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Sweet Shorts, Sour Shorts, Spicy Shorts

By on April 10, 2012 in Inspiration Files
23

Well, hello hello, and happy belated Easter! We do celebrate and this year’s holiday was pretty laid back, just spending the day talking with friends under a big oak tree and a little stroll through my garden to pick flowers. I got me an Easter bonnet, too! A fine big-brimmed straw hat that I wish I would’ve had when modeling my Lonsdale last summer. It will work its way into one of my future blog shoots, I’m sure.

This week I’m dreaming of shorts. And tank tops. Alas, it’s that time again.

{credit: google images}

I haven’t really worn sleeves in two weeks. This is why I never made a proper spring wardrobe plan, because heck, spring just flits in and out of Texas like a hummingbird. Now you see it, not you don’t.

My shorts fixation of the moment is being taunted by all the images of scalloped hems and lace shorts on Pinterest. (See my board.)

And serendipitously, today Colette released a cute little sailor short pattern in their new spring collection. You bet I’ll be trying these!

Last summer I wrote a bit about the way my style has changed living in Texas. I was never much of a skin-barer and I never had a need to be. I never really wore sandals, even in midwestern summers, and now they’re at least half of my shoe wardrobe. So slowly, over time, my tastes and my eye has adjusted to a breezier, skin-showing style.

I’ve liked the way summer clothes have taught me to celebrate my figure and make peace with those parts of the body I used to try and hide. I mean, I guess in a roundabout way I could blame Texas for actually giving me the courage to wear skinny jeans. (This year I even treated myself to SKINNY LEATHER pants. For reals.)

It took me awhile to be okay with shorts, for example, but now I can’t imagine living outside of them. A couple years ago, I timidly bought a pair of pretty little Ikat shorts on clearance at Anthropologie. And they became my uniform. I barely took them off for a couple summers straight. I need me lots more shorts.

In August, I sewed my first pair, pretty purple silk shorts, from a Burda pattern. They were so beautiful. I was so proud of the fly I drafted for them and how it all came out. And then I committed the ultimate sewing mishap–I’d completely sewn the wrong size (down). It could’ve been a costly mistake but thankfully the silk was left over from another project so I chalked it up to a fancy muslin. I’m determined to get them right this summer, and even ordered more of the same charmeuse.

The first pair on my agenda, however, are Pattern Runway’s Sweet Short.

After Oona first alerted me to this new line last summer, I promptly ran over to Etsy and ordered a few of their patterns. And now I really need them.

Thankfully, before I went a-cutting I found Liz’s pretty, gauzy take on these and her original assessment of the fit, or I would’ve banged them out without measuring or even making a muslin. (Do I learn?) According to my measurements I’d fit exactly halfway between their X-Small and a Small. The thing is, there are rather big distances between the sizes, unlike many of my shorts or trouser patterns (like Burda). Rather than cutting out some willy-nilly in-between size, I decided to do some measuring first and drew in the seam lines along the X-Small to get an idea of the ease. The finished measurements of waist and the hip have 4.5″ (11.4cm) of wearing ease! Just FYI. That’s quite a bit for fitted shorts, or at least a fitted waistband. Hopefully, the half size down will be good enough but I’m definitely making a muslin dammit. Tonight.

So stay tuned for further shorts developments. And a full-on summer wardrobe plan. I’ve got some drafting ideas up my sleeves!

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it’s not easy being green

By on March 19, 2012 in Inspiration Files
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Do you ever feel like spring is just a bunch of exclamation marks?!

!!!!!!!!

Growing, growing, green. That unstoppable energy of spring is hard to keep up with. And March in particular is often the only “spring” we get in Austin–from here on out it rapidly turns to summer. So we get extra exclamation marks for that. I’m an avid gardener and it’s hard not to want to be outside digging in the dirt every chance I get. Here’s a bit of home for the “expat” Texans out there:

I have declared this the Year of the Bluebonnet. There are some years that they are smaller in crop than the others but between some perfectly timed rains in the fall and spring they are INSANE this year and I’m sure the Texas-dwellers out there have noticed the highways brimming with them. I dreamed for years of having a wildflower patch, something that simulated a meadow in a city garden kind of way. We have a pretty large yard for a city and even for central Austin–but it was entirely covered in shade and invasive plant-weeds. It took one fall of serious weeding, hacking down a few junk trees and bushes, and throwing out a few packets of seeds. Now my little patch of sunlight has taken on a life of its own. Some years the poppies show off, others the larkspur. Last year I had one lowly bluebonnet and all of this somehow came from THAT. (I never tire of the wonder that one plant can generate about 1000 more in just one season of seed-bearing.)

March is also a thick time because it’s also my man’s birthday month. Friends, birthdays are a really big, big deal around here. Sometimes wearily so. We usually take the day off (okay, sometimes more than one) and basically fill it with everything we love. It just so happens that Derek’s birthday is also St. Patrick’s Day. Yeah, he is part Irish and all heart so his bday always has this double-the-party energy. Add to all this SXSW, which seriously takes over Austin for about a week straight–the buzz, the traffic, the 10s of thousands of people crowding every square inch of this little town, the feeling that you are always missing some kind of huge convergent opportunity.

So we had a l’il party last night and now that things are calming down, from my quiet little porch in the universe, I can think about how much I adore this man and hope he had the bestest birthday:

{In this one, he’s wearing a vest I made him a couple of years ago from a vintage 1940s pattern. I’m going to do another one soon.}

Derek wears green velvet pants to breakfast and top hats to conferences. He collects circus paraphernalia and weeps in front of a Marc Chagall. He has the biggest heart and zest for life of anyone I know–and often loves people so much it hurts him. Darn Irish. I know it’s not easy being green.

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The Hidden Things

By on December 23, 2011 in Inspiration Files, Lingerie & PJs
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Oh Austin, I love you.

{Sign on Silk Road Fabrics.}

Something about this struck me as very typical Austin. That people here who don’t generally suffer from workaholism. That there are still places one has to find by accident, or in this case rely on word of mouth for opening hours.

Austin is one of those rare cities that has the kind of places one must stumble upon. Groovy restaurants that haven’t been Yelp-ed and mapped and Twittered to death. It’s got a fair share of the Secret South. (There’s an art collective literally hiding in a forest.) The sign might be spray-painted, the pedestrian traffic nil, but those homemade Mexican grandmama tortillas are the secret everyone loves to keep secret, or just recommend the old-fashioned way. It’s one of the reasons Derek and I gravitated here. We always call it a haven for creative people; it’s urban but incredibly easy to be an artist and live an artistic lifestyle without a competitive strain to prove oneself.

Silk Road used to be just a walk away from our neighborhood, in a lovely little cottage that was torn down a couple months ago. (Sigh, no more fabric sources for me that don’t require a driving haul through a labyrinth of Austin traffic.) Long before I got back into sewing I used to browse the exquisite silks and walk out with a couple glass buttons. They have gorgeous linens too–my first-ever fabric purchase in Austin eventually became the wide-leg trousers. Last year they moved deep into the East Side, still a source of hidden creativity despite upscale development. I had to turn around twice at the train tracks before I realized the store was inside the Flatbed coop.

Now here’s a place I’ve heard about but never visited. The closed doors of Silk Road sent me wandering instead around this heavenly mothership of all things printmaking.

All in all, a very Austin experience… where you end up when you were looking for something else.

Anyhow, this would’ve been the one local place I’d find some lovely lace trims for Sherry’s Ruby Slip. I’ll have to wait. I’m finding a bit of pleasure in that, too–the pleasure of the waiting, of finding the one thing that can’t be found by anyone else.

This is about lingerie, I guess, in a roundabout way. In lieu of a slip, I made a new bra over the weekend. I wanted to sew another one fairly soon after my first try, to refine fit and design changes while the experience was still fresh in my mind.

It’s still plain and super cutesy pink, but I wanted to use up the fabric and notions I got from Bramakers Supply to test my changes. I tried changing the pattern to a more vertical seam and went to a full-band bra. I also went down a cup size, which fit just perfectly despite my worries on the first bra. (My first was a modified 32C, which as it turns out was a bit of wishful thinking!)

My sewing will stop for two weeks as we travel abroad, but my first order of sewing business in the New Year will be a luxe version of the bra from this lace-like gilded lycra. It came all the way from Germany via e-lingeria.de and took almost two months, but I am so pleased. Gorgeous stuff.

Have a wonderful holiday, and I hope that true and meaningful secrets are revealed to you!

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A Year of Sewing Burda

By on November 22, 2011 in Fashion Commentary, Inspiration Files
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Happy Thanksgiving, everyone! Even to those abroad who don’t celebrate… it really is a lovely holiday. No pressure. Just sitting around eating and drinking with friends and family. I normally go mad cooking and baking but this year I’m only on pumpkin pie duty. I get to sloth around in PJs until late afternoon, so spent some of my free time organizing patterns.

Our lovely postman brought me the new Burda yesterday. A good mail day! It’s the only magazine to which I subscribe–the rest of the mailbox is just junk (well, bills). The last few issues have really caught my eye; I’ve been inspired by the way they’ve been on top of all the urban leather and faux fur trends lately.

My fave has to be this persian lamb cocoon-like coat.

(My late grandmother had a groovy couch upholstered in this stuff so I’m partial to it.)

A great leather top à la Isabel Marant:

Leather shorts and chiffon blouse, yum:

I still love Burda mostly for its design point of view–or just that it risks having one from time to time. The great thing about sewing, of course, is the ability and freedom to shift a pattern’s style to your own, regardless of a pattern company’s aesthetic or demographic. But I still like to be inspired by design rather than having to re-imagine it.

Still, getting a new Burda gave me some pause. The magazine alone adds exponentially to my pattern list! And I’m probably at the point, as I’m sure many sewers get to, where I feel a bit overwhelmed by the project wish list (and my pattern collection). So I decided to weed stuff out this week. It might be Ebay time.

So I went through a year’s worth of Burdas and made a big Evernote catalogue of all the patterns I liked. I weeded out those that felt like repeats, and some of the statement pieces. I always get drawn to the crazy cover styles, but I think I need fewer fantasy garments on my sewing list. I kept all the ones I’ve already traced. That still left about 15!

I’ve only been sewing from these magazines for just a little over a year. Looking back, there was the Number Six Dress:

Which, by the way, gets the most search referrals to the site. No, not sewing. Battlestar. (Hello, Cylons!)

The silk shorts (sadly I traced and made the wrong size! but they were beautiful to look at!):

The drapey white shirt:

My silk tank was a recent Burda make, and I’ve nearly finished two other garments (just waiting for my serger to come back from repairs!).

Two years ago I’d never even heard of Burda. All I had known back in my first sewing life were the mainstream pattern companies. Since then I’ve been a rabid collector of patterns far and wide. Over the past year I dove into Marfy, Colette, Sewaholic, Hotpatterns, and several other little off-the-beaten-path pattern makers. I mean, I have Sewing Pattern ADD.

Every pattern company fits so differently, and I’d really love to focus on understanding fit more in the next season of my sewing, rather than acquire new patterns. I’d like to keep sewing from Burda especially, mostly for their designs, but need to work out their sleeve shaping and bust fit. The Burda sleeve caps and armscyes are quite high and narrow compared to other patterns, which sometimes looks odd on more casual shirts.

Truth be told, I love the idea of having on hand my own blocks (tnts, what have you) to work out my own designs, and have already worked from a Burda t-shirt to design several top styles. Maybe that will be what the next season of sewing is all about for me!

And before I leave this post, I’ll add that I’m very very thankful for the amazing and colorful man next to me. I’m glad we found each other. He’s almost as much of a fashion nut than I am. He’s a theatrical character and makes everything brighter around him. (He screeches Bob Dylan and Broadway tunes at the top of his lungs every morning to wake up.) Someday I’ll introduce him, but in the spirit of Tasia’s recent post, I am thankful that he supports my crazy sewing habits.

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