analog me

A Second Skin

Louise of a view into my world recently wrote a perfect post about love, loss and handmade armor. Go read it. 

My thoughts have been taken over with her idea that her handmade clothes can be "a line of defense at a vulnerable time." 

I know this is true for myself. I made some socks long ago that have been worn, darned and partially reknitted. Yet there is something about the color and the fit that always make be feel protected from the ground up when I wear them.

When my bother was in the hospital, I dressed one morning knowing I had a hard day ahead. Looking through my clothes, I felt I had to wear the skirt I had recently designed and made, even though it wasan impractical choice. Sometimes during those weeks, I felt my personal boundaries with the world were dissolving into a terrible, alien reality and I hoped that this piece of fabric I had cut and reassembled would be a second skin to hold me together. I sensed that a piece of clothing I had envisioned and then formed with my own hands would remind me who I was when I had to hold on tight to that solid person deep inside. 

It happened that I walked out of the hospital very late that night into an altered world: I had one brother less and was surrounded by heartbreak. And yet, I also had a sense of wonder that I could still walk, push an elevator button, turn a key in a lock. I was intact and that seemed unbelievable. 

Last fall when I unpacked my winter clothes a lot of them seemed to have been stained by sadness so I got rid of them. More recently, I threw away all the unfinshed sewing and knitting projects I had been working on at the time of his accident.  And yet, strangely, that skirt I wore as I watched him die still stays in my closet. I got me through one of the hardest days of my life in it and I still feel strong wearing it. I even feel happy. If I had to go on a date (horrors), I might wear it as a swishy piece of armor.

I guess this is why I like sewing blogs so much. The wardrobes I see are so fiercely personal. We all struggle intensely to make clothes to accommodate our bodies. But much of our "fit issues" revolve around creating a second skin that fits our personality, our emotions, where we are right here and now and where we want to be. Sometimes our shape changes and we need something that fits better, sometimes we change and the old clothes just don't "feel right" anymore.

Most often, though, I think we want to dress for that unchanged person we have always been, the person who wants to escape from the ready-to-wear fashions from stores.

We go into some days knowing we need those clothes that can help us through our little battles and celebrations. And often, it is the handmade items that we dream up, make, reach for, and wear that create our daily armor.

Fashion magazines always have the same articles: what to wear to drinks after work, what to wear to your job interview, what to wear on the red carpet. But really, does that ever happen? (And how hard is it to put on jeans and go to the local bar or to wear my only suit to an interview?) Then these same magazines show pictures of clothes that I would be terrified to wear, with shoes I could only hope to hobble around in. 

What I really want to know is: what do you wear to feel like yourself?

And no fashion magazine touches that. 

FBA (full butt alteration) for jeans

In my last post I promised to give some hints to prevent gaping at the back waist of the Jalie 2908 jeans. But the same principles could  even be used for skirts or other pants with a back yoke. Then I decided I needed to test out my alterations, thus the wait.

I'm giving a lot of information so you understand why you should add here and subtract there. You will have more of the facts you need to boss your pattern around, covering your ass without baring your back waist!

First off, some geometry

The reason a lot of of have this problem is that the derriere needs a lot more fabric to encircle it than the waist does, especially at center back. If not enough fabric is removed at waist back, then then the fabric goes up in a cylinder shape (instead of a cone) and sticks out from our body.

The bigger the difference between the oval that represents your waist measurement, and that of your high hip, the more challenging it becomes to provide enough fabric to cover your butt and remove it to hug your waist. Here is a really odd (but enlightening) perspective of the body that I copied from the Fashion Incubator blog that illustrates the back side of the body as several horizontal slices.

The waist is one of the smaller half ovals, and the high hip is the solid line. You can really see how much the body slopes in here.

Remember too, that it takes more length to travel out and around the behind and back in—especially when you are sitting down.

 Dart Manipulation for jeans

In most pants the extra fabric in the back waist is removed with two vertical darts. 

Here is a little model to illustrate where the darts typically are, with the future jeans yoke drawn over them. The larger the darts are at the top the more fabric is removed from the waist and released over the fullest part of your rear.

 

 

 

 

To make the jeans yoke, that top section is cut off making two back pieces: the pants back and the yoke.  When the yoke darts are closed, the fabric that would have been in darts is moved to a negative space at the side between the bottom of the yoke and the top of the pants back. (Shown between the yellow lines.) 

So the larger the original darts, the more fabric will be subtracted between the yellow lines, and the more the red line will curve up and in to accommodate a smaller waist circumference.

By closing of the remainder of the darts in the pants back, the center back is raised up and a wedge of fabric added the the center back right where we need a little extra length to travel out over the rump and back in at the lower back. Then the the center back seam is redrawn, scooping out the center back crotch seam a bit to make room for the gluteus maximus. This puts that center back seam more on the bias which gives the center back a bit more wiggle room thus avoiding the dreaded mono-butt look. At the same time it will subtract the amount of fabric covering the rear, so an equal amount should be added to the side. 

Altering for your rounded rump

Usually we choose a pattern based on hip size. If we have a curvier rear, then the waist is typically too big.

To alter your yoke for a smaller waist, make a vertical cut (about a third of the way from the center back) from top to bottom leaving a hinge at the bottom. In the photo above it looks like a thin black line between the two closed darts. Overlap and tape. Below I traced what my Jalie 2908 yoke looked like before (line with Xs) and after I altered it with the pants back drawn underneath it. You can see how much larger that side dart became, and how much more the top line curves up. I also took a tiny wedge out out of the center top.

Now its helpful to add a tiny dart to the top of the jeans back. The easiest way to do this is to just cut a rectangle from the center top back leaving a hinge right above the fullest part of your tush, as seen below. 

Rotate the rectangle so that it overlaps at the top and opens a wedge at center back.

Now fill in the wedge and smooth out that center back curve as shown in the black line. You could even take more out at the top center than I have shown here.

To figure out how much to take out, I checked my butt curve with the flexible ruler (below) and came up with this. I didn't remove quite that much, but I did take out about 1/4". I had already added a bit more than this to the side edge for my wide hips, so there was enough fabric in width to keep me covered. I suggest cutting the front and back sides a size or two larger than you need at first and taking them in as needed while figuring out all the alterations to the behind.

After all these alterations, my jeans fit my butt much better, but I needed to add some shaping to the center back of the waistband to make it fit the pants and my body. (Photo coming soon!)

It's very tempting to keep tweaking the pattern endlessly, but jeans already fit so much better than most jeans that I am very happy. 

Hope this didn't bore you to death.

Does this make any sense at all? Any other fitting ideas?

Don't Hate Alley—make your jeans fit your hips

Well, I seem not to have evoked too much wrath or envy in my new fancy pants. There were a few fit questions. How about we start with hips?

If you look closely, my jeans do make what I have learned are called "whiskers." Yes, that's what those lovely little wrinkles that point at the crotch of us full-hipped women are called. And my extensive archival research (i.e. I saw this book in with hubby's stuff) shows that while this term is recent, the phenomenon reaches back to the early history of dames wearing jeans.

Yes, even female juvenile delinquents in the 1950's were prone to "whiskers." (BTW, isn't this outfit rather, err, sweet, for a delinquent?) 

Comprehensive research (i.e. I read somewhere that horizontal wrinkles point to areas without enough width) determined the cause: my pants are a bit too tight at that particular latitude.

Okay, I knew I could make the pants bigger there, but I didn't quite know how to add some width in exactly the right contour. Also, I was feeling lazy and, to be honest, those books on making pants fit make me feel tired. I thought, what would a person with a tool belt do to figure out how to match a complex curve?  Take a ton of measurements and fiddle around with a pattern? Oh no, s/he would grab a contour duplication gauge and just copy it. Of course that might not work so well on my larger, squishier curves. Then I had a great idea, maybe a flexible ruler would do the trick.

I pressed my flexible ruler on my hips, laid it on the pattern, saw the problem, and took a crappy photo. No measuring, slashing spreading or french curves needed; it was almost disappointingly easy.

And, the flexible ruler is the gift that keeps giving because it provided the solution too. I just added some tracing paper there and redrew the curve. Guess what? Anyone can do this in the privacy of their own home! 

It seems too easy so I when I make these up, I am going to baste that seam and then adjust the fit. Because we are in the hypothesis testing phase here, and need extensive experimentation. 

Reader's what do you think, will you help me test my technique?

P.S. Stayed tuned for the next installment: adjust for a gaping back waist.

My New Jeans (Jalie 2908) and, oh yes, I sinned

It's time for a confession. 

For a while now I have been consumed by jeans envy. I read sewing blogs where talented women of the cloth show off their new Jalie jeans and am consumed by covetness. I have envied their perfectly fitting jeans, envied their sewing skills, envied their elongated legs and envied their top-stitching. Did those bloggers feel guilty for sowing discontent in the heart of a sewing sister? No, They were so happy in their new pants, that they didn't even care about the wrath they left in their butt-enhanced wake. 

Last spring while I was researching cowls, I tried on a pair of 175.00 jeans. During the 5 minutes that I vainly admired my long, expensive looking legs in the dressing room mirror I committed a year's worth of pride. Then I took them off, wrestled with my jeans greed, and left them behind.

If I wasn't so slothful, I would have made a pair right then. Yes, I had already greedily bought the pattern, and some fabric too, if you must know. (Are you starting to wonder how I am going to weave lust and gluttony in here? Me too.)

Anyway, you guessed! I finally made those jeans. I think that finishing that quilt binding opened me up to starting a difficult new, project. Readers, I didn't tell you all I was trying to make jeans because I was convinced that I would be repaid for my former sins by a karmic fail of epic proportions, and I (pridefully) did not want to have to post a picture of my denim in the trash. 

So I worked away on the seams, fly, and endless top-stitching while repeatably holding the little bits of denim up to my rump and repeating, "this is never going to fit." I stayed up late to see how the mystery would be solved. Would the fabric cover my hind end? Guess what? It did! Quite nicely too, if I may pridefully assert.

 

(Don't you just love how normally shy women will publically post photos of their butt in sewing blogs?)

My husband (you know, the cowboy) admired them, I even think I saw a glimmer of lust in his eyes. Or maybe that was just my imagination, because what he said was: "There's not room for you to gain one pound in those." 

Lucky for me, now gluttony is now out of the question.

Bound

A long, long time ago, I promised my husband I would make him a quilt. I imagined piecing together a stunning design using some interesting fabrics of our joint choosing. 

Of course, that's not what happened.

He decided he wanted a whole cloth quilt made from retro cowboy fabric. This is the leitmotif of our bedroom decor. I buy a handmade lampshade, he finds a garage sale shade fashioned from scenes of the wild west. I hang fabric in embroidery hoops on the wall, he imports a guitar to the corner. I find a vintage cotton woven bedspread, he counters with a request for a cowboy quilt. Our bedroom, with its "matrimonial eclectic" design could look strange to outsiders (if they were even allowed to peek in) but we are happy and rarely even notice how odd things are. (There is a lot of debate these days about what constitutes marriage, but I think this sort of sums it up.)

 

 

Back to the quilt. The fun part is choosing fabrics, designing the pattern and piecing. Quilting and binding it all together are the sewing equivalents of weeding the lawn. And after some quick calculations and the sewing of a center seam, that's all I was left with: drudgery. I put off the hours of pinning the layers together for about a year. Then, it was a couple of weeks before I quilted the parallel lines. Next, I procrastinated putting on the binding for a few more months. 

 

 

One reason I put it off so long is that my hands are not strong enough to hand sew a full quilt binding on. It's pretty hard to sew the binding on by machine so that both sides look good, but I developed a technique that works pretty well. Any quilt binding avoiders out there interested?

 

So, now we have a quilt to put on the bed. It's not that beautiful and it doesn't really match anything, but I have upheld my promise, my husband loves it, and it's great to sleep under. Plus that machine-sewn binding is never going to fall apart.