vintage sewing stuff

A friend brought me a birthday gift the other day – wrapped in old pattern tissue paper, and it was a good indication of what was all inside! She had recently been to a yard sale, and bought all sorts of sewing stuff that had belonged to an old woman. Looking through it, I felt like I was given fragmented glimpses of the life of an Illinois seamstress.

This box originally held almonds. From the First National Bank of Chicago. And it was a birthday gift. And now it has an assortment of really big buttons, zippers that look like they’ve come out of garments, and thread and pins in a little chinaman-pincushion-box.

And the patterns of course… The look like they span at least three decades – and look at the envelopes on the top! Mail-order sewing patterns, with lovely fonts and stamps and 2 cents mailing cost. I am enamoured with the shirt-dress in the top picture – it even has a nurse uniform style! The only difference I can tell (from the tiny illustration) between that and the red dress seems to be that the cuffs are turned up, but how adorable! The black, double-breasted, 60s style coat in the second picture has also caught my eye. The pattern in the back though, with the green border on the side, promises that it’s a “quicky”, so maybe I’ll start with that one, haha! And finally, some 70s patterns, with a very maritime color-scheme. I wonder if that was planned or not!

yarn stash

Hello my yarns. Just like with my fabric stash, I started over again with my collection of yarns when I moved to Chicago last year. This might actually be the largest my stash has been in a long long time, so I’m in decent shape! I love just looking at my skeins and balls and cakes. I recently got a ball winder, and I can’t believe how fun it is to play with, ending up with beautiful yarn cakes, with textures that reminds me of honeycomb.

I have plans for much of the yarn, so hopefully (ah, twofold… I won’t be able to just stare at the pretty yarns in skein-form anymore) the stash will shrink over the winter as I snuggle up with my knitting.

• The dusty grey-blue yarn to the left is 11 skeins of Sisu, waiting for me to knit it up into a cardigan, hopefully looking something like this.
• Chunky green yarn… will become a chunky scarf (possibly plural).
• The lovely lovely, and very very thin mustard yarn in the middle is already on its way to become a light, shawl-collared cardigan in my machine-knitting class. Can’t wait for it to be all done!
• The also very thin denim-colored yarn next to it is being used for a hat and a scarf in the same lace-pattern.
• Finally, the dark grey yarn to the right is what is left-over from the sweater I frogged, only to knit a new sweater out of it. A pair of socks are underway, as well as a scarf. The lovely thing with both of those projects is that I can keep going until I’m all out of yarn! I love projects like that.

internet loveliness

My, I feel lucky! I just returned from a lovely week in Maine, to find not one, but two packages waiting for me! The first was from Elise, who had a giveaway recently when she launched her website. I was lucky enough to win the hand-bound journal, and this was inside my package:

Be still my heart! So pretty! I love the print, and I love the look of hand-bound books, so this was a good deal all around. Elise is very talented, and I’ve been a fan and a follower of her blog for a good while now. I especially like her approach to scrapbooking – use what you have, make it messy if you want, and just create.

Opening the book was just as exiting as opening the package! I got a balloon-postcard as well, and her business-card, which I think is just so well designed. She wrote about the different ones she has had here, including a picture of the backside. Just as pretty as the front, which is a feat in itself. And – notice the teal-colored stamp? It says “This book belongs to”. What a nice little touch!

My other package was tiny – a free sampler of business cards from MOO. Yep, ten free business-cards, that you can design just as you want! I thought it was a good deal, despite the little black banner they stick on the bottom. I might be cheating them out of some advertisement by trimming it off with an x-acto knife, but I won’t hesitate to do some word of mouth for them. I chose the “green” paper option, recycled and chlorine free, and I think they are just lovely.

Recognize the images? One is from the header, and the other is me being cheeky while wearing my dress pants. The pictures are a little pixelated, which is all my fault for using images that were a little too small (MOO told me they might turn out pixelated). Every step, from designing the cards, to the email updates and the package I got, was easy and full of niceness. So, I like MOO.

frogged yarn

Oh dear, I think I’m quite addicted! I picked up a sweater at a thrift-store a little while back, and while I absolutely loved the color, it was a size XL. I know some people are able to pull of the whole belted-baggy-thing with leggings under, but I realized the other day that I’m just not one of them. Since I can’t part with the gorgeous color, I might as well frog the thing, right?
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Mustard? Ochre? Goldenrod? Amber? Gorgeous!

This is my second round of taking apart sweaters – the first time I tried this was before Christmas. Like last time, I used this tutorial, which is excellent and clear, and by following it step by step, the sweater came apart very cleanly and quickly. The actual frogging of the yarn (I guess it’s technically the sweater being frogged) is the really fun part! It’s so satisfying to go ritch-ritch, and to see the ball grow as the knitted piece diminishes. Here is the thing though – the yarn is super super fine. I didn’t really stop and consider this before taking it all apart, but knitting any sort of garment with this would not only take forever, but I would never be able to achieve the same gauge as the original knit.

I’ve come across some projects on ravelry that might work (see here and here), and one option is to knit with the yarn double, as I’ve seen some people suggest. I’m also wondering if it won’t work with a machine knitting class I am taking this fall… Hm. At any rate, the frogging has been fun, and it’s yummy to just look at in the meantime!

underwear, v2.0

I’m back with the underwear! This was my first attempt, and I’m happy to report that they are all still in commission. This batch is the new and improved version, and this is what I got out of a nice, soft, size M, cotton t-shirt:

So, to sum up, I learned a couple of things from sewing up the first round of underwear (hence these new ones being improved).

• Pick t-shirts with care. Stiff is not so good because of the lack of give, soft is good, but supersoft is not better. Supersoft often means superthin too, which tends to make for a weaker fabric.
• Avoid a lot of stress on the seams. Which sounds silly because it’s underwear, and should be able to put up with a lot of wear and tear. For the first batch of underwear I attached the binding by sewing right sides together, flipping over and around, and stitching in the ditch to secure the backside of the binding. This however, meant that there was a lot of tension where the binding and main fabric were joined, especially since I used a straight and non-giving seam.
• Lay pattern-pieces on the grain. My thrifty self wants to get every use out of that t-shirt, but you will end up with a stretchier piece of underwear that doesn’t twist if you actually go with the grain, rather than randomly squeezing things in.
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Ops, I got the inside and outside mixed up on this one. See the zigzag-stitch on the binding?

Let’s get technical (skip this if you’re not too much into underwear construction!):

I used the same patterns as for the first pairs I made. The one for me has four pattern-pieces, and the one for the boy has six. For mine, there is the front and the back piece, and two identical gusset lining pieces. I sandwich the front piece between these two smaller pieces first, and sew them down. Then there is a little moebius-like magic, as I twist the smaller pieced layers before matching them up with the edge of the back piece. Doing it this way makes all the seams completely on the inside, nice and tidy. I use the neckband of the t-shirt as a waistband when I can, and since they usually are ribbed, they stretch and fit quite nicely. Similarly, I use the hem from the sleeves or the body for the binding as well. They all have a crease running down the middle already, which is convenient for matching up the fold with the top of the main underwear piece. For these pairs I sewed down the edges right sides together with a zigzag, before doing the matching up and tucking under (on the wrong side), and using a twin needle to secure the overlapping parts. This might all be a lot clearer with an image-heavy tutorial, I think! Perhaps I will do one if there is desire and interest for it?

The boy version is in many ways much easier to sew. First the two smaller front pieces go together (four pieces cut out, so two identical sets when this step is done), and then that is attached to the large front pieces on either side. The back seam is next, and at this point, I do a double top stitched seam on all seams, meaning that I sew a straight seam to either side of the pressed open seam. It’s not terribly functional, but it looks very nice. Now I add the second layer of the front piece, but seam allowances of these front panels facing each other, so it’s as nice and tidy as can be. I couldn’t find a way to tuck the edges of this piece under without making it bulky, so I left them raw and uncovered. They seem to be doing just fine – t-shirt material doesn’t really unravel. Almost done! After sewing the inseam, the hem is turned up and zigzag’ed (a twin needle would also work), and then the elastic waistband is secured with a zigzag-seam as well.
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Waistband made from the t-shirt neckband, and a nice double seam on the binding, courtesy of the twin needle.

There we go, new underwear! And what have I learned?

• Twin needles are my friends. They make a very nice, evenly spaced double seam on the right side, and a zigzag (and thus stretchy) seam on the wrong side.
• The patterns should be symmetrical. I haven’t done anything to the pattern since I traced it from an old piece of underwear, and it’s not completely even. I think the pieces will sew together more accurately once I’ve retraced and fixed the pattern.

This is becoming a ongoing project I look forward to doing – it’s pretty quick and easy to do, so it earns instant gratification points. It’s also re-purposing, and I especially like how useful the end product is! With several t-shirts in my pile, it only becomes a matter of picking which color to do next!