February: The Lost Month

I say this almost every year about this time, but January and most of February always feel like lost time to me.  We have a bunch of church feasts, a few secular holidays, plus a bunch of family observances and celebrations between Jan 1-Feb 15, and I never seem to catch up until Lent starts.  And then it is, you know, Lent.  But my knitting has kept me sane this year, and I have some projects to share!

~knitting~

I already blogged my Delft Doocot, but I've been wearing it regularly since it finished blocking.  I love the fit and feel of it, and am jazzed to have finally made a lighter weight sweater that I really love.  My Carbeth from last year is still great, but in my current hot-flashy state, and the milder winter we're having means I can't wear it very much this year.

I didn't blog Ponchik's Puddle Duck either--that was a quick knit in December using some random yarn from my bin--I'm making a big effort to stash-bust the random skeins I bought and forgot what they were for.  I had two skeins of Taria Tweed bulky in a orangey-pink color, and I have absolutely no idea why I bought them.  It is not a color I typically wear myself, and the amount was too small for anything for the girls.  So I combined it with some leftover bulky Garnet Heather Swish from my L'Enveloppe and made Ponchik a pullover sweater with it. The silk wool blend is so soft, and the garnet stripes are enough visual interest for my print-loving girl.  She loves it, I love it, and I'm glad to have that yarn out of my bin!!

My scrappy shawl!  I've had this idea to make a shawl out of some random leftover skeins of yarn for a while, and I started it on a bus ride to NYC in late December.

I got pretty far on it (I was getting close to the border and final bind off when I realized I Did Not Like how the striping and color and pattern were coming out.

I was using the Boneyard pattern, so every 12 rows there is a knit row on the purl side, which looks great on a solid color, but when the skeins would run out in the middle of a pattern repeat, it looked strange.

I thought the stripes needed more variation, and the colors didn't quite work all together.  So I frogged the whole thing a week ago and started fresh.  (Sorry, I don't have pictures of the original).  I decided to pull out ALL my scraps and start from there, which meant I could make a bunch of narrow rows at the first since some of my scraps were small indeed, but I'm quite happy with how it turned out.

It is a reflection of many things I've made over the past years (some successful, some not), uses up yarn that is not very useful otherwise but I can't bear to just throw away, and produced a useful finished garment for one of my girls to enjoy.  Win-win.

Next up is a belated birthday gift for my mother.  Her birthday is in early January, but I knew in December already I wasn't going to be able to finish her gift in time.  (I had kids sick at home for almost three weeks in December, as I mentioned, and it just threw my schedule off.  Things Did Not Get Done).  But my mom is a big girl, and willing to wait!  My parents are coming for a week-long visit tomorrow, so I set myself a firm deadline and tried not to look at any other yarn until her scarf was finished.  

The pattern is Embrace, from Quince and Co. and the yarn is Chickadee in a limited edition color from a few years ago called Carnation.  I bought four skeins at the time, intending to make a toddler sweater for one of the girls, but never got to it, and now four skeins probably isn't enough for them.  I think it will work well with my mom's coloring and preferred clothing palette, so I hope it will be a nice accent piece for her.  It was a fun knit and I learned a new stitch on the border!

I cast on my next Doocot with the Quince and Co. Chickadee in Sorbet I bought with a gift card from two Christmases ago.  (I keep looking at the color name and thinking "zher-bet" or "soar-beT", like "sher-Bet" instead of "soar-bey."  Anyone else?  Just me?  Alrighty then).  I've been wearing my blue Doocot almost every chance I get, so I think another will get a lot of good wearing.  The weather is so weird this year that heavy sweaters are not the best choice.  My teal Carbeth has had only a couple of outings this year.

~reading~

Quite a lot actually.  I finished Come As You Are, and I wish every woman would read it!  It was so helpful and empowering for me.  It's worth the price of admission for the first chapter alone, which is just basic anatomy, and the range of how women's bits present.  In short: you are normal.  I am normal.  We are all normal.  If it doesn't hurt, it's normal.  But the rest of the book is amazing too.  I might write some more about it in a dedicated post.

I started her most recent book, Burnout, at the beginning of the month, and while I like it, and am getting a lot out of it, I don't recommend it quite as whole-heartedly because the tone is different, and there are some sections I skimmed as a result.  But the chapter on the Bikini Industrial Complex is worth the cost of the book, as is the chapter on sleep and active rest (you need more than you think, and it isn't just about sleep!)  It has made me think about my whole body in a different way, but that knowledge is built on the foundation of Come As You Are, so if you only have time to read one, read that one instead.

During December I got obsessed with the Sky series A Discovery of Witches (watched it twice!) and then immediately started reading the triology.  I swallowed the first book almost whole, but am taking my time with the second one.  I'm very eager to see the second season, which only recently finished filming.  I started following Teresa Palmer on IG, and am enjoying her account very much. I also follow Deb Harkness, who wrote the books, because I'm a geeky historian and lover of medieval things, and love the stuff she posts about her research as a university historian.

I love the relationship between Matthew and Diana in the book, and how the story arc and character curves don't go the way you might expect.  (Some people have said that the All Souls Triology is like Twilight for grown-ups meets Outlander, and I don't think they are wrong.  Outlander is better written and the cast of characters much larger, but I think the authors are exploring similar themes.

My stack also includes books I received for Christmas, but haven't started yet.  I only have so much time to read!  But I'll get through them sooner or later.  Circe is there because I'm trying to develop a female character who is different from a lot of female tropes, and a friend said that the main character is written differently.

~sewing~

Almost nothing.  Just a bit of mending (see Ponchik's leggings above).  I also took out a pair of my husband's suit pants and learned a fascinating amount about how men's suit pants are constructed.  I wish women's skirts were given so much thought and structure.  Sewing for me, nada.  It's okay, really; I'm having a great time thrifting.

~watching~

I watched some forgettable stuff that had been on my watchlist for a while, but A Discovery of Witches was the high point (since I watched it twice in a row!)  I've tried a few shows in the past couple of weeks that are trying too hard to be Game of Thrones and just...no.  I don't want to watch that.  My writing partner and I were discussing this phenomenon recently, and she was pretty frustrated with the offerings as well.  Her comment: "My bar isn't really that high--can we just have a show without people's heads being cut off?  I'm not asking much."  Me: "I know, right?"

Season 2 of Jack Ryan was...okay.  I thought the first season was brilliant, and a great reboot of the characters, but season 2 seemed like it was trying to tick too many boxes.  I know that happens sometimes in the second season, so I'll be eager to see if they straighten the course for the 3rd season.

There was an interesting indie film called The Delinquent Season that I found very thought-provoking, but it will not be a film for everyone.  The acting was raw and courageous, the storyline had a lot of tough stuff in it. 

Marriage Story was excellently acted, well-written and directed, and deserves the award nominations it is getting, but it was also a pretty tough watch.  Delinquent Season explored similar themes, but in a more interesting way, I thought.  Marriage Story was just pure pain.

I decided that the boys were old enough to start watching some of the Marvel films (not all of them) and we started with Thor, and then moved on to Avengers and Captain America.  We're through The Dark World now (skipping the Iron Man movies for now, because I think they have a bit too much language and violence for them, relative to the other Marvel offerings).  It's been fun to share those films with them.  I think all the kids are ready for The Princess Bride and am eager to show it to them.  I read the book aloud to them last spring and they all enjoyed hearing the story.

I binged The Stranger at the beginning of February, with Richard Armitage, and highly recommend it.  I follow him on IG, and have been waiting for this show to hit Netflix for a while. A friend also recommended The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, which I have not really been interested in watching until now, but I tried it, and I do like it a lot.  It's not a show I want to watch quickly, but I like having it in my back pocket for when nothing else seems to be interesting. I also watched Agatha Christie and the Truth of Murder on Netflix during a sick day recently and enjoyed it very much as well.

Linking with Ginny for Yarn Along!

Slopers

I've been meaning to write this post for ages, but never did until I got Stasia's most recent newsletter about her jeans-buying adventure, and thought I really should get to it.  I think a lot of people don't understand why sizing varies so much across and within brands, and get frustrated when a size doesn't fit the way they expect.  I didn't understand until I started sewing for myself and reading about the fashion industry, and I found the knowledge so helpful and empowering!  Hopefully this will be helpful for someone out there.

The short answer is that when you make a garment and size it up or down, you use what is called a sloper.  The sloper is the base pattern that is used to make all the other sizes from, and where brands slope from and who they slope for, determines a lot of how garments fit proportionally.  (I have a larger-than-industry-standard waist-to-hip ratio and a 14" rise, so I've never been able to find RTW pants that fit me, and modern skirts are usually a challenge). 

The first thing is that some brands slope from the middle of their size range, and some slope from the bottom.  Sloping from the middle means that whatever the "medium" or middle size number is (often an 8, but sometimes a 10), is the base sloper.  The smaller and larger sizes are then graded from there, which means that the pattern is either made larger or smaller along the seam lines in even increments.  Some brands slope widely between sizes, and some slope smaller.  What that means is that in some brands, the difference between and 8 and a 10 might be an inch or more, and in some brands, it might less than an inch.  A common grade is 1/2" between sizes.  The size differences are more pronounced the fewer sizes there are overall, so things that are simply labeled: small, medium, large, etc. can vary quite a bit.

For brands that slope from the bottom of their size range (say a 0 or a 2), their upper size range is going to come out much smaller than a brand that slopes from the middle (this has to do with how grading is done, and how much grading you can do to a pattern before it starts to have distortions.  It is also why so-called "plus-size" clothing tends to start at a size 12 or 14, because it is difficult to slope from size 0-30 without having at least three base slopers made, which is expensive). 

There is also the target audience of a brand, which is useful to know not because of style-sense, but because it informs the slopers.  Brands that market to a younger audience are likely to slope from the bottom of their size range.  Why?  Because their target audience is a teenager with a still-maturing pelvic cradle.  So these brands' slopers are smaller, the size range smaller, and the amount of curve smaller.

JCrew slopes for a taller-than-average, straight-up-and-down figure, and appears to slope from a size 4 or 6, and their clothing reflects all that.  Land's End and LLBean target a different audience, and appear to slope from the middle of their size range, but the middle of their size range is also based on a curvier figure. 

Slopers also change over time, which is why a vintage 14 is considerably smaller than a modern 14 in almost any brand.  Legacy brands like Pendleton or Eddie Bauer have vastly different garment measurements over time.  I thrift wool skirts online, and never purchase anything from a legacy brand that doesn't have the measurements listed because you can't go by size.  A vintage 14 Pendleton skirt (from 1990s or earlier) is going to have somewhere between a 26-28" waist and 36-38" hips.  A recently-made Pendleton skirt in the exact same style, in the same size, is going to be more like 30-31" waist and 41-42" hips.  I recently discovered that Sag Harbor made a wool skirt sometime in the 1980s or early1990s that fits me great in a size 14, but not all my 14s are the same.  Some of my skirts have a 32" waist, and some are more like 31" (these skirts have a bit of elastic in the back, so some of the range might be due to how much the elastic has been stretched out, but it is hard to tell).  This is for the same skirt, in the same woven, non-stretch fabric/lining, made around the same time. 

The other issue is that there isn't a standard sloper for any garment across the fashion industry, but in jeans, particularly high-end jeans, companies often do not check their slopers carefully against actual women's bodies for good fit across all sizes.  What happens is if there is a basic fit issue on the sloper of a high-end jean, it gets replicated across all the jeans in that range and brand, and in all lower-cost brands that copy their sloper.  Sometimes you also get slopers that grade well up or down one size to either side, but distort big-time when you get more than a couple of sizes up or down.  Since the fashion industry moves fast these days, there isn't enough time to check all these things because time is money and clothing has become more or less disposable.

I think one of the reasons why so many "pear-shaped" (or triangle-shaped) women have trouble finding pants (*raises hand*) is that no one has bothered to check slopers for full seat adjustments, because as your waist-to-hip ratio increases, the likelihood of a fuller seat increases.  (So does the need for a full tummy adjustment).  Since many brands are sloping for a 6-8" waist-to-hip ratio (meaning that the waist is 6-8" smaller than the full hip measurement) and a flat bottom and tummy, anyone with a differently-shaped body is going to have major fit issues at any size.  Stretch fabrics can only mediate fit issues so much.

I personally find garment measurements to be the best predictor of fit (know thy measurements and thy desired ease of wearing!), and since I thrift most of my clothes online, I try not to buy unless I'm pretty confident about the measurements or I've had a lot of experience with the brand.  

If you've made it all the way to the end of this, pat yourself on the back!  I hope this proves helpful.  The main thing to remember is this: your body is not a problem (All Bodies are Good Bodies!), and size is just a number.