2023 Review

My big sewing project this year was setting up a new sewing room. I have done this before, but then covid meant everyone in the house needed a private office (and I wasn't sewing much) so the sewing room got packed up and turned into my mother’s office. When I began spending more time sewing again, the temporary arrangement of taking over the kitchen table with my sewing machine became less practical, so we rearranged once more and now I have my own room.

Unlike last time, I am now in a furniture owning stage of life. Instead of just moving the old coming-apart cupboards back upstairs, I bought new (matching) cupboards and sewing desk, and everything got sorted. Embroidery stuff is now in a drawer, not a random hatbox; the beads are in the sewing room rather than downstairs with children's crafts; some horrible fabric that definitely won't come in handy one day has been got rid of; and my sewing books are in my sewing room. It's going to take a while to get used to where everything is but it is all consolidated and ordered and I am very pleased.

As far as actual sewing goes, I started the year with a pyjama set. I reused my contour pants pattern and traced new patterns from bought pyjamas.

Then I christened the new sewing room with a Midnights themed outfit to wear to the Taylor Swift Eras Tour movie.

I ended the year with a spur-of-the-moment jewellery project, recreating the body chain worn by Sleep Token's backup singers at their Wembley concert.

Source

 I took some patterning lessons, the fruit of which should come into play next year.

Also, I finished another Bayeux scene (and started on the next one).

Time to trim the threads

The Canberra Show has come and gone. I entered two items: the Amygdala onesie and my 1830s ballgown. Because the Show no longer has the Costume or Historical categories, the only options for my garments were Winter/Summer Garment and Miscellaneous Sewing. I won second prize in both categories.

Now is probably a good time to mention that this blog is likely to be going on hiatus for a while. I mentioned in my review of last year that I had been spending more time on music and I've kept doing that to the extent that I'm pretty much not sewing at the moment. I never like it when blogs I follow just stop, leaving no clue about what happened to the person behind them, so I want to say what's going on at the moment. I do not know if this new interest is likely to last a few months, like the brief obsession I had with nuclear power plants the year before last, or 15 years, like costuming.

Here is the last thing I sewed: a quick cover for my pillbox hat so I could be a
'lady going to a funeral' at a dress up party with the theme 'Somewhere else to be'.

If I sew anything in the coming weeks or months I will come back and post about it. I miss the blogging. For now I don’t feel a need to be sewing; even though I have unfinished plans, I am (unusually for me) content with that. Maybe a silk Victorian ballgown was the final boss and I won the game. I can do this and I am good at this; it's time for a new challenge. But I also enjoy writing and without sewing to blog about, I don't have the same opportunity for that. Writing lyrics isn't quite the same thing (especially at beginner level – so don't expect to see an original song on here any time soon).

Anyway, this is my farewell, for the time being, from this particular venture. I wasn't expecting this, although I began to have some suspicions towards the end of last year that sewing wouldn't be my primary focus much longer. However I wasn’t certain enough to say anything then. But now it's well into the year and I have no sewing to post about so it seems time to put down a milestone.

2015 Review

2015 began with a spur-of-the-moment Eowyn costume that turned into a crisis of collar-design and a drawn-out quest for The Right Trim. I said in an earlier post that I had been to every sewing shop in the ACT, but I have since discovered this was a gross slander of Needlewitch which I hadn't heard of then and which did have something that would have worked.

For the Jane Austen Festival I wanted to make a couple of evening gowns but I found myself in need of a new pair of stays which dashed my plans to be ready early this year. I managed to get my Joker-inspired regency dress wearable for the ball and finished it afterwards. At JAFA I did an 1806 bonnet class where I made a Polish Casquette (using a Lynn McMasters Pattern). Later in the year I made a spencer which is now ready early for next year.

 I made a pair of pyjama pants (Kwik Sew 3882) as part of sewing lessons.

I played through the Bioshock series of video games this year which I loved. This inadvertently solved my “I can’t find any clothes I like in the shop” problem as I suddenly wanted to wear 1940s style dresses - and these proved surprisingly simple to make. I created a pattern with a number of variations and kept making new dresses. I was glad to have simple, quick projects as I spent the last half of the semester alternating between being sick and madly trying to catch up on uni and I needed something to relax with. Most of these dresses happened between 9pm and 3am at the point where if I didn't sew something I would go mad. Here are the individual blog posts: maroon, light blue, navy blue and teal.

Finally, here is the progress on my Bayeux tapestry dress. This year I finished the Church and these horses. Filling in the horses takes so much thread (and time).

In non-sewing news: I am finally finished with Uni! This year I completed a double degree in History and IT. (All together now: "That's an interesting combination!")

This is my tenth year of making costumes. And having come as far as I think I can under my own tutelage I started having lessons and they've been great. I now press and finish seams better; I use notches; I use a whole variety of new and different tools; I know how to treat my sewing machine better...

Speaking of sewing machines: I got a new one this year. My 1976 Husqvarna 2000, inherited from my Great Aunt, finally gave out after a long and full life. I now have a Brother NV610 which, so far, I am pleased with.

There were other changes to my sewing arrangements this year. We rearranged the house a bit so I now have a sewing-only sewing room far enough away from everyone else that I can sew late into the night whenever the insomnia takes me. We reorganised the pattern stash to be more accessible. My mum and I swapped sewing cabinets too. So basically my sewing setup now is all of the new. And I got a garment steamer. I love my garment steamer.

This was a year of plans that did not eventuate, starting with Eowyn taking two months longer than it was meant to. I was not planning to be sick all the time either. It wasn't anything serious but the time-out being sick followed by catching up on study really threw the last five months for me. There were several months this year which I pretty much slept through. When I finally had a chance to look seriously at the hardware for my Assassin's Creed costume I found that the method I was expecting to use wouldn't work. I had been planning to use draw slides for the hidden blades but the only ones I could find were nearly as big as my wrist and really heavy.  And finally, I posted a list of my future plans of which I have worked on exactly none. (Usually I don't publish 'goal lists' because I know how many dresses I think about and don't make.) Of course, I immediately went off and made four other dresses not on the list. All or none of my plans may be realised next year.

A moving story

When I was working on my 1940s dresses  I did a lot of the work in the small hours of the morning. This was not so well received because the noise disturbed the other occupants of the house who for some reason like to sleep then. This prompted a decision to move the sewing room post-haste.

We decided to get rid of the table. I think its intended purpose was for cutting out patterns on but its actual use was mostly to have things put on it or under it. It wasn’t a good height for sewing work and I now have a glass table to use for tracing so I mostly use that if I need a table. The sewing room also doubled [tripled] as a dressing room (which meant I couldn’t store things in the built in wardrobe) and an art room. One of the sewing cupboards lived in the spare bedroom which meant a trip down the hallway whenever buttons or zips or patterns were needed. (Most of the patterns made it to the sewing room earlier in the year but not all of them.)

Mum is an experienced house rearranger so she made up a floor plan with movable furniture and we experimented with possible solutions before embarking on the big move.

First, the table went. It had a good life but some of the veneer had snapped recently and its usefulness was limited.

The spare bedroom was a very crowded room. As well as the bed and desk it stored my costumes and a sewing tools cupboard that didn't fit in the sewing room. The new spare bedroom is a larger room which gives guests more space to move. My bonnets and hats are displayed on the shelves and my costumes now have covers to protect them from dust and light.

The sewing room is now ONLY for sewing. THIS IS SO EXCITING. Let’s tour...

My sewing cabinet and dress form.

The stand the dress is hanging from used to support a birdcage but turns out to make an excellent hanging rack for garments in-progress or being steamed.

The ironing stand holds the iron (duh), ironing ham, sleeve roll, pressing cloth, ironing spray and garment steamer. The steamer was a birthday present and I love it. Haven’t ironed a thing since (I have pressed a lot of seams though).

Next are the notions drawers, scrap fabric boxes and mum’s sewing cabinet. We don’t sew at the same time as much as we’d like but I think we have a better chance of both fitting in the same room now. The drawers used to be behind the open door of my sewing cabinet meaning I couldn’t easily access things while I was sewing so I’m very pleased it’s been shifted.

The brown cupboard has more notions and tools. There’s a nook for in-progress projects bags next to the pattern boxes. Having the boxes stacked on top of each other is not as convenient as lining them up on a table but they are small enough to not be too hard to access. Finally, the fabric cupboard. I would like to do some stashbusting over summer (ha ha, ha) so I can fill this cupboard with a stash of useful lengths. I often want to ‘make something now’ but don’t have enough of any particular fabric.

The new room is great. No more worrying about keeping people awake; no more having to share the space for other uses; less sun in the heat of the afternoon. I don't know why we didn't think of this sooner.

Anniversary thoughts

I have now, as of September, been costuming for 10 years. At the start of the year, when I finished my Eowyn costume, I found myself reassessing my hobby. The last few things I’ve made I have been really happy with and proud of what I’ve achieved but they still weren’t as good as I wanted. I am aware that nothing ever will be – but, while over the last 10 years I’ve watched my standard of work constantly improve, at the beginning of this year it seemed to have plateaued.

I’ve felt a need to ‘level up’ my sewing before. At the first Jane Austen festival I went to I was inspired by the quality of the other costumer’s work, including these two bloggers. After that I started doing little things, like pressing seams during construction, which add so much to the final look of a garment and my quality of work improved significantly in that period.

One of my favourite things about costuming is the constant learning. With every costume you have to acquire new skills and improve your techniques. But at the start of this year it seemed to me that I was no longer doing that. My work was good but I consistently had fitting problems. I was also taking too much time and too many mock-ups to create a pattern through a guess and check method. I was sure there were better ways to do things but I seemed to have reached the limit of what I could teach myself. “I’ll just have to give it up” I thought to myself. I don’t think I ever seriously considered that – I love sewing too much – but I needed to find away to continue to improve.

These are my planned projects (subject to change at any time, etc) that I’m excited to keep improving my skills with:

At the same time, people were beginning to ask me to give them lessons or make costumes for them. Lessons were a bit awkward because while I definitely can sew I don’t have any verified techniques or knowledge to pass on. Commissioned work also posed a problem because while I didn’t want to work for free I also wasn’t comfortable with charging by the hour when I was using techniques that were inefficient timewise. I also didn’t want to charge a lot for work that wasn’t finished in a professional manner. Which, given the time cost to me that a commission represents, made significant projects for others not something I could do.

I have not done any sewing for a few months. But this is not despair – it is hope! In July I enrolled in sewing lessons but they didn’t start until the end of September so I decided to put off all projects until after the lessons so that I could use my new skills to make my costumes as good as possible. (It was also really convenient – I spent that time either being sick or desperately trying to catch up on uni because I had been sick, and benefited from not having my brain trying to figure out a sewing project as well.)

I have been excitedly looking forward to the course since I enrolled, greatly confusing everyone I told about it who all looked weirdly at me and said ‘but you can already sew’. But I knew I would learn better, more effective ways to sew and I couldn’t wait. I am starting in the beginner class but that doesn’t mean it’s all easy or just going over things I know. It’s ‘beginner’ - not as in simplified but as in these are the proper, professional foundational techniques that you need to know first, before you learn the other ones. I’m nearly finished the first class in the series and I have learned so much. I’ve also bought so much – the first lesson was on useful tools.

Loot!

Thinking inside the box

A few weeks ago I decided enough was enough. It wasn’t good enough to have patterns all over the place – some in boxes in the sewing room, others in a basket in the spare bedroom and some in drawers. Whenever someone wanted a pattern they had to look in every spot (assuming they could remember all of them). If you asked my mum, she would tell you that the patterns were divided between her patterns and my patterns but if you asked me I would say the split was between ‘real clothes’ and costumes.  These two divisions almost matched but differed enough to make everything hard to find.

I googled how other people stored their patterns and found that some people have not very many patterns and other people have patterns that are all the same size, and some people have more dedication than I do, either to organisation or interior design. I decided new furniture was not an option but that a labelled set of boxes had potential.

I looked briefly at buying boxes but they were mostly outside my budget and didn’t come in useful sizes. The plastic boxes didn’t even have straight sides – not so great for storing envelopes, which do.

Copier paper boxes proved to be the right size. They were easy to accumulate as our various workplaces go through lots of paper and have no use for the boxes. However, these boxes are ugly and the different brands don't match. I’ve seen some people online who make lovely decorative storage items and I was briefly tempted to try something similar. But I decided this would slow down the organisation process considerably – I was already fed up with the state of things – and that I am not crafty or neat enough to produce something I would be happy with. So I decided to cover the boxes with black contact which would be easy to do and wouldn’t visually clutter the room. Of course Kmart ran out of black contact before I had enough boxes covered ...

The next step was working out how to divide the patterns. There are so many options: type of garment, type of wearer and ‘genre’.  And each division should be near, but not quite the capacity of one box. To solve this problem I sorted the patterns on a grid:

x-Axis: Men’s clothes, children’s clothes, complete outfits, outerwear, dresses, skirts & pants,  tops, accessories

y-Axis: Normal clothes, ‘real clothes’ (which would be costumes to anyone else), fantasy costumes, historical costumes

The final categories are:

• Women’s Tops, Bottoms and Two-Piece outfits
• Women’s Dresses, Vests and Outerwear
• Women’s Fantasy Costumes
• Women’s Historical Dresses and Outfits
• Women’s Historical Underpinnings, Outerwear and Accessories
• Men’s Fantasy and Historical Costumes
• Children’s Real Clothes
• Children’s Fantasy and Historical Costumes

The boxes are the right size to have standard pattern envelopes neatly in a row down one side while the large envelopes and zip-lock bags can lie along the other side.

I don’t have a box for the historical costumes yet and I suspect they will need a different type of box, given that the patterns are much bigger and bulkier than any of the others.

This project is part of a larger effort to neaten the sewing room (and the spare bedroom that it frequently spills into). Most of the flat surfaces are done, just under the table and the sewing machine cabinets to go. Since we now have two new sewing machines, the cabinets are undergoing major rearrangement – and changing hands.  

The room is so much nicer without large plastic containers lying around and cluttering the floor. And last week, when I needed a certain kind of bodice pattern I knew exactly where to look for it. So I am declaring this organisation scheme a success.