Alter It August

*I normally do a big crafty post all together with my Yarn Along, but I ended up with so much sewing stuff that I thought I better split the posts in two.  You can find my Yarn Along post (with current knitting/reading here).

~sewing~

I rescued a Washi maxi I made in the late spring that I thought I hated (and never blogged--it went right back into my sewing bin for future cutting down).  I don't love it, but it is proving a useful late summer wardrobe addition.  The fabric is a mystery cotton I got on an instagram sale.  I made Birdie a little blouse out of the leftovers and could probably make her a skirt as well.

Another rescue from the bin was my Gzhel skirt from last year.  I didn't alter it at all (although I considered shortening it several times, left it in the end).

 But! I have worn it a few times in the last two weeks, so I think that's another good late summer addition!

 In the spirit of Alter It August, I also altered two dresses from last year that have been languishing.  (I found Mia's Instagram last August through this challenge--I highly recommend following her.  She is a total delight, and a Minnesotan to boot!)

Anyway, my Magic Tulips dress just didn't fit great in the arms, and it has never been the right weather to wear it--it is too thin for cool weather and the long sleeves and longer length made it too hot to wear in the summer. 

I cut off the sleeves using my Washi bodice as a guide and cut little caps out of the cut off bits with the Washi sleeve pattern.  The original sleeves were pieced, and I didn't have enough to cut them on the fold, so I used the seam line instead.  I think the print hides the piecing and the seam line is hidden on the underside of the sleeve, so I think it isn't noticeable.  

I also shortened the dress by 2.5" and Bob's your uncle.  Well, not quite.  I did a sort of slapdash job on my first pass (this is why I can't do this kind of work around my kids) and then went back the next day to fix it, adding in some small darts just above the bust to control some excess fabric that was flopping around there (remember that the original bodice on this dress was the M7353, which is designed for knits, but I modified it for wovens, but it was very unfitted as a result).  

I'm much happier with it and will wear it during these dog days of August.  It also feels like a dress a woman my age would wear (I turned 40 last month).  I struggle a lot with feeling like my clothes are either too "young" or too "old."  This one kind of hits the right spot in the middle.  I hope.

Likewise, my blue check linen dress was in my sewing bin to be cut down into something else.

In an effort to make the dress work for me for this summer, I had tried shortening it 3" sometime in the late spring, but it still just didn't suit my aesthetic, and I didn't feel good wearing the dress.  So into the bin it went for further mulling.  Sometime in June, I cut the top off to make the bottom into a skirt, but couldn't work out how I wanted to do it, and left it sit. 

After the Magic Tulips dress worked out so well, I went ahead and unpicked everything and put the dress back together and lopped off the sleeves and made caps from the scraps.

It was a bit of a squeeze to get the sleeves out!  But I think it is mostly wearable.  There is a bit of extra fabric at the high bust on the sides (where I put the little darts in on the Magic Tulips dress) but I think darts would look strange in the linen, so I'm just going to leave it.  The nature of linen is to be a bit unfitted and rumpled anyway.  It is thin and cool, though, which is just the thing right now.

~watching~

I caught Mary Poppins Returns on Netflix just before our trip to Greece in July, and while I thought it was cute, I didn't think it matched the original, particularly the song and dance numbers.  Emily Blunt was brilliant as Mary Poppins, but I didn't love the Bert replacement character.  I also thought at least one of the song and dance numbers was a bit questionable in terms of content.  But still.  A decent family movie.

(I will not bore you with a lot of vacation photos, but I will share three, just to give some flavor)

On Aegina, one of the Saronic Islands

On the flight to Athens, I saw Bohemian Rhapsody, and it completely blew me away.  The performances were amazing, and the story was compelling.  I put Queen on my regular playlist for the next bit.

Parthenon, obviously.  There was a lot of history here I didn't know and was pleased to learn this time.

On the return flight, I also watched Can You Ever Forgive Me, which I liked a lot more than I expected to.  Weirdly, it felt like it was of a piece with Bohemian Rhapsody.

At the Acropolis, overlooking Athens.  It was super hot.

When I got home from our trip, I caught up on Grantchester (I am enjoying Tom Brittany as the new vicar!  I loved him in season one of Outlander). 

From a Marvel costume exhibit at a local museum that the kids and I went to in April.  It was a super cool exhibition.

 I also finally caught up on all the Marvel films that comprise Phases 1-3, except Captain Marvel, thanks to a Prime Day promotion on the ones I hadn't seen yet (I confess I rewatched Thor and Avengers as well because I love them and they were in the promotion).  I enjoyed Ant-Man and Ant-Man and Wasp way more than I thought I would.  Super fun and mostly family friendly.

Also saw an indie German film that did well at one of the festivals this year called Toni Erdmann, which is a strange trip of a film (and super long!), but the last half hour or so is hilarious.

So that's it!  I am editing the manuscript like mad (I've been given a hard word count target of 80K words.  I've edited down from 113K to about 87K on the first pass or so, but still have to keep whittling.  It's picky work). 

I am going to try making a Misty Cami this week with some Rifle and Co. rayon I have in my bin (it is going to be a squeak to get it out, yardage wise) so we'll see how that works. 

Yarn Along: August

*I usually put my sewing and watching lists on this post too, but it was getting so long that I split them up.  Check back tomorrow for my sewing update!

~knitting~

Working on my Pabaigh after finishing the Lightweight Pullover shortly before our trip.  (And no, I don't have pics of the finished sweater--it's too hot to put on a wooly garment!)  Pabaigh was a good traveling project, since I'm not very far on it yet and it is lightweight.  I've just divided for the sleeves, but this thing is so boxy, I think the next bit should go pretty quickly.  That collar, tho.  Twelve inches of stockinette in the round.  Bleh.

~reading~

I finished MOBY in Greece, and read all of Harrison Scott Key's second book, Congratulations, Who Are You Again?, which I enjoyed almost as much as his first book.  It is a funny but honest look at the writing process.  I also started reading the iodine book that Ginny recommended.  I'm not sure what I think about it yet.  I read the very long introduction to Mary Eberstadt's How The West Really Lost God, and I'm not sure I have it in me to finish it, but I might poke along with it.  I'm a couple of pages into Notes From Underground and it immediately hooked me, so that's a good sign!

Linking with Ginny for Yarn Along!

Yarn Along: July

~knitting~

Shawl knitting, mostly.  I set aside the sweater when I travelled to visit my parents, and have kept working on the shawl and finally finished it on Saturday afternoon!  It is blocked but needs to have the ends woven in.  I'll take a picture of it on me when it is less than eleventy billion degrees.  Ha!

I did make a little progress on the sweater in the early part of June, and have now picked it up again that the shawl is done.  I'll need a small project to travel with, so I'm considering what to make next.  I have some heather blue super wash wool from Knitpicks that needs to be something small. 

~reading~

Finished Tim Keller's Meaning of Marriage and I mostly liked it.  I alternated between liking the book a lot and wanting to throw it at the wall.  So I guess it was good?  I liked Judith Wallerstein's Good Marriage book better, frankly, but Keller's book had some good things going for it.

Picked up Written in My Own Heart's Blood again on my kindle (I had started it again sometime last summer and didn't finish it, but decided I needed another Fraser clan fix for a bit).  Because I've only read this book once or twice before, this part of the story is less familiar to me than the earlier books that I've read many times.  But that is fun too.

I also started Alain de Botton's How Proust Can Change Your Life and it is proving a delightful read, although I didn't quite expect to like it so much.  It is a dip-in-and-dip-out kind of book, so I'm not reading it fast.

I have Roger Scruton's Notes from Underground on my stack for next, although I really do need to get to Milosz's book too.

~sewing~

I'm sad to report that my Mellow Yellow skirt was an unfortunate victim of a laundry mishap.  I don't really know how it happened, since absolutely nothing else in that load was affected (including a snowy white linen shirt) but my skirt somehow came out with pink streaks all.over.it.  Wahh!!

So instead, I give you a pic of my mug in 100% thrifted clothes because that's pretty much where my closet is living this year.  (I almost passed on this skirt, but I actually kind of love it.  It's lined and everything).

I also tried to make the Rose shorts with my Brussels Washer linen and they were a complete fail of fitting and construction.  I could take them apart and try to refit them and fix my construction errors, but they just looked so bad on me, I don't have the heart to even try.  My sewing machine is currently in time out.

But to leave on a cheerful note, I put the Liberty #1 dress that I cut down into Ponchik's drawer where she has been enjoying it.  (I made it in May, but didn't get around to photographing it in situ until this week).  I love seeing it on her, since it was my favorite print and possibly my favorite dress.

~watching~

A lot of good stuff this month!  The Aftermath, The Mountain Between Us, Alone: Arctic Circle (thanks to my family!), and started Dr. Foster (amazingly good, although I'm only an episode or two in).  The Mountain Between Us was better because I had been watching Alone the week previous.  I don't think I would have enjoyed it very much otherwise.

I finished The Spanish Princess.  I loved it, but wished they had ended the series a little bit further into Harry and Catherine's marriage since most stories about Henry VIII pick up about the time he takes up with Anne Boleyn, 24 years later. 

Miss Austen Regrets was total random pick, but I really liked it.  Weird but strangely compelling: Phantom Thread (although if it hadn't got an Oscar, I probably wouldn't have bothered).

The Aftermath was definitely the highlight and I highly recommend it.  Jason Clarke and Alexander Skaarsgaard knock it out of the park with subtle nuanced performances.  Keira Knightly was a good anchor between them. I watched it twice in a row and then bought the DVD.  I cannot get this movie out of my head.

That's it for me!  Linking with Ginny for Yarn Along.

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.