made the first version (which does look suspiciously like a copy of the pattern photo). I wear it a lot but it’s short and I hate the facings. I hate ALL facings! They never cooperate and lie flat or stay put. Give me bias binding over facings any day. There will be bias. Okay, I’m done!

Take good care, everyone! Wash your hands, stay 6 feet/2 metres apart and wear your damn mask! It’s the least we can do.

Dye!

July 29, 2020 damselflysdelights4 Comments

Summer has finally smacked us upside the head! Happily it’s still cool enough at night to enable us to sleep well but the days are quite hot, at least for here in Vancouver. Obviously this is a lesson in “be careful what you wish for”, right? I’m alternating my time picking produce, watering everything in sight and working up in the Sweat Shop (aka my upstairs studio). Oh, and dyeing fabrics on the deck with dyeplants from my garden and older dyes, mordants and assists from the dye studio. It’s been an adventure!

I started by chopping off my Japanese indigo plants.

Japanese indigo (Persicaria tinctoria aka Polygonum tinctorium)

I decided to try a new-to-me technique for dyeing with some of this bounty as explained in John Marshall’s “Singing the Blues” book (p.29), dyeing cellulose fibres with fresh indigo. I had a 2-metre length of a lightweight hemp fabric, scoured in Synthrapol and soda ash. After stripping the leaves carefully from the stems I weighed them so they were pretty much equal to the wof. I dissolved thiourea dioxide in hot water and left it to cool. In the craft blender I lightly packed leaves and covered them in ice water and blended them into slurry which went into a stainless steel pan. Repeated until all the leaves are blended and added calx and the thiox to the last blending. The results looked pretty weird, all curdled and frothy, but it properly turned green in about 10 minutes.

Then I added the damp fabric and carefully squooshed it around in the vat for about 10 minutes. The fabric turned blue when I pulled it out, rinsed in clear water and hung it up for awhile but I didn’t think it was very dark so I repeated the whole procedure since I had plenty of indigo leaves. I know that it gets a lot lighter after the fabric is finally finished. Also this year’s indigo isn’t very intense with the indigo precursors because it was such a cloudy/rainy spring and early summer. Less sun means less blue!

Final results, fresh Japanese indigo on hemp

The blue is quite light and blotchy (and nearly impossible to photograph accurately!) but I think the fresh process has possibilities. I had lots of leaves left over afterward so I dried them. One day I’ll combine several years’ worth of dried leaves and see what I can get from them. There should also be at least one or two more harvests before cold weather kills the plants.

There was still plenty more plants in the dye garden to play with so I chopped down the weld plant that was more than 2 metres tall and Thom buzzed it through his chipper/shredder for me. I decided to dye a second 2 metre piece of the hemp fabric and mordanted it in tannin and then alum/soda ash using instructions from “The Art and Science of Natural Dyes” by Joy Boutrup and Catharine Ellis. The weld was simmered for an hour and the plant matter sieved out before adding the fabric and a small amount of chalk (calcium carbonate) since our water is very soft. Again the fabric didn’t turn out as dark as I expected but it’s quite a pretty soft yellow. I’m beginning to think it’s the hemp which was unbleached that didn’t take a strong dye colour even though it was well scoured at a simmer.

Of course I couldn’t quit there! I’d been saving up the marigolds that I had deadheaded off the plants for about a week but even after stealing a bunch of fresher blossoms didn’t have quite enough for a couple of yards of heavy cotton doubleknit that was next on the list. So I added some spent heads of the dyers’ chamomile (Anthemis tinctoria) to make up the weight of flowers. My plants are not yellow as is the usual variety but white with yellow centres like regular chamomile. Even so they still dye quite well.

Dyer’s chamomile (var. Sauce Hollandaise)

I wasn’t picky and left in the stems and the sepals and likely a few aphids and ants as well! I simmered the lot for at least an hour. Meanwhile the cotton knit was mordanted in myrobalan and alum acetate (in separate steps) and then into the pot after the flower heads had been sieved out. Now I got a really strong colour of slightly greenish yellow even though I hadn’t heavily scoured this fabric but just ran it through a couple of laundry loads because it was a freebie from a neighbour and slightly grubby.

Marigold and dyer’s chamomile on cotton knit

Lastly instead of using dye plants from the garden I decided to use up as much of a jar of lac extract as I could. Even though this insect dye gives great colours of raspberry reds to purples, it absolutely stinks! I can’t dye it indoors at all or it gives me a sore throat. It’s that bad. It also is a PITA to wash out because it stains everything: rubber gloves, pails, washpan, sink, and even my best stainless steel dyepot is currently pink. Hopefully it will lose that eventually because I hesitate to dye anything that will pick up the colour from the pot. Anyway, I used most of it up and dyed 3 metres of a natural linen/rayon blend which was first mordanted in gallnut and alum acetate. This fabric (of which I have quite a lot left from a 50 yard bolt) dyes beautifully.

I left it for a day or so after dyeing before rinsing it in cold water over and over and over (8 times!) outdoors in the gravel driveway before running it through a machine wash with Synthrapol and then dried in the dryer. I’m still planning to be careful when I wash any garment I sew out of this in case it still has the power to stain anything. I don’t trust it! But isn’t it gorgeous? And no longer stinky. Yay.

I haven’t exactly decided what I’m going to make out of these fabrics yet, apart from the indigo one which will be a shirt for Thom, but they certainly coordinate nicely together.

Wait! That’s not all. I finished sewing a tester version of Closet Core Patterns Kalle Shirt that became an actual wearable garment. I used a bleached muslin from deepest stash and sewed the cropped version with cotton thread on purpose so it could be dyed. I have more to say about this pattern but I think I’ll leave it until I make the actual tunic version that I originally had in mind. But here’s the wearable muslin before I scrunched it up.

Kalle shirt before dyeing, minus buttons

I had saved my myrobalan mordant bath so I heated it up and used that to soak the scrunched shirt. Then I squeezed it out and put it into an iron modifier bath (2% WOF dissolved in hot tap water). It immediately turned grey but not as dark a colour as I had hoped. Perhaps there wasn’t enough myro in the pot or it didn’t stay in long enough since it was probably a lot more diluted than I needed. Or the muslin wasn’t scoured well enough? I quite like the results though.

At least it’s not white. Heh. Yes, I know it needs ironing but it still smells like rusty nails so needs another wash before I’m going to wear it. I’m a bit hesitant about this style on me and how to incorporate it into my wardrobe but we shall see. It only cost me some time and I learned a lot. It’s not a bad fit I think but I’ll be making a few fit adjustments anyway before making the tunic. More on that when I get to it.

Stay well and stay cool (or warm depending on where you live)! And WEAR YOUR DAMN MASK!!!

More Pattern Thoughts

July 16, 2020 damselflysdelights2 Comments

Or maybe that should be Mistaken Pattern Thoughts? Last post ended with me assembling the Closet Case Sienna Maker Jacket. I was completely off base thinking that I could frankenpattern the regular and extended (I was incorrect to call them “curvy”) sizes together to get something that would fit me. Wrong! The two size ranges are drafted on completely different blocks and they didn’t correspond well enough to combine parts of them together. So it became a DIY project of massive proportions! In the end there wasn’t much left of the original pattern except the collar, hems, pockets and centre front and back seams.

Yes, my body is not a “standard” shape! I have a small frame but carry a lot of extra fat around the middle of me from bust to upper thigh. Unlike most people who have fat distributed more evenly on their bodies, my arms and legs (at least from just above the knee down) are relatively thin. My shoulders are also narrow and quite sloped. I’m short but not petite since my shortness is all in my legs (and arms) not my torso. All this means some pretty complex fitting changes have to be made before I’m happy with any garment’s fit.

So much work but I learned long ago that just going with baggy oversized layers makes me look like I’m wearing my big sister’s clothes. (And I don’t have a big sister.) I hate that! The proportions are completely wrong for me and I feel swamped. I need the upper bust and arms to actually fit me and then widen from the bust to hip to at least skim breezily past the fat parts. With enough ease because I also don’t like feeling squished in the middle.

In the above photo of the front of the Sienna (size 14 in the extended range), you can see I needed the shoulder sloped and narrowed, the underarm raised, the bust narrowed slightly and the waist curve removed and widened down towards the hem (not shown). I also shortened the body at the lengthen/shorten line by an inch which probably isn’t enough to bring the lower pocket markings up to where my short arms can reach properly. I’ll check that when I get there in the sewing steps.

And then I did a similar fix to the back pattern piece.

I don’t need to slope the back shoulder as much as the front to accommodate my forward shoulder. I left a little extra width in the shoulder seam to be eased into the front which fits my round shoulder much nicer. Another option would be a dart but this is only 1/4″ so easing is better. The upper back width is also not narrowed as much as the front. I left the back curve shaping intact. (Interestingly the “regular” pattern sizes have a straight back seam. And no bust dart.) This jacket is not meant to fit too closely but to be a layer that one wears over one’s regular clothing to protect it from dirt or wear: a work jacket, chore coat, or lab coat. Or to at least look like you were planning to do some work.

So of course after all that fiddling I had to make the sleeve pattern fit the new armhole. And me, hopefully.

The Sienna sleeve is a two-piece like a suit jacket. This is a little harder for me to adjust than a simple one-piece sleeve but I figured it out eventually. I had to take some height off the cap, add some to the underarm, narrow the whole sleeve and shorten it. Yikes! So much work. But if there’s anything I cannot abide it’s sleeves that are too large for me. I lived with that issue in the past but no longer. I can make them better. So I can bend my arms comfortably but not dip my cuffs in the soup.

The only other adjustments I had to make were to the shoulder seams on the facings so they would match the slope. Collar and pockets and belt are untouched. Remind me why I keep buying patterns? Seems pointless when I have to do so much to make them fit that it feels like it would be far easier to draft one from scratch! I keep saying I’m quitting buying anything new now that I have a whole suite of basic pattern blocks that I can use. At least for the simpler things. Let’s see how long I can maintain a pattern-buying moratorium. You heard it here first! Counting from NOW……

One comment about Closet Case: Heather Lou has decided to rebrand as Closet Core Patterns. It seems a better fit and less of a subtle unintended slur than “Closet Case”. All her marketing and social media redirect to Closet Core now. However, even though the timing is good I think it’s going to take awhile before it completely catches on. Especially when the original name is all over the patterns that I already own. Maybe I’ll get out the markers and correct them! Heh.

Anyway, I hope you aren’t holding your breath waiting for me to actually cut out and sew the Sienna right away. I’ve been working on a number of sewing ideas and absolutely nothing is getting finished yet! Unfortunately I get just as much pleasure out of planning as I do actually accomplishing. Okay, maybe “unfortunately” is the wrong word. I’m just going along with what works for me right now: preparing patterns, matching them with fabrics, stacking them up, wash, rinse, repeat. Once I eventually get over this phase I will definitely start chopping out garment pieces. After I have at least half-a-dozen ready to go, then I’ll start sewing them together. I know that’s not how most people sew but just working on one project at a time doesn’t make me happy. After all it’s not a contest, is it? I don’t really need anything new. I have plenty of clothes to wear already. It has to be fun or I won’t do it. And right now all I want to do is play with pieces of paper. So I am.

But just so you know, there is fabric for the Sienna.

The colour only showed up properly in the sunshine.

It’s a heavy reddish-brown brushed bull denim that’s been in my stash so long I have no idea where it came from. And I even have the D-rings in the right size for the belt. Progress!

Moving right along. I get to go to the dentist tomorrow for a teeth cleaning and check-up. I adore my hygienist but I don’t relish all the new rules for taking my temperature, distancing, masks, hand sanitizer etc. thanks to The Evil Pandemic. I can’t even wait in the office but have to be called in by phone and then leave before it’s Thom’s turn right after me. Ugh. I know they are just being careful and protecting both themselves and me. It’s important to do so. And I’m sure it’s just as much of a PITA to them too. Anyway to cheer myself up I made a new mask to wear. Obviously I can’t wear it in the chair though! Fun times, people. Fun times.