UFOs

I saw a UFO the other day.

It wasn't in the sky; it was in my workroom.

Let me explain.  My workroom is always a mess; I tend to work better when there's a bit of chaos around, but even I had gotten to the point where I realized it was out of control.

On Friday, January 20, I decided that the best way to spend the day was to avoid the TV at all costs, and start cleaning the room.  It helped that I had just sold something on Craiglist that was currently in the room, under a pile of fabric, holding apparently even more fabric.  So I started there, pulling out the vintage trunk (which was absolutely beautiful, but round-topped and so hard to stack on, and, embarrassingly, there's another one in the attic anyway) and emptied it.  There was a ton of fabric in there that I could use right now, some of which I'd forgotten I owned.  So that's sort of a win?

Continuing on all week with the TV avoidance (though not social media; if we're friends there, you know my feelings and how abundantly I've shared them), I got the trunk out, added a metal shelving unit from the basement to better organize fabric, cleaned out the standing cedar closet (and its stackable bins inside), threw out/donated another 3 trash bags of stuff, and thought I was finished.

There was one more trunk left under the table, and against my better judgment,I moved everything aside and dragged it out.

Inside was stuff I literally haven't seen in over a decade, including a quilt that I started making shortly after I bought the house (2000), and drafted a review for in Patternreview's UFO Contest back in 2006 (but never posted because it didn't get finished after all).

I was trying to stitch down the rows of squares on my machine, and I didn't notice until I'd sewn a few rows that the backing fabric had gone crooked, pulling the whole thing out of alignment.  Instead of simply picking the stitches out and starting over, I folded it up and shoved it in a box.  For 10 years.

Last night I laid it out on the bed, over top of the comforter (which actually came with me when I moved in 2000), and it looks really good in the bedroom.  I fetched a seam ripper, ripped out those three rows of stitching, grabbed some  yarn and a big needle, and yarn-tied the entire thing in an hour.

So now all I need to do is bind the edges and I can add the 16 year old comforter to the donation pile and sleep the sleep of the righteous under my finally-finished UFO quilt.

More than a UFO

UFOs are Unfinished Objects.  What do you call an object that's never been started, only obsessively planned and talked about and delayed and procrastinated and ignored . . . and reminded?

Whatever we want to call it, I've got one.

Way back when Mario and I first started seeing each other (friend stage; not even dating yet, though I had plans) he asked how hard it was to make a jacket.  I said that it would depend on the jacket, plus I hadn't started sewing for men at that point.  Why?

It seems he's always had a yen for a particular jacket.  Anybody remember the jackets Jimi Hendrix wore, the funky, velvet, Sergeant Pepper bandleader type jackets?  Pseudo-military with too much gold braid?  Frock coat on acid? 

That's what he wanted.

I thought, "No way, dude.  We're not even dating."

Fast forward 5+ years. 

What's my excuse now?  He still talks about it.  There's a TV commercial with a quick flash of Hendrix wearing one of those jackets and he points it out.  And he's not normally like that.

I ask if he'd really wear the thing if I made it.  "Absolutely!" he says.  "I'd probably never take it off."

I'm not sure how that would fly at work, but whatever floats your boat.  I guess I really need to start thinking about how I want to make this jacket.  I have a few mens patterns around, but nothing that's going to come close to.  Time to look at the historical patterns and see what I can morph into something resembling what he wants.

He looks so quiet.  Here I am all this time trying to liven up his wardrobe with print shirts when what he really, really wants is a frock coat on acid. 

Go figure.

Near Miss

My striped dress has been languishing on the end of the work table for some time now. I posted that we were having difficulties - following the pleating marks on the pattern, there was no way to get the stripes to line up, and while at first I didn't think that would be a problem, these really are awfully DEFINITE stripes, and they look awful if they're not lined up. I sewed the skirt to the bodice and HATED it. And put it down for a while.

My first thought was to simply lose the idea of matching entirely and just go buy more fabric and make the skirt in horizontal stripes; since it's not a tight skirt, I didn't mind the idea of stripes around my hips. But the store was out of the fabric. Who bought 20 yards of this? And what were they making? So the dress stayed on the table, looking at me every time I walked in the room, making me feel guilty.

I let it sit for a while longer, and then one night, I cut the skirt off the bodice and loosened all the pleats. Since there was no more fabric, I had to make do with what was there. I attached the bodice to the skirt again at the center back and at both center fronts, then at the side seams, making sure to line up my stripes. From there, I just pleated by hand, matching stripes and trying to balance the pleats on each side. The seam allowance this time was pretty minimal - I'd used 5/8" before, and had to cut it off, and since this dress has a dropped waist I didn't want to raise it to some weird, unflattering level. Thankfully the black fabric almost eliminated the seamline anyway, but I think that worked.

After that, things got a little easier. I put the sleeves in (hadn't bothered when I thought the dress might be heading toward Wadderville) and gave everything a good pressing. I like the sleeve cuffs. I had them pinned each way for a while, trying to decide whether I wanted that much gingham visible, but it seemed pointless to hide almost all of it so I used the gingham for the under cuffs, which are turned back. If I'm feeling more minimal, I'll use the striped side.
Feeling much more positive, I put it back on the table to rest again for a few days.

(insert lost weekend here, followed by useless Monday evening).

Tuesday night was a whole different story. I blew off book club, got a few things done around the house, and then retreated to the workroom after dinner. All of a sudden everything started to move. I marked and made the buttonholes and sewed on the buttons. I LOVE the buttons. I got them at Pacific Trims in NY the last time I was up there, and they were exactly what this dress wanted. I knew that before I had a complete vision of the dress - I had black and white stripes, red gingham and red domed buttons in my head but nothing else for quite some time.

I tried the dress on after I sewed on the buttons, and now I have another small issue - I need to figure out which bra will work best with this dress because my usual ones are a little much, and I can see a smidgen of the gingham when I look down. I need one of my more minimal bras, which the underwear drawer has apparently hidden from me. Grrr.

It still needed something, but I didn't know what. I put the dress on Evelyn to stare at it and it came to me. I went digging in my junk drawer in the workroom and came up with two cherry appliques that I got a while back for no apparent reason. Except, apparently, they look freaking adorable on the collar.

Last of all was the hem. There's a good bit of skirt here, and by that point (around 11:00 p.m.) I just couldn't cope with the idea of hand hemming. Problem: I also couldn't cope with the idea of visible black thread on my white stripes, or white thread on the black. What's a girl to do? Machine hem with white thread, that's what, and then spend some quality time with a black fine point Sharpie marker.

I know it's cheating, but sometimes - especially on a dress that's been in the works this long, and was so close to being trashed - cheating is okay if it gets something finished and wearable.

End result: I love it. It's going to be up there with the Cherry Bomb dress in the category of dresses I reach for on gray days, or cranky mornings. Cheerful!

I know what my problem is

Why I've had so many UFOs lately, so many started-but-not-finished projects.

I'm sewing just to sew. I know, it sounds weird, we all sew to sew, because we love it, but what I've wanted to be doing lately is working outside. Since I can't, I retreat to the workroom and start another project. Sewing is what I do whenever I can't do something else; I love it, I'm good at it, and at the end, I have something wearable or usable to show for the time I've spent.

But lately, not so much. I've turned out 2 skirts I've been happy with, but those were both impromptu projects, done within 2 days and already worn. The UFOs on the table are longer term pieces, started with the best of intentions (and in the case of the dress, much inspiration and a stalking incident, to be explained later). So what's wrong there?

I think started most of them just so that I would have something to do. I don't need a pair of cargo pants. I didn't need skirts, either, but they wanted to be made. The cargo pants didn't want to be made in the same way. I was standing in the workroom, having pushed the dress to one side, casting around for something -- anything -- to make, and I latched onto a khaki green stretch twill and remembered that I wanted to make another pair of jeans, but I didn't really feel like making jeans just then . . . so the cargo idea was born. I cut out the pieces with great enthusiasm, got the pockets and flaps all constructed, and then stopped. Okay, so Lily helped - I had the pockets placed on the back ready to pin down for stitching, and she jumped on them and knocked them out of place and I just haven't been able to face working on them again.

But is that enough of a reason? My cat knocked my pockets off? Not if I'd been into them, it wouldn't have. If I'd been going full throttle, I would have chased her out of the room, picked up my pockets and continued on.

Now, I think the problem has grown beyond itself. The UFOs have become the problem. I need to get them out of the workroom, or I'm afraid the next project I really want to make will end up keeping them company. Whether getting them out of the workroom means finishing them or chucking them into the fabric recycling pile, well, that remains to be seen.

But Mario's been away for a few of days, and while I have a bunch of other things that need to get done in his absence, the bulk of my non-working, non-sleeping time is going to be spent with the sewing machine.

Whether or not that will leave me any new garments to show off when he returns remains to be seen. But what will be there to be seen, hopefully, will be a woman who's cleaned off her work table and is ready to face a new day.

Hopefully.

Where do UFOs come from?

Last year at the Patternreview Baltimore meetup, Cidell sent me home with a whole stack of Patrones magazines. I'd asked to borrow one, so this was like Christmas come early. I traced off a bunch of patterns and sent the magazines back.

Some patterns I didn't bother to trace - I know how BWOF pants fit me, and it looked like Patrones ran narrower. I had no desire to re-invent the wheel, especially when I couldn't read the directions. I did, however, photocopy quite a few pages with patterns I liked, and this pair of Sportmax pants was one of the designs that made it to the keeper pile.

I liked the slouchiness of them, I liked the menswear stylingl, I liked that they were seersucker (and I don't particularly like seersucker), I even liked the cuffs (I'm short and generally don't - ever - wear cuffed pants). And I had some seersucker in the stash, provided by Gorgeous Fabrics. I bought it because it was the least seersuckery seersucker I'd ever seen. If that makes sense.

I started with the KwikSew shorts pattern that I'd just successfully completed. I liked their fly front and construction techniques, and I figured I could rework the pockets to match the Patrones illustration, add belt loops, and play with the length and width of the legs. I drafted the pattern pieces I needed, cut into my seersucker . . . and put it aside.

Until this week.

Why? They weren't going wrong. They hadn't even gotten anywhere when I put them down. It wasn't that the weather was getting cooler; I could have gotten plenty of wear out of of them before the end of summer. So what did it?

I have no idea, but after having won Patternreview's UFO contest in 2007, I tend to be sensitive about UFOs left in my workroom. If something's not going well, I let myself put it down to marinate for a while, but when I come back to it, if I'm still not feeling it or I don't like where it's going, generally I can release it to that great scrap pile in the sky with not too much regret. This pair of pants got under the radar and I forgot about them.

When I came across them last week, still draped over the back of a chair with the pattern pieces pinned to the fabric, I decided to give them one last chance before I chucked them out. Everything went together like I'd planned last year. I like the decorative band on the pockets and the wide belt loops. The fly front went smoothly, and even the waistband gave me little trouble.

These pants aren't necessarily something I'd make again - I was right, I am too stinking short for cuffed pants - but as a little something different for the summer, they're just fine.

Most important, they're no longer a UFO, lurking unfinished in the workroom, waiting to jump out at me when I'm least able to deal with them.

(Photo of me wearing the pants still to come - the timer on my camera is acting wonky and the photographer isn't available).