I love coats.

Apart from the obvious stuff like having to do buttonholes and getting a nice corner on the tips of the collar, I think it's a lot more difficult to significantly alter a coat than make one from scratch.

It all started Saturday night on our very quick party trip to Adelaide. There was a boy, (as is so often the case) wearing a quite dapper coat. I love a good coat, so naturally I ended up doing dancefloor things with him. Turned out the coat wasn't his though, he'd just found it earlier in the evening, which meant getting it was a simple matter of giving him my number. Didn't even have to do anything inappropriate :)

Still, even though he said it was a bit too small for him, a men's medium is quite a bit too large for my size 8. So last night I chopped it up and tonight I made a start on putting it back together.

Taking down a shirt is fairly easy, even when they've annoyingly flatlocked the side seams, because it doesn't have a lining. This coat is fully lined but I've given up on keeping the lining perfect, because it's all gotten a bit... complicated. I've lowered the seam of the shoulder but raised the set of the top of the sleeve. I've taken in the underside of the sleeve and in the sides but the underarm was still too low so I've had to add in a bust dart to make the sleeve hole small enough. So the lining's way bigger than the shell, and the shape of the sleeve hole is terribly wonky and the lining doesn't match it. I'm just going to tack it all together and zigzag the crap out of the inside of the set-in sleeve.

But it's 5am so it won't be finished tonight, not that I need it in any real rush, but it's nice to know that I can do it. It's easier making one from scratch though, since you can make a muslin and test it all out.

Speaking of coats made from scratch, today I found some gold... something-or-other on the clearance rack at spotlight so I can make a rockstar coat to match what instagram came up with. And they have solid coloured rayons now! I didn't buy any because they weren't on sale and, well, I've had other sewing lined up, but I'm happy about it nonetheless.

I think I need better things to get excited about.

Whoops

Time flies when you're drafting patterns.

Some lovely wool blend coat fabric on clearance, an old jacket cut up for a pattern and high hopes for a drapey collar I haven't quite worked out yet, and suddenly it's after 6am :/

Favourites List

Getting that "vibe" that you really should go to the op shop today, and finding a half dozen brilliant things.

Mini Sausage Rolls from the OK Pie Shop.

Being the only one home in our end of the house.

The music of the late 90s and early 00s.

Looking for shoes and finding yarn.

Making clothes without a pattern, because if there's no right way, then there's no wrong way either.

Having an "ironic" hot pink mullet skirt.

And a backup dress just in case the so-bad-it's-super-freaking-awesome mullet skirt is too ironic for tomorrow night.

Finding a full bobbin of the colour you want.

The fact that bacon tastes better cold.

How I don't have to shave this week, because I got a wax last week.

The Vacuum Sealer.

Call Me Maybe by Carly Rae Jepsen.

How clean my fingernails are after I wash my hair.

Lists. Writing them, crossing stuff off them, leaving them home; list are brilliant.

Hi Ho (Hum)

Well, my holidays are pretty much over. In 10 hours time I'll be back at work, for a 9 hour day, no less. I think that the first half of your first shift back should be holiday-paid too, so your first day back is a half-day, to help you ease back into it.

And yes, I know it's only been two weeks, but they've been a fairly full two weeks:

I learned how to make shoes, culminating in spending the last two days wearing a pair I made.

I quilted a mid-sized quilt, and the binding's 3/4 done too, but I've run out of pink thread.

I made (as in, fully completed) two baby quilts.

I'm about half way through 25 monsters.

I made three skirts.

I pieced and quilted a pillow case.

I cut and began piecing a 4th quilt.

I went to four parties, and a country music festival.

All in 17 days.

Worse, I feel like I'm really starting to build momentum, like if I had another week off I could fully double that output. Though I will confess, both weeks I had a Monday/Tuesday slump, so maybe I'm just imagining it.

Anyway, no photos of the grey version of the peach spotted skirt I made yesterday, because it got vomited on by Anna's dog. Luckily I had packed the peach one too, in case of something like that happening, so I just switched halfway through the night. And then my shoes really did coordinate with my outfit, since I'd made them in the same peach fabric.

I realised last night too that the skirts really really needed to have pockets (I kept putting my phone down and freaking out 30 seconds later), and even though it took me a bit of thinking today, since I hadn't done pockets in a long time, I eventually got them worked out.

Not that you can see them in the photo. The fabric is a very lightweight poly-cotton blend, that I don't love the drape of as much as the rayon, but which I love the retro browns of. The crinkle made it hard to cut straight too.

I spent a couple of hours tonight sewing the faces to the monsters, and I've found that the keys to raw edge applique are to have your machine on the slowest stitch speed, and do something else every other hour, lest you go blind and/or insane. All the black around the eyes and the big smiles is done, now I just need to do the whites of the buck teeth and then the associated mouths.

In between the two hours spent turning fabric in circles watching a needle bob slowly up and down, I cut all my HSTs for the blue and grey quilt I bought for earlier in the week.

And it seems the key to correctly cutting an entire quilt is to only use new fabric that can be replaced tomorrow if any mistakes are made. None were, and after my second hour at the monsters I laid this out.

And I'm so in love. Here it's laid out at 1.4 by 2 metres, but there's pretty much 4cm of seam allowance for each block, so it'll become quite a bit smaller. That's the worst thing about HSTs, you lose 2cm in the 45 degree seam and then if you sew with a wider allowance so it's easier to do neat points, as I do, there's the same gone again. Still, it's going to be at least 1.6m long, and that's nearly as long as me, so it's plenty big enough.

Rainbow Pants Monsters.

I had a look through my scrap bag tonight because I figure I should start thinking about the next batch of monsters rather than cramming them into a frantic 3 days come early February. Also, I was at the salvos the other day and found some fantastic handmade (the sewer had problems with the tension on their overlocker. They're not the only ones) rainbow batik pants for $3, and I think they'll chop up into some really lovely monsters.

Back to my scraps, and I was pleasantly surprised. I'd had a rummage when I was doing the last lot of monsters, but there was still a fair bit of decent stuff in there. Lots of narrower bits too, I noticed, about 10cm wide, so I drew up some more skinny monsters to use that stuff up. And while I was drawing, I sketched out a couple of four legged shapes, because most of them are a wee bit humanoid. Mainly because it's the easiest to make, but I should stretch myself, and four legs is only a little bit harder than two, whereas four arms is a surprisingly large amount more work.

I think the thing I learned most doing the last batch (other than "don't decide 5 days before christmas to make a dozen monsters really really quickly for the facebook crowd") was that I really like long arms. There's going to be a lot of long armed monsters in the next few batches.

Why do I keep doing this?

The hardest thing about dressmaking is fabric selection. Fabric selection for a quilt can be tricky, but that's purely a design thing. Even if you've got the most horribly clashing prints imaginable, as long as you're using 100% cotton with a shrinkage rate of less than 5%, you'll end up with a functioning, if not necessarily aesthetically pleasing, quilt. When it comes to making clothes though, fabric selection is waaay more tricky.

It's all about drape, see. I hate drape. Partly cause I don't really have the figure for it (ie. I'm a boobless stick) and partly because it's pretty much impossible to economically design an item of clothing with drape without a mannequin. Ever tried to pin clothes around yourself? It doesn't really work. And making the same item over and over again doesn't work either, because fabrics with drape are usually about the same price as quilt shop cottons, and the cheap stuff you use for making your practice muslins doesn't drape.

I remember now why I didn't go off and do fashion design. That next batch of monsters might get made sooner than planned. At least they always work.

Nothing, oh, sweet nothing...

I have two whole days off, and nothing very much to do.

SWEEEEET!

Well, I need to find something to wear for new years, for which I am working till 10.30pm, rushing to a co-worker's house for the event and heading home not too long after since I have to be at work at lunchtime (an early start for me even on a non-hungover day) the next day. Oh, and apparently it's going to be about 35 degrees, so no jeans and boots for me. Anna and I are going shopping tomorrow so I'll have to find something. I have plenty of clothes, but it's shoes that are the problem - I really struggle with sandals and thongs and heels. Boots I'm good at, sneakers I'm okay at, work shoes I bought the same pair 4 times to save the horror of having to find a new comfy pair for at least a year or two, and anything strappy just doesn't work on my feet.

Maybe that's why I like BnS balls so much - cause no matter what else you're wearing, you then get to chuck your nice comfy boots on at the bottom of it. I wish every outfit could be that easy.

It always ends in swearing.

Fashion is hard. I'm not talking about dressmaking here, for all that it has its difficulties, I'm talking about "fashion". Or, if you'd rather, fashion.

It's a thing. A thing that says that those shoes do not work with that handbag. That that belt is an inch too wide, that that heel is just a tad too chunky and that that waistline is a wee bit too high.

Take this skirt for instance. 1m of polytulle, 1m of hot pink cotton and a bit of zipper I had leftover from making my gym bag. 3 hours of work, cause I pinned all that runching instead of gathering it, and it's lovely. Really really nice. Pretty much exactly what I wanted it to be.

Except it's all wrong. See, I want to wear it with the top I altered last night, and a wide belt. But the top is quite long, and I'm not sure that I want to cut it down so I'd rather it be tucked in. This skirt sits on my hips perfectly, since I used the same waistband design I've used for pretty much every skirt I've made myself in the last 5 years, but oh no, it doesn't "look" right with it on my hips. Not with the belt. The belt needs to be higher. But the skirt is too big at my waist, because it wasn't made to fit there. Oh well, there's this belt, why don't we use to gather it in? The tulle is gathered anyway so you won't see it... But the band is too wide when it's up high. It's all wrong.

What I need is the same skirt but with no waistband. A bit of elastic would do the job fine. It doesn't matter that the top will be tucked in to it because you still won't see the top of it for the belt. I can make a gathered, elastic waisted skirt in about 15 minutes. If I had been able to try on my non-existent skirt before going to the effort of making it I could have saved myself 2 hours and 45 minutes.

This is why I didn't move to Adelaide and do fashion design. Squares are simple. Squares don't make me cross. Even rectangles are quite alright. If HSTs were on facebook I'd probably even be friends with them. But fashion?

Fashion can fuck off.

Not mentioned in this post: the fact that I have the hiccups.

Tonight I was going to finish work, go to the gym for my usual 42 minutes, come home and have an early night. There's a protest to attend tomorrow, and it starts at noon. NOON! I'm usually just doing the last of my sleeping then, so that means an alarm, and going "ergh" and arguing with myself that Chinese investors can have the damn forest, I wanna sleep in, and eventually getting up in time to get a terrible park, miss the first 10 minutes and not have anything for lunch, since I have to be at work a half hour after it's scheduled to finish. But I suspect it will run over time. Such things usually do.

Alas, it was not to be. Meagan and I spent an hour and a half at maccas, it still took me 42 minutes to watch an episode of Buffy at the gym, and my plan to write a list of things that need doing in the next two days got sidelines when I started, um, actually doing them.

So I'm torn over whether it's a good thing or a bad thing.

I didn't really get much of anything done though; a vague shuffling around of the mess in my room revealed a black lace top that I bought at kmart about a year ago for $6 but never wore - it had a fairly high neckline and long sleeves, but they're gone now.

I think I prefer deconstructing clothes to the actual making-them-from-scratch thing, probably mainly because that involves tricky seams, and an always-surprisingly-large amount of fabric. This I did most of the chopping in the bathroom, cause that's where the mirror is, and I just folded it over and sewed it down at the edges. It's the top half of what I'll be wearing Saturday night - the bottom half is still yet to be decided.

And no, the room's not really any cleaner.

And what did YOU do today?

I, personally, believe that anyone who owns a vacuum sealer, and DOESN'T use it to vacuum seal themselves some clean undies for in case of emergencies, is being, frankly, quite irresponsible.