analog me

Patched together

We got our eldest boy off to college last month, so I guess it's a good thing that I have been working a lot. Otherwise, I am afraid I might have too much time to think about what it means to send my son off, and out of the house. 

He might kill me, but here he is on his last day of high school last spring.

See that messy porch?

Before heading to college, my son painted that trim for us and asked me to mend a bunch of his favorite pants. At first I thought that this was an odd request. Some of these pants were worn, tattered and paint stained, so I hesitated a bit before fixing them. Then I realiszed that he wanted to have some old favorites to wear while heading off into the unfamiliar.

Sometimes I feel the same way.

 

These patches come from that stash of uphostery fabric I scored last spring. I have not had the mental presence to start a new project, but I do find myself having an urge to sew, and patching has been the perfect activity. I imagine that these will build up into a mosaic of mending someday, in a sort of organic way.

They were a big hit with the repair guy at the bike shop. He kept asking me where I got the fabric and how I sewed them on. He seemed to think I was pretty amazingly hot to have managed to get that fabric to cover my knees. If women really dressed to attract men's attention, it wouldn't be what the fashoin magazines advise.

Speaking of fashion, I am going to Paris in a week ans have an invitation to a fashion show. 

Should I be excited. . . or terrified? And what sort of look will I patch together? I am welcoming all advice.

Finally, If you have read this blog for a long time, you might remember that our porch has been in a slow process of rehabilitaion. Getting it to a useable state has taken a fair bit of effort and the final steps involved finding a rather ugly love chair, wrapping fabric over the cushions, and then making some pillows to match.

I know I took a bunch of artful photos, but I think they ended up on another computer so I'll keep it real. Here is the new, improved look with number two son doing what he does best: eating and reading.

 

How Not to Get Anything Done: Part 2 In an Ongoing Series

Step One: Promise your darling that you will mend his favorite bicycle commuting shorts.

Step Two: Decide to procrastinate the mending and other jobs by going along on a shoe shopping trip with your 12 year old son and your sweetie.

Step Three: Get bored trying to understand the seemingly minute, but hugely significant differences between apparently identical skateboard shoes. Leave the guys to analyze footwear.

Step Four: Stop in a little clothing store nearby and browse. Innocently admire decorators' samples of fabrics being sorted by shop owner.

Step Five: Accept shop owner's offer to give you all her rejects, thus saving her the hassle of dispensing with them. (Yes, these are all too small for clothing.)

Step Six: Take bags home and sort into piles of fabric to keep and fabric to give to East African sewing group. Touch stuff like silk canvas, embroidered silk,

handprinted Chintz,

silk and linen brocade.

Step 7: Repeat Step Six as desired at least four more times. Exclaim to your husband, "Look at this stuff. I can't even get in a store that would let me touch this!" or "This cotton brocade is 250.00 a yard !" Gloat over the hoard.

Step 8: Pack up bags. Then unpack favorite pieces to admire. Repeat as needed. 

Step 9: Create fantasy projects involving small pieces of gorgeous fabrics. 

Step 10: Don't get any sewing done at all. 

Step 11: Finally check that mending job off your to-do list, possibly staring a new trend in bike wear.

 

Thrifty Tip: How to fix a frayed collar

It's that time of year again: piles of winter wear have been dragged out of the attic and dumped on the bedroom floor, garden produce in danger of freezing or rotting (or both) clogs my fridge, the storm windows need to be washed, closed and weather stripped. Tedious to-do lists combined with shorter, colder days invariably creates paralysis. 

Yes, I have Seasonal Ineffective Disorder again.

Should I install 3M window insulation kits or fix some of the clothes I have dragged out of the attic? Which will keep me warmer? Sewing wins, again!

Maybe you have shirts with frayed collars that look like this?

Maybe they are nice wool shirts in great colors, but the nasty white interfacing is showing through the fray? If you want to wear them again, do like your (great?) grandma did and "turn" that collar!

1) First, rip out the old stitching on the top of the collar stand that holds in the collar.

2) Remove the old threads and collar.

 

3) Flip the collar over so the unworn side faces up.

4) Sandwich it inside the collar stand so that the fraying is hidden. Pin. Make sure that the bottomost level extends a tiny bit more toward the collar than the top.

5) Slowly topstitch along the old stitching line. Use your fingers to feel that the layers are not shifting as you remove pins and sew. 

6) Trim threads. Lay out your handiwork and admire.

7) Watch your son grab the shirt, throw it on and wear it out the door.

8) "Forget" that it is not permissible to photograph ones male offspring if they are over the age of 10. Remember, upon pain of shunning, that a mom can never publicly post photos of male children on her blog.

9) Ease the pain, not by insulating windows, but by cutting out a new Ginger skirt.

Battered by Boxer Briefs

Or why I didn't participate in Peter's Boxer Sew-A-Long.

If you're a longtime reader here, you know that I live in close quarters with my arch nemesis: The Laundry. It's a beast that I keep thinking I have vanquished. But again and again it rises up out it's baskets and outsmarts me in new and exciting ways.

My primary problems have been sheer volume and socks. But now, a new force has emerged: men's underwear.

And sadly, I am partly to blame for my problem.

The guys in my house come in three sizes: medium man, small man, and large boy. Therefore I used to buy (and sort) the underwear in three sizes: men's medium, men's small, and boy's large. The difficulties started when I bought my husband some higher-than-usual-quality boxer briefs in size men's medium and then threw out most of his old undies.  Immediately, his nice, new underwear was pilfered and no one had "enough underwear."

It was, the lads claimed, simply a matter of fit, their old ones were "too small" and they had no choice but to wear their dad's new ones. Overnight, it appeared that all the guys had become men's medium underpants wearers. 

You know where this is going right? My husband and I stupidly thought that to keep the peace we had to buy a bunch of men's medium underwear and we happily bought several packages of average quality. I even thought that this new sizing strategy would simplify things. HA! Now all my husband's higher-quality underwear ended up in one son's drawer and there was rampant underwear envy among those left with inferior undies.

Of course, the issue all along had been that some underwear is desirable and some is not and it is impossible to know from looking at a package in a store (especially while under florescent lighting) what anyone will want to wear once the pants have been washed and dried. Sometimes the elastic is wrong, and sometimes the legs are too tight and sometimes the fabric is too stretchy, too saggy, too stiff or too loose.

We then tried to even things up quality-wise (quantity being taken care of) and bought some more higher-than-average underwear. But, we couldn't always remember the exact brand and style (when did the choices for guys become so dizzying?) so that even in the same size they were often deemed "too small." 

Taking the boys at their word, my husband then bought some large underwear. Of course, it is too big for anyone. Weirder yet, the favored undies seem to suffer from attrition and disappear at a faster rate, so that the ratio of out-of-favor underwear is always on the rise and the boys "never have enough underwear."

Now we have at least 35 pairs (!) of navy blue underwear in size men's medium, as well as some of the older underwear in smaller sizes that "didn't fit" (but seems to be getting dirty so must be being worn) and some of the large pairs that just seem to follow the other pairs through the laundry cycles for kicks. Everything is fine until it is time to equally divide and fairly allocate these 40-odd pairs among thee guys of different sizes and with different underwear criteria.

Yes, at this very point I am crushed in defeat by the underwear monster. Which, by the way, seems to be a close relative of the black sock demon. Help!

 P.S. How many pairs is "enough" ?

 Keywords: laundry, underwear, brothers, war, insanity

Summer baby sewing

Last week I went back for more fun and itching to the lake. My sister and I drove up early with my youngest and we set up a dual sewing station on the screened porch. My son got a new woodburner at a local variety store so he was ready to craft too. There was a bit of negotiation for outlets what with the two sewing machines, one iron and one woodburner, but we worked it out. 

I had a lot of plans to make summer tops for myself, knit for myself, cook great meals and all that. But I have a new niece, so I decided to start by making some baby stuff. I had this Kwik Sew pattern from the early 90s and some bits of fabric. 

I modified things a bit to make the legs short, omit the crotch zipper, and cope with fabric shortage of this lovely yellow print.

After the fact, I narrowed the top a bit as my niece is very slender. The Kwik Sew patterns look so dated--even the new ones, but I do like the way they always go together. As usual, my biggest problem were the fasteners. What the heck is the the trick with snaps, anyway?? Mine always get stuck in the thing you hammer, or bent, and they are too strong for baby clothes. 

I also had some gorgeous thick flannel and some Anna Maria Horner Voile. I bought this fabric a while back because I love the colors, but because of the directionality and size of the print, I could never figure out how to use it. Times like that, you have to love the square.

Actually, two big squares, sewed, turned and tied. I sat on the dock and knoted the layers together

while someone yelled, "Mom, MOM, Look, LOOK."

While I said, " I am. I am looking." And I really was. Most of the time, anyway.

So now the newest family member has a gift. And I got something even better than a new blouse: a plank of wood burned with 8" tall letters that spell "SIG."