Corduroy Madness (part the first)

I mentioned in my last post that I had succumbed to autumn madness by purchasing a few lengths of corduroy.  They arrived in short order and I washed them right away.  I was especially eager to make up the navy cord, since my denim skirt has been getting such heavy wear.  Do you ever see something in ready-to-wear that gets in your head and you have to make it so that it will fit you?

 

 I love corduroy skirts that have patch pockets attached at the waist, but they are always too short for my taste, and they almost always feature a front zipper or buttons down the front, which never looks good on my figure.  That style almost always gapes at the waist on me as well, which is just not cute.  I decided to make mine with a side zip with the shaped patch pockets and use my straight skirt block (Anne Adams 9481).

I ordered Kaufman's 21-wale 100% cotton corduroy, and fabric.com only had a yard left of the navy colorway, which is cutting it a bit close for this skirt, but I decided to take it and hope for the best.  The fabric is 56" wide, which is the only reason it worked. I've never worked with this weight of Kaufman cord (my previous experience has been with the 14-wale line, which is heavier weight), and it is just lovely.

  It has a beautiful hand, and it drapes better than I thought it would.  That said, it is pretty lightweight, and is unlikely to be a great middle-of-winter skirt.  Although, it must be said, I'm running quite a bit hotter than usual these days, so perhaps it may work out well after all!  (And after working with this fabric, I'm eager to find other ways to use it again).

This might be the most comfortable skirt I've ever made and a lot of it is down to the fabric.  I don't know that it is the best-fitting skirt ever (it is slightly loose in the waist) but comfort bests fit sometimes and it may shrink slightly given the fiber content.  I'm also much more sensitive to pressure around my middle now, and a comfortable waistband is the unicorn of skirts everywhere.

 

No major pattern modifications to note; I omitted the back seam allowance and cut on the fold.  Both side seams are sewn at the highest seam allowance on my plate (which I used to think was 7/8" but after measuring yesterday, I think is actually 5/8") and I added a second set of darts in the back as usual.  

I usually make these 1/2" darts, but I ended up taking another 1/8" in on each dart after trying it on, and probably could have gone another 1/8", but as I said, comfort is key.  I tried to put in a buttonhole with the automatic buttonholer, but the fabric just did not play nice.  It was too stick for the presser foot and even lowering the feed dogs didn't help.  I made three practice buttonholes before trying it on the waistband, and still ended up unpicking the thing in the end and working it by hand.  Win some, lose some.

My major victory on this make was getting the waistband overlap correct and sewn nicely.  (It looks like a bit of a mess in this photo, but it actually does look nice).  This is not always an area that I do well, and I'm chuffed with the result.  It helped that the fabric was amenable to this procedure. The zip also looks better in real life than it does on this pic.

Now I'm off to make up the 14-wale corduroy into similar skirts because I'm mostly a two-trick pony.  And also: I don't always dress like a crayon, but when I do, it will be rust or navy colors.

That Burgundy Skirt

 

Remember that burgundy twill skirt I mentioned a couple of times this fall but never showed you?  The one that fit weirdly and I was never going to wear?  Well, it still fits slightly weird, but I decided to take it for a spin anyway.  

This is another redrafted Anne Adams 9481, and I pretty much followed the same script as my olive twill.  This is the same Kaufman Kobe twill as the olive, and it behaved pretty much the same way.  

The strange thing about this skirt is that I bought the fabric in early September and made it up right away, but then I couldn't remember how I had planned to wear it--nothing in my closet seemed right for it, and the slightly too-big fit around the waist didn't help.  (I did wonder if washing it again would help, as the fit of my olive skirt has improved with additional washing).

I really was ready to put it in the donation pile because every time I tried to style it with something, it just looked weird, but I pulled it out this morning after I thrifted this sweater from ThredUp.  I wore it with a dress over the weekend and I am in love with it.  It is 100% cotton and very light weight, so I'm very comfortable in it in this crazy weather and my crazy body that doesn't know what temperature to be.  I love the cropped length, the slightly dolman sleeves, the stripes, the color, everything.  It is slightly saggy today after wearing all day yesterday, but I don't even care.  A trip through the wash should reblock it in any case.  And it looks pretty good with this skirt, I think!

The only change I made from the olive skirt was to put a proper button hole on the waistband instead of a dress slide, and while I like the look of it, and was pleased to use my buttonholer again (like I said, I'm drunk with power 😆), I think I prefer the dress slide, even if it is is fussier to install.  

I think I like this skirt for weather that doesn't require tights, since the twill is pretty sticky even with a slip.  It is humid enough today that I ended up ditching the tights when I got home and the skirt is behaving much better without them.  Still looking for transitional shoes to wear with bare legs that are not sandals and don't require socks.  The perennial issue.  I did bid on a pair of clog booties on ebay, so that might be the ticket.

I succumbed to autumn-induced corduroy madness and ordered a couple lengths to make some corduroy skirts on this same block.  I'm a little short in the mid-weight skirt department anyway, and my one denim skirt has been on heavy rotation the past two weeks.  I'm really into straight knee-length skirts right now, so I think they will get a lot of wear.

Yarn Along: Wearing All the Summer Knits!

~knitting~

The temperatures have finally dropped enough for me to wear the pieces I finished over the summer! 

The first is the Lightweight Pullover that I started in the late spring and worked steadily on over the summer. 

I finished it sometime in August, I think, but it was eleventy billion degrees at the time, so I just blocked it and put it away for colder weather. 

I'm actually pretty pleased with how it turned out.  I cropped the body, obviously, but didn't make any other changes to the pattern.

The second is the Pabaigh by Kate Davies, started in June, finished last week.  I like it with a few caveats.  I ended up reblocking the hem after wearing it for a few hours because I didn't like how it wanted to bubble and roll in at the bottom, creating a visual muffin-top.  Not a good look for me.  

I think with the reblocked hem, it will end up being a really great piece for me, since it is perfect for those days when you need a light jacket.  I don't always want to wear a full coat, so this is great for that. 

My changes were to make the funnel neck significantly shorter (the pattern asks for a whopping 14 1/2" finished length).  I made mine around 11" and that is about right.  I have a short neck and any longer would have swamped me.  I made a small error on the back near the back neck, because I was short a stitch and made the increase in the middle of the row, but the increase was very visible after a few rows, so I tried to go back and fix it a few times with a crochet hook and only succeeded in making worse.  I don't think it is terribly noticeable at a distance, and it does make it easy to tell the back from the front, but I'm annoyed with myself that I couldn't make it perfect.  Oh well.

The gauge on this sweater was higher than I usually knit (something like 26 sts per 4 inches) but I was able to keep steady work on it, and it gave me confidence to try finer gauge pieces in the future.  I really liked the construction on this too.  Kate is so good at that.

 

I still haven't worn the textured shawl I finished in July, but will do so soon!  I am also plugging away at my Doocot and enjoying it very much.  Kate Davies is a wizard.

~reading~

Still plugging away at Mary Eberstadt's first book.  I've been falling asleep much earlier in the evenings lately, so I haven't made as much progress as I would have liked.  I made some progress on Scruton's Notes from Underground, although I confess I'm not as into it as I thought I'd be.  I'm sort of gritting my teeth through it at this point.

~sewing~

Made a burgundy skirt on the same block as my olive twill, from the same fabric line, but I don't love it.  The fit is different for some reason, and I can't muster the energy to figure out why.  Incidentally, the olive twill turned out to be the surprise hit of the season.  I wore it regularly all summer and well into September.

I did a bunch of little mending projects that don't warrant photographs.

~watching~

I seem to go back to CSI: NY when I need a mental break but still want to watch something.  The series hit Amazon prime last month and I've been rewatching the whole thing from the beginning.  Somehow I never saw the first two seasons when it aired, so it was interesting to watch those for the first time.  I'm now in season 3 and the cases are a bit more familiar.  Enough time has passed since the show aired that it is an interesting window into the early-to-mid naughts, particularly as I was living abroad for part of that time.

This school year is really kicking my keister (already! I know!), and I find I'm mentally worn out from trying to keep up with everything.

This is my theme song this school year:

Oddly, it always puts me in the mindset of the Cold War and East Germany.  For some reason it escaped me until recently that it was a Queen song, and not sung by a West German band.  It just has that West End Girls vibe for me.  I dare you not to have that mind virus in your head now.  You're welcome. 😉

~writing~

The good news is that I completed the massive edit I've been plugging away at all summer, and finally have my word count down to an acceptable number for the interested party.  I am grateful for being made to do it--it made me a better editor, and I hope the book is better for the tightness of the prose.  Hopefully the interested party will think so too!

That's all for me.  Linking with Ginny for Yarn Along.

Linen Kombu #2

This is a boring little post about a linen kombu. 

facings for days

 (For those who don't know what that is, in the Orthodox tradition, clergy members and monastics traditionally wear a cassock and riasson in church, and most clergy members wear the cassock all the time.  The riasson is like an outer cassock with big sleeves.  It billows a lot, and so many clergy members reserve their riasson-wearing for church and wear a vest over their cassocks the rest of the time.  The vest is called a kombu or kontorasson).  

hem facing

When my husband was ordained a deacon five years ago, I made him a self-lined linen kombu.  I used a doctor's coat pattern on the advice of another clergy member and left off the collar and shortened the body.  I also made him a silk-lined boiled wool kombu in 2016 when he lost his original wool one made by my mom. 

sleeve facings

After our travels this summer (in which my husband was wont to put his ipad in the front pockets of the kombu), I realized that it was time to replace it.  The buttonholes were ragged and sagging, the pockets were sadder than sad, and the fabric was faded and looked worn.  

machine-worked buttonholes!!

I ordered some black linen from fabrics-store.com (in the 1C64, which is slightly denser and nicer than the IL019), but I forgot that I would need four yards to self-line the sucker, so only ordered two.  When it came time to cut it out, I quickly realized there was no way to fully line it, so I set about making facings.  I probably could have just finished with bias and been fine, but I wanted the look of facings.  I ended up with bias-look facings on the sleeve openings, but it looks fine.  I also took the time to measure the pattern on my husband's shoulders and adjust each side to hit at the shoulder seam on his cassock (one shoulder is slightly higher/shorter than the other). 

I also had to conquer my buttonholer on my machine, since I knew that the kind of strain my husband puts on buttonholes would be better handled by machine-worked holes over my hand-worked ones.  (To recap: I was terribly scarred by the buttonholer on my mom's Pfaff, and have never tried to learn the buttonholer on my machine).  It turns out to be pretty easy to use (thanks, Bernina!) and now I'm drunk with power. 😬  Bring all the buttonholes!  Ha!!

In any case, it was a relatively quick project that turned out well enough and is getting good use.  I was hoping to get a pic of him wearing it, but I think I'll never log this project if I do.  If you follow the link to the wool version, you'll get the general idea.

Over and out.