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I decided again that discretion was the better part of valor, and instead of leaving early this morning to spend three weeks at the farm, I rejiggered the schedule so I’ll be going for one week, then back a week, and then I’ll be spending three weeks at the farm– gives us more time to get the new inventory thing settled at work, gives me time to begin winterizing the yurt and take measurements and then come back and make more quilts. yeah.
Also, I decided to leave Sunday morning instead of this morning, and so I’ve spent today actually being productive in my own house. Four loads of laundry, including washing the chair pads for the kitchen chairs, one of which got red wine spilled absolutely all over it the other day. It was a perfect day for line-drying– intermittently sunny, but a steady and quite heavy breeze out of the west, which sucked/snapped the linen sheets dry in like literally twenty minutes. (I have discovered that linen sheets can only be hung to dry, and only outdoors, and cannot be used at all if it’s not outdoor-clothesline weather, which is fascinating. The dryer irons intractable creases into them; hanging over a door crinkles them. They must be on a line and must snap in the breeze. Only then do they come out soft and usable.)
And I also cut out a version of the – oh, I don’t think I mentioned, I borrowed the Alabama Stitch Book from the library on the recommendation of mmmm was it![[profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
missbuster I think it was?? thank you!!! – anyway. It includes a pattern for the T-Shirt Corset, and for a wonder it was still present in the library book, but of course an XL is for a 44″ bust and that’s quiiiiite a bit shy of my measurement, so I traced it onto some newsprint and then went around and added like uhhh hhh IDK a bunch around the edges, and cut it out and just gave it a shot on an old bleach-stained black shirt and a newish giant dark gray shirt Dude picked up at a tech conference with the logo of some long-ago startup on it. (Because, of course, Ms. Chanin’s instructions have you lay it all out on a single shirt, but she also is assuming you are less than 44″ in circumference at your largest point, and so the layout directions were also useless.) (I do like the book, I like it so much I bought it– for my BFF, who has a bust measurement of maybe 40″, so she’ll be able to use it as written.)
I appear to have missed the straight of grain on at least one of the pieces, which was bound to happen since I couldn’t use her layout and also I’m working on a too-small table, but apart from that, it went together pretty well. I also did not hand-sew the entire thing or in fact a single stitch on it, because while I admire her slow fashion aesthetic, I own a fucking sewing machine, and would like to know sooner than several weeks from now whether the pattern needs serious adjustment or not.
So I basted it all together with my sewing machine, coincidentally with hot pink machine embroidery thread because that’s what I had in there, and tried it on and then adjusted a couple of the seams, and then all of the lower seams had utterly failed to line up at all, so I cut it off level with the shortest one, and then I dug out an old broomstick skirt my BFF gave me that I’d kept with the intention of using it in a different refashion that didn’t work out, and instead of continuing to save it for that purpose, I just cut it off before I could reconsider, and then I took everything upstairs to the serger, and instantly broke a thread and had to rethread the thing so I decided, fuck it, I’m putting the hot pink embroidery thread in the upper looper spot (that’s the one that shows), and doing all the stitching on the exterior the way the pattern calls for (it’s to show off your handsewing, and like, i get it, but I’m not doing that), and so I just sat there and rethreaded the serger like four times but sure enough, in the end, I have a new dress. So that’s not too shabby.
I also cut a circle skirt out of a discarded twin fitted sheet– which neatly wound up not using the badly-worn parts of the sheet– and found the sleeves of an earlier cut-apart t-shirt to be pockets, and the waistband I cut off the broomstick skirt will do to gather the circle skirt to, and then I can sew that to the top of another promotional t-shirt I took in the shoulders of and hand-embroidered the neckline of and cut into a crop top I won’t wear and had figured on sewing onto a skirt. Then I’ll have another t-shirt dress.
I was so productive because I was procrastinating making another yurt quilt, by the way. But it was nice, and I’ll take it, and also I have no idea how to attach pockets into a circle skirt so I should look that up, I started and that’s when I broke the upper looper thread and abandoned that project, so.
Anyway I’ll try to take pictures of the completed dress soonish, we’ll see how that goes.
I decided again that discretion was the better part of valor, and instead of leaving early this morning to spend three weeks at the farm, I rejiggered the schedule so I’ll be going for one week, then back a week, and then I’ll be spending three weeks at the farm– gives us more time to get the new inventory thing settled at work, gives me time to begin winterizing the yurt and take measurements and then come back and make more quilts. yeah.
Also, I decided to leave Sunday morning instead of this morning, and so I’ve spent today actually being productive in my own house. Four loads of laundry, including washing the chair pads for the kitchen chairs, one of which got red wine spilled absolutely all over it the other day. It was a perfect day for line-drying– intermittently sunny, but a steady and quite heavy breeze out of the west, which sucked/snapped the linen sheets dry in like literally twenty minutes. (I have discovered that linen sheets can only be hung to dry, and only outdoors, and cannot be used at all if it’s not outdoor-clothesline weather, which is fascinating. The dryer irons intractable creases into them; hanging over a door crinkles them. They must be on a line and must snap in the breeze. Only then do they come out soft and usable.)
And I also cut out a version of the – oh, I don’t think I mentioned, I borrowed the Alabama Stitch Book from the library on the recommendation of mmmm was it
missbuster I think it was?? thank you!!! – anyway. It includes a pattern for the T-Shirt Corset, and for a wonder it was still present in the library book, but of course an XL is for a 44″ bust and that’s quiiiiite a bit shy of my measurement, so I traced it onto some newsprint and then went around and added like uhhh hhh IDK a bunch around the edges, and cut it out and just gave it a shot on an old bleach-stained black shirt and a newish giant dark gray shirt Dude picked up at a tech conference with the logo of some long-ago startup on it. (Because, of course, Ms. Chanin’s instructions have you lay it all out on a single shirt, but she also is assuming you are less than 44″ in circumference at your largest point, and so the layout directions were also useless.) (I do like the book, I like it so much I bought it– for my BFF, who has a bust measurement of maybe 40″, so she’ll be able to use it as written.)I appear to have missed the straight of grain on at least one of the pieces, which was bound to happen since I couldn’t use her layout and also I’m working on a too-small table, but apart from that, it went together pretty well. I also did not hand-sew the entire thing or in fact a single stitch on it, because while I admire her slow fashion aesthetic, I own a fucking sewing machine, and would like to know sooner than several weeks from now whether the pattern needs serious adjustment or not.
So I basted it all together with my sewing machine, coincidentally with hot pink machine embroidery thread because that’s what I had in there, and tried it on and then adjusted a couple of the seams, and then all of the lower seams had utterly failed to line up at all, so I cut it off level with the shortest one, and then I dug out an old broomstick skirt my BFF gave me that I’d kept with the intention of using it in a different refashion that didn’t work out, and instead of continuing to save it for that purpose, I just cut it off before I could reconsider, and then I took everything upstairs to the serger, and instantly broke a thread and had to rethread the thing so I decided, fuck it, I’m putting the hot pink embroidery thread in the upper looper spot (that’s the one that shows), and doing all the stitching on the exterior the way the pattern calls for (it’s to show off your handsewing, and like, i get it, but I’m not doing that), and so I just sat there and rethreaded the serger like four times but sure enough, in the end, I have a new dress. So that’s not too shabby.
I also cut a circle skirt out of a discarded twin fitted sheet– which neatly wound up not using the badly-worn parts of the sheet– and found the sleeves of an earlier cut-apart t-shirt to be pockets, and the waistband I cut off the broomstick skirt will do to gather the circle skirt to, and then I can sew that to the top of another promotional t-shirt I took in the shoulders of and hand-embroidered the neckline of and cut into a crop top I won’t wear and had figured on sewing onto a skirt. Then I’ll have another t-shirt dress.
I was so productive because I was procrastinating making another yurt quilt, by the way. But it was nice, and I’ll take it, and also I have no idea how to attach pockets into a circle skirt so I should look that up, I started and that’s when I broke the upper looper thread and abandoned that project, so.
Anyway I’ll try to take pictures of the completed dress soonish, we’ll see how that goes.
