Yarn Along: June

~knitting~

The Lightweight Pullover is nearly finished!  I think the collar took the most amount of time, honestly.  The rest has gone so much faster.  I'm hoping it will look nice on me when it is finished. 

I'm also working on a shawl from some hand-dyed Chickadee.  The color isn't coming through very well on the photos--it's more of a green-blue color with some mint undertones.  

I really like the stitch pattern on this shawl--enough to be interesting, but not so consuming that I can't do something else at the same time.  The perfect mix.  I think it will be a really nice layering piece for fall and winter, and it is a good size for traveling with at this point.

~reading~

I finished David Brooks' The Second Mountain and I highly recommend it.  It was the perfect thing to read at this point in my life, and now I'm down the rabbit hole of chasing his research. 

To that end, I'm nearly finished with Judith Wallerstein and Sandra Blakeslee's The Good Marriage, which is even better than Brooks' book, if that is possible.  I have Tim and Kathy Keller's marriage book on my stack next.  My next book is going to feature a complicated mid-life relationship in a working class context, and I'm starting to think through all this stuff.  The male protagonist has started to talk to me a little in my head, so I think things might start to take shape this summer.

The de Botton book is another book from the Brooks' rabbit hole, and I hope to start it after I finish Keller's book. 

I started Bowling Alone and made some progress on it one weekend, but set it aside for a bit.  So much of what he writes about has been used and cited in other things I've read it feels like old hat.  I'm skimming the data and just reading his conclusions.

This is my reading stack for a novel I plan to write at some point:

It will be set in Alfred's England, and I'm eager to delve into the period!

~watching~

The Spanish Princess on Starz.  I've been watching this series of Philippa Gregory novel adaptations since The White Queen premiered, and it has been fascinating to see the Wars of the Roses brought to life.  I think this might be the best series yet. 

I also finally saw those foreign films that were in my queue, and highly recommend them.  Never Look Away is by the director of The Lives of Others (watch that one first if you haven't seen it.  It isn't the same story, but the themes are similar).  Never Look Away is about what happens when a culture doesn't reckon with the past.  It is set in the late Nazi period, and then picks up the story in the mid-1950s in the GDR.  It is a fascinating, complicated story without easy answers.  I loved it.

The other film I saw was Cold War, by a Polish director.  It won a bunch of film festival awards earlier this year, all well-deserved.  It shares some themes with an older German film called The Promise (also excellent), and at times I felt this film was a bit too similar, but mostly, I enjoyed it.  If nothing else, it is a seriously gorgeous film from a cinematic standpoint, shot in black and white.

I also watched Patrick Melrose, largely because Benedict Cumberbatch won a BAFTA for his performance and I was curious about it.  The BAFTA is well-deserved.  It is not an easy watch--Patrick Melrose is not an especially likeable character, but Cumberbatch delivers a powerful performance of a man in a slow-motion emotional train wreck.  The final episode is devastatingly beautiful.  I had to watch it slowly, because it was such difficult material, but I'm glad I did see it.

I'm eager to see Chernobyl, in part because the reviews are rave, but in part because I was so affected by Svetlana Alexeivich's book about the disaster, Voices from Chernobyl.  I could not put that book down, it just got into me and grabbed me by the throat.  I'm waiting until the Starz series is done so I can temporarily cancel my Starz subscription to get HBO for a month to watch Chernobyl.

Also finished season three of Berlin Station and I'm gutted by the way this season went.  I won't spoil it for anyone who is watching the series, but man.  This season was tough stuff.  I probably won't watch a fourth season if there is one (and it seems unlikely, given how this season ended).

I don't have a lot of stuff in my queue at the moment--a few indie films and some recent award winners, but that's it.  I'm not that excited about anything coming out soon. 

~sewing~

Not much, obviously.  Just those two skirts I blogged in the last two weeks.  I have two yards of Essex linen that I don't know what to do with, since I bought it to make an Everyday skirt, and I can't see myself wearing one right now.  I did just get my paper copy of the Sorrel dress (from the Kickstarter campaign last fall), so I might use it for that (but so many buttons!  eek!), but I'm also considering Rose pants from Made by Rae.  Or I might just save it until my body settles into a size.  But my closet is so lean right now, I kind of want to do something with it.   

I decided to go ahead and try the Rose pants.  I'm not much of a pants person, but I like Rae's stuff, and the Rose pants seem to look nice on a pretty wide range of figures.  I'm going to try the cropped version and see how we go.  I don't really have quite enough fabric but hopefully I can make it work somehow.

And random because I can, I found some old photos of my grandma recently and wanted to share them.  Wasn't she gorgeous??

Linking with Ginny for Yarn Along!

Mellow Yellow Skirt

They call me Mellow Yellow (that's right Sprite).  

Um, no.  I don't think anyone has ever used mellow in the same sentence as me.  Ha!  

But!  I did make a yellow skirt, so there you go.  This is my trusty Anne Adams 9481 with major grading down and changes over time.  It's basically just a straight skirt with yoked pockets and three sets of darts.

I used Kaufman's Ventana Twill, which I've never used before.  I'm not sure what I think of it.  It handled nicely while sewing, and it pressed beautifully, but it wrinkles a lot during the day.  I took these after an hour-long car ride, and it wasn't too bad, but by the time I got home this afternoon, I was looking rather rumpled.

I did get a lot of compliments on the color, though.  My main complaint is that the fabric is a bit thinner than expected, so the pocket lining shows, as does anything I tuck in.  I did wear a slip, but there's only so much you can do.  I don't think lining it would have helped, as the lining just functions like a slip.  I would have had to interline it to fix the pocket-lining-showing issue.  (<<--Technical term).

I used a 3" waistband folded over twice for a 1/2" finished waistband, which is just right for comfort and ease.  I did do a button + hand worked button hole on this skirt instead of a slide closure.  I always forget that it takes a button hole or two to get the rhythm of them, so when you are only doing one, it doesn't always look that great.  Oh well.  It is functional.  I put a bunch of fray check on it because the stitching wasn't catching as many of the raw edges as I wanted.

It's an okay skirt and the fit is slightly better than my olive one, so there's that.  It will do for now.

A bit of olive

Despite the fact that this season is shaping up to be a mostly store-bought dresses season (thrifted and new), I really wanted another skirt to wear.  My denim skirt is the only skirt I care to wear right now, and I wanted another color in a similar silhouette for summer.

Almost all my summer tops go well with olive, and it will carry into my fall palette well, so I decided to start with an olive twill.  This is the Kobe Twill from Robert Kaufman, and I have never used it before, so I was a little nervous.  My last Kaufman twills (in Hampton) did not hold up the way I would have liked, and I wanted something with just a whisper of spandex.

This twill is okay.  It is a great weight for summer, and it washed and dried nicely.  It handled well while sewing, and I cannot really complain about the look of the finished skirt.  Like all cotton twills, it wrinkles during wearing, but no worse than my denim skirt, so it is fine.  (These photos were taken several hours after I got dressed; I had run errands and done some other things by then).

Unfortunately, I didn't have a zip that matched well, so I went with something lighter in the same color family.  I may either swap it out for a dark gray one, or just try to color the zip, because it shows a lot more than I thought it would.  I already swapped it out for a dark grey one; a picture is worth a thousand criticisms.

I used a scrap of my Liberty #2 dress to line the pockets (I used most the dress to cut down to a summer dress for Birdie) and I like the little pop of floral at the pockets.

I also made the waistband much narrower than any earlier iteration.  I thought about trying a contoured waistband, and I just couldn't get my mind around it.  I have a pattern piece that I even went so far as to cut out, but gave up after trying to think it through.  

The nice thing about the straight band is that it is easy to apply, and the narrower height helps it not roll very much.  I think 1/2" is about right, but I do need to cut my waistband narrower in the future, given that it was difficult to get the overlap by the zipper to behave nicely.  

My other mods were to make all the seams 7/8" and to add a second set of darts in the back (but I almost always have to have two sets of darts in the back).  I also cut this slightly straighter (I had pegged the hem on my last unblogged denim iteration and it looked weird).  I think this is a nice compromise.  

Just a basic skirt and I think it will serve nicely.