It Takes a Village

I don't know about you, but I definitely think that this:

is a significant improvement on this:


It may not be enough to render this thing wearable (I haven't yet had the nerve to try it on), but it's a step in the right direction.

I have to thank all of you who have spent the time and effort to give me your feedback. I took the advice - posed by many of you - to steam out the pleats to the best of my ability. I may still go a step further and take Debbie's advice about using a ham to reshape the pleats like darts...

This exercise would have been extremely difficult without the dress form, fyi. Yet another useful feature makes itself known!

I should also mention that this fabric looks much worse in photos than up close. The pulling you see in the shot is in no way observable to the naked eye. I know, I'm scrutinizing it all to hell. I do wonder why this is. Have any of you noticed a similar phenomenon with any of the fabrics you've photographed?

Take the Good with the Bad

Toronto in February is only slightly more hideous than Toronto in January. Glass half full people talk about the imminent bloom of spring. Those more pessimistic remind the glass half full idiots that we've been suffering in grey mediocrity for that much longer. And, who are we kidding, we have another month of this shit before anything starts to shift.

It's murder on the shoes. Nothing can withstand the days that go from freezing at 6 am, to snowy at 9, and then to melt by noon. The streets are filthy. The geography is ugly. There is not a hint of the rebirth of green. Bone-chilling cold/damp is the utter inverse of hot/humidity. Don't get sick. Don't get cold. Because coming back from it is epic.

But wait. Before you kill yourself, think of the reasons you live here. Like late-April to mid-November. Street patios. Kensington Market under a cloudless sky. Drinks at the Park Hyatt rooftop. The best, and most diverse, food you'll come across anywhere - and that includes NYC. The food here is best in class. OMG - is the only thing I care about food??

To wit, gotta love a town that offers up handmade cupcakes and unpasteurized cheese of the highest calibre, within a city block.

Red Velvet and Dulce de Leche... These are so moist, I almost wrecked them taking them out of the box. And, not an icing lover by nature, caramel and cream cheese totally flip my switch.

Brillat Savarin is like St. Andre but "not crappy" (says the decidedly snobby fromageriste) Honestly though, if your fromageriste can't be the ultimate snob, then what hope is there for your organic butcher?? And the cheddar isn't English applewood, it's Kintyre. Seriously, this stuff is the shit.

Of course, this little indiscretion tiramisu cost me $40.00. Wanna guess how long it's going to last, what with my tween who eats everything in sight and then says she's still hungry? (The one whose legs have outgrown the size 12 pants I bought her last month.)

They say what doesn't kill you makes you stronger.

Update: Scott kindly volunteered to walk up to the liquor store in the wretched damp, to get me a few bottles of wine. Alas, on his return, I reviewed my Visa slip to note that he'd spent $52.00 on one of them. Says he was talking to the cashier so he didn't note the bill - the one he signed off on using my card. Intriguingly, this is the bottle I was about to open 10 minutes ago, but something told me it was really cher. I don't know if it was the label (which I might have recognized subconsciously) or the fact that it simply seemed extra fine, but can you imagine?? That would have been one expensive Sunday afternoon snack.

Now begins the argument over who will return said bottle...

Cherry Picking

In the beginning of December, still hobbled, when finally I had to go out and run some errands (which is to say, trundle into a series of cabs), I ensured that one of them would be all about me. I learned, from a fantastic Toronto creative entrepreneur i.e. clothing designer with very chic boutique, that she was stocking Manitobah moccasins:


They're Canadian made and insanely warm and cozy. Dare I risk offending the moccasins of other lands? Really, if you're gonna wear some suede/shearling/fur products they should come from Northern Canada. Note: I sleep in mine (along with jammies and a cashmere scarf). I know from cold feet. These days, particularly, I feel my feet deserve pampering!

At any rate, the reason I'm being coy about the locale is because, while at this great boutique, I had another awesome experience. The owner, I'll call her T, not only designs, but manufactures the clothing in her own studio - behind the retail space. Y'all know these days I am rather obsessed with fabric. And if there's one thing T ensures is best in class, it's gorgeous fabric. She buys in NYC a couple of times a year. She produces about 1000 pieces a season.

One of the most generous features of T is her willingness to share her professional experience with someone like me, admittedly, a long-time client - but in no sense an insider. I am so curious to know about fashion merchandising for some bizarre reason. Must be the Etsy wannabe in me :-) While chatting at length about the biz, I decided to be bold. I asked her about the likelihood of someone - ahem, such as myself - gaining access to the amazing fabrics she uses, by approaching the mills or vendors directly. The answer: Slim to none. As you'd imagine, volume dictates the cost and availability of fabric. Because T can buy in quantity, she can afford fabrics that would be completely beyond the price range of the average home seamstress. But I didn't stop there.

"T," I said, "Do you ever have fabric overage at the end of a season?" She advised in the affirmative. So I continued: "Do you ever sell it to nice home sewists such as myself?" In truth, that's not something she's done in the past, but incredibly graciously she opened her studio to me and her basket of archived swatches.

What a joy it was to be in a beautifully organized - but totally functional - industrial space. The machines were amazing. The cutting space, vast. Bolts of fabric cozied underneath the cutting table. As I chose from the swatches, mysteriously fabric would arrive and I'd get take the 2-yard ends, or a few metres. Let's just say I paid the most reasonable price for the most beautiful fabric. I won't go into detail but the discount was utterly thrilling.

Here's a sample of the fabric I chose:

This is the slate fabric I used to make the pleated skirt for my sister...

This is a flannel with a tiny bit of stretch. Totally gorgeous for pants.

This could make a nice dress or even a top - it's solid but with really good drape.

Now this is the pièce de résistance... An amazing silk that's shiny on one side...

And matte on the other. In CERISE!

Pleatitudes

The problem with sewing for someone else is that it's as likely to fail as it is when you sew for yourself. Only, now you've raised someone else's expectations and the failure (such as it may be) is squarely on you.

I suspect this skirt will fall into the wadder catgory, despite the fact that I have worked very carefully on it and it looks really nice from the front:



My label was sewn into the inner waistband before assembly, so it doesn't show from the outside. And while I don't love these labels - neither the name (which will not stick) nor the quality - I'm still pleased to have sewn it in in this fashion.


I really tried to make the inside lovely. I catch stitched the hem because I didn't want it to show from the front and because I want to have the latitude to change the length without ripping out a row of top stitches.

See the slip stitched inner waistband:


Alas, this is the craziness that persists in the back - despite the fact that I've re-reviewed the instructions 4 times, to confirm that I didn't misread them:


WTF??? I've decided to leave the garment on my dress form, to see if the pleat will settle. I also think that maybe I've been to literal in my pressing. Perhaps I should have let it fall on its own. I'm afraid to do any more pressing than I've already done. You can see how the fabric is getting close to overworked.

One other thing you probably won't be able to focus on in light of the pleat horror: I am so addicted to my snap setter and pearl snaps. They are so much more fun to insert than buttons. And I think they're sturdier.

The Kind of Grey I Can Manage

This room is the embodiment of sexy:

Photos courtesy of Desire to Inspire - my go-to interiors blog...

In keeping with my theme, it appears to be English. Gotta say, I love orange and grey mashups.

So, whatcha think? Could you live here? Does this room envelope you with its manly elegance? Does it remind you of a vampire lair? Do tell...

In Which I Wonder Why I Don't Live In Britain

Bastayan Satin Front Dress - £195.00

Bastayan Laverna Embellished Dress - £250.00

The longer I love clothing, the more I sense I should be living in the UK. Don't misunderstand - I'm much more North American practical than British cool. But I do love the fashion over the pond. (Almost as much as I hate people who say "over the pond".)

Enter Bastyan. Just learned about this brand from Mrs. Trefusis, a blogger I've been skirting without actually reading, what seems like forevah. Glad I got my act together to check her out. She's erudite and hilarious though, regrettably, an infrequent poster.

And she turned me onto a new label I love. Alas - or maybe I should say gratefully - there appears to be no shipping out of the UK. Bastayan seems, from photos, to be walking the Isabella Oliver line (no pun intended), another great diffusion brand designed for real women who do things like go to jobs and care for grimy children. The colour palette is rich - but sensible - the cut is elegant (but with a bit of edge) and the prices are within the realm of doable. Especially if you review the sale page.

Don't be misled by the two cocktail dresses I've posted. They're part of the "fancy" complement, presumably for the women who enjoy professional glamour and don't deal with snotty kids.

Has anyone had any direct experience of this company? How is it that, despite it being "totally my thing", I've never heard of it before. Has Kate been mentioning it but I haven't been paying attention? Please discuss.

Pleating the Fifth

This post is destined to have a multilayered quality i.e. schizophrenic for those of you looking for more qualification. It focuses on a new project I've been working on, not for myself, but for my sister - I know, it's like a miracle of generosity! - Vogue 8602.

The Goods:

Here's what it looks like on the pattern envelope:

And here's what it looks like in real life...

Not so fast. First you need to hear the full disclosure and click I Agree: The photos are crap. I don't know if iPhones take crap pics or if I just don't know how to use mine yet, but pls. be warned. I have no energy right now to sew, write about it and to ensure good pictures. Apologies. Oh, and another thing, this is a work in process. The waistband is being held together by pins - it's nowhere close to being done...

Now take a look and listen to the tale:

Let's pretend the overexposure is to help you see the details...

And that the fuzziness here is to distract you from the boobs part of the dress form. Note: I'm taking this pic from below so the proportions are distorted... Nonetheless, I feel strangely naked.

The part I'd ask you to pay particular attention to is the back of the skirt:

IMPORTANT: The drag lines here are artificial (see para below). Essentially, I've already pressed pleats that don't work, so I'm trying to find new ones that will work. Of course, once the pins are removed and the new line is pressed, the back of the skirt will be flowy like the front of it.

What you see here is my effort to redraw the pleat pressing line because the freakin' skirt pops out at the back like some crazy clown thing at the outer edge of each back pleat. I can't figure out the origin of that fitting weirdness because, on me, it's definitely too big in the hips and through the ass.

Actually, I think I get it. Back pleats are stupid and unnecessary and, to suit my dimensions, these should have been about an inch wider to take about 2 inches out of the back of the skirt. I know my sister has a different shape than me so it's kind of stupid to worry about this in the abstract, given that it might not be relevant on her body (see below), but I feel I have to resolve this issue to whatever extent I can. I don't imagine it will go away simply because her hips and derriere may be slightly broader. Emphasis on may be, given that I'm working from memory. I know, I know...

The Considerations:

• The pleats should fall softly. I have them pinned to the skirt on the underside to get a sense of alignment.
• This skirt is a size 14 made in a gorgeous wool suiting (has a fabulous pedigree that one day I'll get around to sharing with you) with a slight bit of crosswise stretch.
• Ordinarily I'd grade this for my particular shape but I'm making this for my sister who has different proportions. What exact proportions I'd love to tell you, but she's yet to advise me. So, as indicated, I'm going from memory. She's just slightly taller, longer-waisted, larger-boned, flatter of stomach but larger of hip and leg. Practically me, but entirely different! I decided not to shave width from the 14, my usual practice, because I'm unsure how that will work for her in the hips and ass.
• Interesting side note: Lest I imagine that there's no apple lurking beneath my hourglass shape, think I've finally figured out that I'm a Big Four size 14 in the waist only but a 12 in the hips/ass and a 10 in the legs. And a 12 in the top, with potential FBA-requirement. That's going to make it much easier to grade from paper next time I cut a pattern, rather than removing 3 inches of fabric from everywhere but the waist.
  
• In true, Vogue doesn't show any kind of rhyme or reason when it comes to final length, I'll need to slice 4.5 inches (?!) off this to put it just above knee-height for her with a 1-inch hem. That will be its cutest, most youthful length IMO. But it's going to be a bitch given that I've already serged the bottom and the pleats are well ingrained. I think I'm going to have to chalk a new horizontal line with my ruler, go back to the serger, and hope for a steady hand. A wide hem will be too bulky, I think.

The Irony:

Not 2 days ago, I found myself waxing rhapsodic about my love of pleats with my talented friend, the uber designer Stacy Lomman. (No, I don't have any shame.) The lesson here is that you shouldn't brag to actual fashion designers about techniques you love as if you have any experience to speak of. Really, you shouldn't ever talk about enjoying any technique 5 minutes before undertaking it. It's just asking for trouble. Note, however: I really do love pleats. Sewing them is so fun.

The Questions:

• Could I get away with a large hem, even given the pleating, which increases bulk?
• What experience do y'all have of pleats? Has anyone encountered this challenge before? What did you do to resolve it?
  
• What do you think that can I do to resolve the fall line on me? Yes, I know it isn't my skirt, but old habits... Or, to put a different way:
• Do you think at a certain point, if I keep fussing, the fabric will stop taking new pleat lines and I'll have a wretched mess i.e. in the absence of my fit model, is less more?
• I can barely find any info at all about this skirt. It appears to be really marginal, for some reason. Anyone reading made it? If yes, pls. share your story.

Thanks all for providing your great feedback.