(Celebrate your achievements as well as your plans is something I forget often.)
Warning: Sorry, this is long! I hadn’t intended it to be so and yes I did sew something (at the bottom of post, so you can scroll down).
I really have the sewing bug at the moment. In fact, all of my creative juices are flowing. It’s perhaps not the greatest timing, as Gianni will arrive this afternoon and will be here until the beginning of September. I will likely not be doing any sewing or knitting while he is here. I have a personal rule, which I think is a good one, to take advantage of the time that he is here and really focus on enjoying all of the time we can together. This also means that I will likely being doing little writing, although I will surely sneak a post or two in while he is sleeping at some point!
The best part of writing a blog is you, the reader, who I consider (referring to all of you) to be fellow creative friends, who read and comment. I love the writing part, and would write it anyhow, even if no one read it (I’m always writing, even in my own journal, my morning pages, etc.), but the comments make me think and change my ideas, which is a beautiful thing. I recognize that I am often wrong!
In fact, like most people, I often don’t know what I am saying. Among the most interesting aspects of being human are the fallibility of memory, our ability to tell stories to ourselves, and our wonderful, magical capacity to change our narratives (if we get over our egos).
It’s beautiful to change one’s narrative. Thank you!
Nothing really monumental has happened, but I’ve started realizing how often I write down that I prefer one thing to another, that I can define myself in one way or another, when actually that doesn’t need to be the case. Maybe setting out a definition of oneself, even if only talking about style, is a way to relieve a general sense of unease with the unknown. On the other hand, the ability to embrace the unknown, the unpredictable, is a great quality to have. I admire it in others. In fact, if I tell the truth I believe it is the missing ingredient in making the leap between a good life and an even better one.
That was all a vague way to say that I am going to experiment more, both in activities and in style. There is no reason why I can’t wear anything that catches my fancy. And maybe I need to push my fancy out of my comfort zone a little bit. Yesterday I was walking to work and a real bombshell walked in front of me. She was wearing a very tight suit in plaid, with sky-high heels, and long, coloured hair. Everything about her was voluptuous. I was in navy blue jacquard pants with a small print, a striped shirt I bought in Bologna at Christmas, and a navy blue jacket (and flats). There’s nothing wrong with what I was wearing, but it occurred to me that I can have multiple style personalities. Nothing has to be cornered into a small box. There’s a middle ground, a sideways, an up, down and around. There’s no reason to limit myself.
At the same time, Annie left a great comment the other day that made me think. It was about how she prefers having a perfectly made skirt to a wonky jacket. She also provided a great quotation from Arthur Ashe about starting where we are, using the materials we have, etc. I will go back and quote it exactly. There is so much to like there. One, I completely agree that what I love in a garment is a good finish, a good fit. Perfection is too extreme, but I like the feeling of having finished something to the best of my abilities, to have given it the best chance of having a life of being loved and used.
It’s also perfectly clever to focus on building from where you are. I know there is a gap between the fabulous garments I envision and my actual sewing skills, but it’s a good reminder that I can already make some nice things reasonably well and that by building on those skills I will improve. I have at various times tried to focus on making simple garments and making them with care, although I think I’m at an intermediate stage in which I can up the skill level a bit, without going crazy, and still work on getting a garment worth loving out the other end. I like the whole idea of not always trying to leap so far ahead.
Excuse the wrinkles, as these linen skirts were in my Florence suitcase, recently unpacked, which got jumbled around. These are simple A-line linen skirts (the one on the right is a pleated Burda vintage one, underlined in silk organza. The two on the left are both simple Burda patterns, but both are lined and nicely finished. The brown one uses a really nice Armani linen I think it was, with a nice, smooth texture and a pretty weave. The blue one is quite nice, too, although when I wear it I think I look a bit like a flight attendant. In fact, I once wore it with a shirt and a scarf around my neck and a colleague told me exactly that!
I’ve also made a series of pencil skirts, which are OK.
It’s a bit easier for me to progress confidently in knitting given that I already have more skill in that area. The beaver sweater is done:
Here’s a goofier one (kind of a weird angle, and yes, those are my pjs):
I have an almost-preference for the insides of sweaters. Because the motifs were large, they were not ideal for stranded knitting. I didn’t want to do intarsia and then switch to stranded for the top part, as I wanted equal thickness in the yoke, so I went with that technique. It has a bit of characteristic bubbling from carrying the yarn behind the beaver, but I’m OK with that. It’s not extreme. It might have been interesting to use intarsia for the beavers swath and then stranded for the top, to get a smoother look, but we’ll never know!
The photo below is to show you a mistake I made. The second-to-left beaver has a hunchback! I’m missing stitches down the back of his back. I realized it after I had finished that swath and I didn’t feel like ripping it out. Normally I would rip out, but in this case with the caffe-coloured yarn held double and the green twisted, I just didn’t feel like it. Fortunately, it’s on the back of the sweater. If I want to, I can fill in those stitches with duplicate stitch, which you do on top of the garment. I’m not sure if I’m going to bother, however, as I kind of like having a quirk built into the garment. If I ever lose my beaver sweater it will be a distinguishing mark so I can identify mine from the hordes of other beaver sweaters!
The front. Anyhow, enough with the beavers. Moving on!
Seeing work in context is helpful. These are recent sweaters. I think it’s very interesting to collect your work together. It’s perhaps why I like SWAP. Sometimes you can see themes and thought processes working themselves out (in fact, undoubtedly you can see this).
Adding in the Art Deco sweater, cabled pullover and “League” sweater with crochet flowers:
Oops – I forgot the fish vest. That’s a fairly important missing item. Adding it in:
In any case, it’s obvious that what I love at the moment is nature themes, natural wool yarn, tweedy, muted colours. These were all made with Brooklyn Tweed – either Shelter or Loft. These yarns suit my taste and lifestyle, especially for off-duty garments. This autumn I will use the same yarn to make my attempts at more decorative “painted” sweaters of the natural world again. I’m really excited to see how this will evolve.
On the other hand, I haven’t always being moving in that direction. These are a few of the really old sweaters in my collection:
Overexposed. Some are fuzzy, some are in cotton. The pink top uses vintage buttons that I took from some early 20th century gloves. The brown cardigan I knitted with a rugged yarn I bought in Australia when I lived there in the late 1990s. These tops are not really where I am at the moment, style-wise, but they’re also a part of my experience.
OK, this is REALLY getting long. I apologize for that. I would like to note that I DID make the Burda top I mentioned in the last post:
The back opening needs a little bit of finishing and I need to add a button with a thread loop. Amusingly, I made it using the May 2017 Burda that I bought in an Italian supermarket, i.e. I made it using instructions in Italian. Everything has French seams and the neck and armholes are finished with bias strips turned to the inside. I did something really dumb while sewing and inadvertently sewed the centre back French seam while the top was twisted- ending up with a Moebius garment! Annoying to do something so silly and then have to unpick!
Before I go on, I will say that I love this top. I think it’s very cute and it’s very airy. It fits quite neatly around the waist so does not feel hospital gown-ish at all! It looks great with pencil pants and with shorts, as I had hoped. I used a remnant of men’s shirting cotton that I had in stash, possibly for use as boxers (sorry G!). I was about to make it using pink stripes, so I think that will be another version. I hope we get some warm weather to make it a wearable item this month. I think it’s a great pattern – highly recommended.
OK, the Italian. It was funny to make a garment in Italian. My conversational Italian is pretty good by now, and I can get by in Italy in pretty much any circumstance now. One thing that is very different between my French and my Italian is that my French is “book” French, and my Italian is colloquial. When I take online tests my French far exceeds my Italian, because I’ve had to write it and have taken multiple bilingualism tests for various employment purposes throughout my adult life. Orally, however, I am much more comfortable in Italian. I have discovered that for me language needs to be lived and it needs to be in a cultural context. I feel awkward speaking French because I have largely done it in a work context (my francophone friends I blame, as they speak English much better than I speak French, and have a greater incentive to practise, so the conversation always switches). Italian flows for me, because I’ve learned in a living, breathing relationship. What this means is that I absorb French and can understand it and use it, but I can’t play with it as well. What this means in Italian is that I know way too much about how to talk about mishaps with one’s bowels, indigestion, diarrhea, etc. (Gianni’s sister loves to talk about bowel mishaps for some reasons, and Gianni is also rather obsessed). I don’t know if this is necessarily an Italian thing, but it’s certainly not something we spend a lot of time talking about in my family (laced up Anglo Saxons?). I also don’t spend a lot of time talking about diarrhea at work, so the poor French will not be treated to my conversation about bowel misadventures!
Anyhow, this is getting really long, so I will get to the point. I was making the top and realizing that I could easily figure out what they were saying. I suspect this is simply because I have been sewing with Burda magazines for a long time, so I understand their “pattern speak.” The exact terminology in Italian, however, I did not know before I sewed this pattern. “Bias strip” or “understitch” are not terms that come up in daily conversation at the lunch table. It was fascinating and also a little bit thrilling to pass this milestone. I know much more adventurous people who knit in Japanese despite not knowing the language at all, but I will celebrate this small achievement from where I am now.
OK, that was WAY too long. Signing out. I’ll have Gianni take a photo of me in the top sometime.
XX
Burda 03/2011 116.
My Vintage Inspiration 