~Hits~
1. Folk Tapestry dress: I love this dress. It is easily the highlight of my winter rotation, and I really love wearing it. I like the heavier weight, the print, the whole thing.
2. Bandana dress: I wore this rayon dress a LOT this summer. It was cool and comfortable, easy to slip on in the high heat, and I got tons of compliments on it every time I wore it.
3. Linen dresses (1) (2) (3 & 4) (5): more of a category than a specific dress, I developed a serious love affair with linen this year, and made six linen dresses. One of them I'm saving for next summer and haven't worn yet, but the other five I wore very regularly. I did have to take the red linen dress out of my winter rotation because it was leaving a faint pink cast on my favorite cream colored sweater just from wearing them together, and I don't have anything else in this rotation that is warm enough and coordinates with the red. Hopefully I can wear it in the spring or summer.
4. Lawn dresses (1) (2) (3) (4): another category of fabric that I got to like very well this year. I bought several of Robert Kaufman's London Calling Liberty lines of fabric, and got a lot of wear out of almost all of them. The only one that ended up being a bust was the Art Deco lawn dress, that I gave away at the end of the summer.
5. Geo Flannel skirt: I love this skirt. It is funky and warm, it fits me very well, and goes with several sweaters in my drawer. I get compliments every time I wear it, and I feel good in it.
6. Bluebird dress: I wore this dress so much in the first half of the year, that I ended up remaking it earlier this month with the modifications I've added to the pattern over the past year. (The fabric was starting to fray under the arms, and I really prefer a longer length in my dresses)
7. First Light Dress: I wore this dress a ton in the spring, and really liked it at both ends of my rotation. It worked with a heavy sweater, with a light sweater, with no sweater, making it an ideal transitional dress. I'm looking forward to wearing it again in the spring.
*The jury is still out on my Return to Tokyo dress from the spring. I really like the print, but the length still bugs me. I'm going to put it in my spring rotation and see how it feels in the spring. I tend to like shorter lengths with tall boots, so perhaps I'll just reserve it for the first half of the rotation when it is still cold.
~Misses~
1. Ivy League dress: This dress reminded me why I dislike working with Michael Miller's fabrics. They are too stiff, they are printed only on one side, so if you use pins, it tends to put a white runner in the fabric, and unpicking any stitches is a total nightmare. This dress also convinced me to tackle the underarm sleeve draft on my pattern, as it fit poorly and wore badly over time.
2. Asian floral dress: I didn't even wear this dress except to photograph its awfulness, it was that bad. It was an experiment in making the Afternoon blouse neckline with my Simplicity 1080 and was generally a disaster. I do think a lot of it had to do with fitting issues, but I just wasn't in a place to tackle them at that point. I also chose a fabric that was particularly unflattering to my skin, which didn't help.
3. Chambray skirt: I wanted to like this skirt, and I did wear it quite a bit over the summer, but I spent a lot of the summer fiddling with the fit, because I couldn't get it right. First it was too tight, then it ended up a little bit too loose, and generally didn't fit the way I wanted it to. I think it was probably a poor match of fabric and pattern, as my Anne Adams 9486 is generally a good pattern for me, but in stiffer fabrics.
4. Cherry blossom dress: this was just a poor fabric choice. I really don't care for Art Gallery's mid-weight cotton as a dress fabric, and I didn't like wearing this dress at all. It made me feel like I was wearing paper.
5. Moneta, Coco: this fall I made the long leap into sewing with knits, and I discovered that I really don't enjoy it all that much. There is the instant gratification factor, but I learned that I prefer to buy my knits ready-made. I didn't like a lot of things about the fit of Moneta, and even after fiddling with it a lot, I couldn't get something that felt good on my body. The Coco fit pretty well, but I didn't care for the style for every day wear. I had a hard time sourcing fabric that I liked and that turned out the way I wanted it to, and I didn't really care for the look of zig-zagged hems. I couldn't master my twin needle, and didn't have the lightning bolt stitch on my machine, so I felt limited in the finish that I could accomplish. That said, I ended up liking my Coco dresses for pajamas, and as I do have a terrible time finding nightgowns that I like, I consider this a minor victory. I have some navy blue printed knit fabric that I bought in the fall that I intend to make into a summer pajama dress in the late spring.
6. Pullover sweaters (1) (2): I made two pullover sweaters in the late winter and early spring and both were total fails. I didn't care for the way they felt on my skin, or the style or the fit. I passed them both on to a good friend who looks great in them!
7. Pincushion dress: I actually liked this dress a lot when I first made it, but I quickly fell out of love with novelty prints in the spring sometime, and by summer, the dress was about two sizes too big on me and the too-wide shoulders just annoyed me without a sweater over top. I think some fitting changes I made in the spring may have contributed to the poor fit by the end. I gave it away earlier this fall.
8. Pots and Pans dress: this dress was a spectacular fail on many levels. I was using a vintage novelty print and stretched it with some contrasting broadcloth (mistake #1); I hadn't figured out the optimum length for my Simplicity 1080 at that point, so it came out too short for my liking (mistake #2); I made contrast pocket facing which looked awful (mistake #3); I didn't have a cardigan that looked good with it, and the red shirt was not really that great. I did make it into a blouse later in the spring, and I really did like the blouse, but the vintage fabric proved to be a little too fragile to stand up to regular wearing.
9. White florals dress/blue gingham dress: I liked both of these dresses in theory, and I did wear them all summer, but by the end of the summer, I was just really meh on them. I never did get the fit right on the white florals dress, and the print, which I still love, looked terrible at a distance. The blue gingham dress fit very well, and looked good on me, but it felt too young for me by the end of the summer. I gave both dresses away.
I had quite a long string of misses in the late spring and early summer, but things perked up by fall when I figured out the best way to draft my Simplicity 1080 (aka Dottie Angel frock).
~Highlights~
1. The biggest highlight of my sewing year was the 18th century working woman's outfit that I sewed for a presentation at my kids' school. I learned so much in the process of researching and making the garments, and I really enjoyed wearing it. The cream on the cake was the stays that I made at the eleventh hour. I love them so much. (And yes, I know I promised construction posts about that outfit, but things have been kinda nuts in the last six weeks...maybe I'll get to it in 2017)
2. A non-sewing highlight was being told my my optometrist in June that after 30 years of wearing bifocals, I could now wear drugstore readers! Yippie! I promptly bought three pairs for less than the cost of one of my previous pairs and spread them throughout the house.
3. Another non-sewing highlight has been the changes we've made to the house in the past month or so. We had the interior and the wooden bits on the exterior repainted, we bought (and I helped assemble) a lot of functional furniture for the kids' rooms (dressers, bunk beds, a few bookcases), and changed out the futon and cushion covers in the living room and office, plus a few other little things like that. I'm still waiting to rehang the pictures and icons on the walls, but I should be good to go by early next week. I'll try to take some pictures to share when things are settled in their places.
4. I continued my weight loss journey this year, and stalled out over the summer. I realized that logging everything on My Fitness Pal had become a problem for me, on several different levels, so when we went to the Midwest to visit my parents and some friends, I stopped. I felt free of a burden. I also had my last dilation endoscopy early in the summer and had a much rougher recovery after that, so eating almost anything this summer was super stressful. At the end of August, the doctor decided to try a different medication therapy (one I'd taken years ago with good effect, but isn't clinical standard in their office) and things have improved a lot since then. I'm eating more or less normally (although I still can't manage bread and a few other bolus-producing foods) and I've successfully challenged a few foods that I have been avoiding for a long time (sweet potatoes, buckwheat, eggs). I decided that having a varied diet was more important than the lower GI consequences that I suffer, so I've been eating more fibery things like brussels sprouts and onions and oatmeal. I've had a few rough nights as a result, but I feel better overall, so I think the trade off is worth it.
5. I did some meatier writing this year, mostly in the summer and the fall, as a result of reading Matthew Crawford's excellent World Beyond Your Head and some related books and articles. I also finished an essay on body image that I've been picking away at for ages, and I am happy with the result.
6. I read some great books this year: I started War and Peace as a Lenten podvig, and am now nearing the end (I'm part II of the epilogue, 93% done!). I'm hoping to finish it sometime in the next couple of weeks. I read The Light Between Oceans in the summer and was gutted by it. I'm eager to watch the film version when it hits amazon in January. I am currently reading the excellent Laurus and finding it quite profound. I read a lot of non-fiction this year as well, including several gulag memoirs, social history of the Stalinist period, a few books about East Germany, and several books by Svetlana Alexievich. I read a bunch of light fiction earlier in the fall--I got caught up on my Decker/Lazarus mysteries as well as a few other easy mysteries. I also re-read several books in the Outlander series when I was looking for comfort reading. I'm currently in the middle of book six.
7. I also completed several sweaters, a bunch of knitted accessories and some non-selfish sewing this year. I made most of the girls' summer dresses, sweaters for each of them, a vest for Boo, a wool kombu for my husband to replace one that fell of his bike (!!), and tried to mend things that needed it as I went along. I made more of an effort to recycle clothing and textiles that were past their shelf life (having an H&M on the way to school has proved useful in this regard) and have gotten pretty basic with how many items of clothing each person in this house has. It is a delicate balancing act.
~Goals~
1. I don't have a lot of sewing goals for this year. I'm pretty happy with the range of patterns that I work with right now, and while I bought a few more this past year, I don't have a great desire to sew any of them right now. My sewing storage expanded a lot with all the changes we made to the house in the late fall, so I don't feel an intense need to cull my patterns at the moment. I do try to get rid of patterns that don't work for me, so my pattern pile fits tidily into two small shelf boxes. I've planned my sewing projects through the summer, and went through my fabric stash earlier this week to cull it a bit. My main goal is to pick fabrics that I will want to wear a lot during a rotation or two, and to keep my rotations between 25-27 pieces. I just bought some Monmouth flannel for a winter dress and hope to sew that up in the coming weeks.
2. My knitting goals are limited as well. I'm still working on several pieces for myself, and learning some new techniques along the way. I've accepted that I can't handle complicated all-over stitch patterns right now, but I can manage something that is in a small panel, or is an easily readable 4 row pattern. I'm also getting better at understanding what sort of fit to aim for with different sorts of sweaters, and I'm finding I want a little more ease in my clothing generally speaking. I'm working on a pullover and a cardigan that I think meet my criteria.
3. During the all-consuming stress of the repainting and everything else earlier this month, I briefly dropped close to ten pounds in two and a half weeks' time, putting me at the first of my weight loss goals for the first time. I've since gained back about two and a half pounds, but hope to continue on the path started. I've made more of an effort to give up sweets, and to be more structured about when I do have a treat. I can say with confidence that any success in this area is all God's doing, and not any of my own. I do find myself craving salty things more as I get older--I've developed a particular fondness for tortilla chips and salsa, and anyone who knows me well will know how strange that particular liking is! This fall particularly, I find myself craving wholesome foods. Not necessarily what is marketed as "healthy" or would show up on a Beachbody-approved diet plan, but plain, whole foods. Things like roasted autumn vegetables with olive oil and maldon salt, or grechka (buckwheat) with homemade gravy and mushrooms, a plain or baked apple, or fried eggs over easy with thin sliced black forest ham on the side. Foods that make me feel like I've eaten real food at the end of the meal. I am still relearning how to eat, after 18 months of completely abnormal eating patterns, and have to relearn things like portions and satiety and get better at reading hunger cues. I also have to be careful as I still have things get stuck in my throat (although it tends to go down now with liquid, rather than sticking in my throat for hours or days). It is a process. I'm slightly nervous about the 12 Days of Christmas, which tends to be gloves off with regard to desserts and rich foods, but I'll beg God's mercy to help me get through it.
As with any blog, there is much about my life that I don't write about, and my heart is sometimes heavy with things I cannot share here. I do not know what the future holds, but I do know Who holds the future. And I try to rest in that.
Happy 2017!
