Category: pregnancy

Using Slopers: Full Abdomen Adjustments 

Amanda WynnLeave a comment

WHAT IS A FULL ABDOMEN ADJUSTMENT?

Ever struggled with getting patterns to fit a fuller abdomen/thicker waistline than patterns usually are drafted for? The full abdomen pattern adjustment (or, in my case, postpartum tummy adjustment!) adds more fabric to your pattern to cover the stomach area more comfortably. It adds volume for smoother fit to the body’s contours and more comfort.

I always have struggled with waistlines and the front abdominal area, and since my second pregnancy, my mommy tummy is more pronounced than it used to be. I really struggle with ready to wear sizing for the same reason – they just aren’t made for my body type, which is more like this (on my shiny new fancy croquis I painted!):

pronounced curvature of abdomen at high hip
fabric is pulled forward by full abdomen, shifting side seams forward and causing drag lines

My body proportions lack waistline definition but also have a somewhat narrow hip structure, which causes a few special fitting issues that might be familiar to anyone with a full tummy area:

-waistbands dig in or won’t close if pants or skirts fit at the hip
-the belly pushes the front of clothing downward to settle below the belly, where it cuts in and exaggerates the curve of the belly in an unflattering way
-waistbands ride up or fall down if the garment fits at the waist because the lower body doesn’t fill out and provide resistance against the fabric at the high hip and full hip to help hold it in place.

To show this from the side view:

Hem may hang unevenly from being pulled up to cover full abdomen.

If you have similar fitting issues when sewing and/or discomfort in ready to wear, you might find that a full abdomen adjustment really helps. What follows is what works for me, and is kind of a Frankenstein method using bits and pieces from all the tutorials I’ve tried. So far, this combination of approaches has been the most successful for me and I’ll be doing a future blog to document how I apply it to a pants sloper, too. I claim no expertise on fitting, but am sharing this in the hope that it will help other sewists to get a better fit with less trial and error and less wasted sewing time and fabric.

So where to begin?

START WITH BODY MEASUREMENTS

At a minimum, you need your waist measurement (taken at the narrowest point of your torso, usually even with the elbow) and your low hip (sometimes called full hip) measurement, which measures your hips and buttocks at the fullest point. Usually the low hip is 8.5″ below the waist.

The usual approaches are to choose the pattern based on at least one of these measurements, adjusting to fit the other measurement if needed, but this doesn’t work as well with a full abdomen. Simply choosing a larger size adds to the front and back waistline evenly, which misaligns the side seam and loses waist shaping in back.

If you choose the size that fits your body at the waist and then reduce the pattern width to fit at the hips, you then lose the darted fit of the back pattern and will require adjustments there. Also with skirts this reduction at the hips strategy may work fine, but for pants it becomes more complicated. If you choose a size to fit the waist, then the proportions at the hip are going to be larger than your body. The leg proportions are probably smaller than those of the pattern, and then the complicated intersection of body segments happening at the crotch is going to be thrown off.

The other usual approach is to fit the body at hip, then slash and spread to expand at waist. While this works better, and fitting the bone structures (hip) and modifying to fit the soft tissue areas (the waist) is my preferred way to fit, this involves trial and error from the very start. I hate sewing more toiles/muslins than I have to.

The best approach, i think, is to measure the body in halves. Doing this allows you to analyze the distribution of mass on your figure more accurately, and to adjust only where needed.

One way to do this is to mark your side seam on the body on both sides, using something that won’t shift like tape or eyeliner pencil, and measure the back and front halves of the body separately. While the conventional pattern selection wisdom would have you choose the pattern based on your whole body measurement, but this approach to a full abdomen Then choose the size that fits each best, matching them at the the low hip and adjusting the side seam lengths to match. This preserves the fit of the back pattern and allows for more isolated adjustments where they are needed on the body.

With a full abdomen adjustment, there is another consideration when adapting the pattern to your measurements: the high hip (4-4.5″ below the waistline, approximately midway between your narrowest point at the waist and the low hip). This measurement can be fuller than the low hip, especially if you have narrow hips, as I do. For a sloper, which you want to fit closely to the body, it may seem desirable to match the body measurements exactly at the low hip to hug the body.

However, this is not flattering in actual garments unless the design is intended to emphasize the curvature of the lower stomach. For skirts and pants, it is usually far more flattering to skim over this curve rather than hugging it with fabric. so you’ll want to measure straight down from the low belly. Maria Denmark has a tutorial that illustrates how to do this beautifully (here).

Another trick to do this without a toile  or slashing and spreading the pattern is to take measurements differently at the full hip. Hold a ruler vertically flat against the lower belly, to extend a smooth line down to the full hip area to show you where to measure. It adds a little extra ease at the front full hip to skim the body instead of hugging up into the curve.

CHOOSE TWO PATTERN SIZES TO FIT FRONT AND BACK SEPARATELY

To choose sizes will require measuring the flat pattern or some math to figure out which size best matches each half of the body.  Skirt and pants have very little ease at the waist, since they rely on a tight fit here to anchor the garment in place. So you’ll be choosing the pattern pieces that come closest to your body measurements plus approximately 1/2″ of ease for movement. If you’re measuring a pattern piece, remember not to include seam allowances, omit the dart intake, and remember to double the measurement if you have to cut two of the piece. (For example, if your front pattern piece says cut two on the fold, measure the piece (leaving out the seam allowance and space inside the dart legs) and multiply it by two, then compare to your body measurement plus half the pattern ease.)

To give an example, here’s how pattern selection worked for me and my measurements (approx. 31″ waist, 39″ high hip, 37.5″ low hip):

My sloper pattern had half an inch of ease included and the side seam shifted 1/2” total toward the back. This seam shift isn’t terribly crucial, but is in theory the industry standard; if I were doing this again, I’d feel free to ignore it, but in this experiment, I was being as precise as I could.

So I chose the size equal to my back waist measurement minus the seam shift (-1/2”) plus half the pattern’s ease (+1/4”), so body measurement minus 1/4”. This worked out to be the 37.5” size, which matched up to the size I needed at the low hip in back as well. So my back proportions matched the standard pattern almost exactly.

In the front, though, my proportions are very different than the pattern proportions. My waist and high hip measurement aligns best to the 43″ size. The low hip doesn’t match up to my body measurement but is pretty close to my measurement taken with a ruler held straight down from my abdomen (as discussed above, wanting to skim rather than encase that curve).

full abdomen sloper adjustment unaltered skirt pieces
My unaltered pieces are a 37.5″ back and a 43″ front. (My sloper pattern is labeled using the low hip measurement instead of the imprecise numbering conventions of women’s clothing.)

 

ADJUSTING THE PATTERN

If this had been a typical pattern, the side seams of the front would be longer than the back. to fix this, i would align them at the low hip and trim away the excess from the top and bottom, also curving the waist slightly upward at the center if needed to give a little more vertical coverage over my belly.

To test the fit, I did a pin fitting first. I pinned the darts closed, pinned the side seams, slipped the garment on, then pinned the garment closed at what would be the zipper at the center back seam to simulate wearing it, so that if I need to adjust, I don’t have to seam rip and can adjust as I wear it.

By doing the math and measurements of body front and back separately first instead of slashing and spreading a muslin/toile version, I have a much better fit from the beginning with less work. the fit works perfectly at the waist and high hip. I have the close fit I want in back and my side seam hangs evenly at waist and high hip.

There is one further adjustment needed, though. since the front of my actual body is only wider than the back at the high hip. Since my back and front are the same size at the mid thigh or knee, the extra room isn’t needed there, and this extra space in the bottom of the skirt really throws off the hang and the side seams at the hem.

full abdomen sloper adjustment comparing front to back sizes align at hip and bottom edge
Align the pattern pieces along the center front and center back seams. Lay the back over the front. Starting at the low hip, taper the front pattern to be in proportion to the back pattern at the hemline.

To fix it, I laid the back pattern piece on the front, matching them up at the vertical line of center front/center back. At the low thigh/just above the knee I marked the width of the back piece. I want them to match here, approximately, remembering the slight seam shift adds 1/4” of width to each side of the front pattern piece. Then I use the pattern piece to redraw a smooth curve all the way up to the full hip of the front pattern.

full abdomen postpartum sewing pattern adjustment fix side seam
Blend the pattern to the smaller size at the hemline.

 

This isn’t perfect, because the grain line of the outer seam of the front is now more on the bias than the back, but this could be dealt with by cutting the front in two pieces and realigning the grain to the side seam for future garments.

Here are my final sloper pieces after all adjustments:

full abdomen postpartum sewing pattern adjustment sloper final

And that’s it! I hope this is helpful, and I’d love to hear  your tips and tricks and experiences dealing with this fit issue. Please forgive my wrinkly fabric. It’s cotton, and though it was pressed prior to shooting these pictures, my kiddos Godzilla anything on the floor:

my house is glorious chaos

I’ll be posting lots more on fitting issues, body proportions, and sloper adjustments as part of a wardrobe overhaul project I’m undertaking as we launch headlong into a new decade. 🙂 Happy New Year! Hope your holiday season was joyous and that Santa brought you all the pretty fabric,

-Amanda

Adjusting to life with a newborn, and working on a new pattern.

Amanda Wynn5 Comments

I’m excited to say I finally had my baby girl, a little more than three weeks ago now. Requisite retelling of the birth (feel free to skip): I spent a lot of time worried about preeclampsia and platelet counts, but that ended up being for nothing as that wasn’t a problem, though labor ended up being awful for other reasons (infection after my water broke, low blood pressure, fever, crappy anatomy) and I ended up having a c-section after 24 hours of labor because my poor baby wasn’t tolerating it and after five hours of pushing and a room full of nurses cheerleading at your junk, well, a c-section starts sounding pretty good. Poor kiddo had some scary complications after the stressful birth and ended up in the NICU for about five days, and I couldn’t even touch her for about two days, so that was an emotional nightmare, but I’m happy to say everything resolved and we’re all home now and  healthy and happy(ish – let’s be real, I have some emotional wobbliness while pregnant / after birth that check a lot of antenatal/postpartum depression boxes, but luckily I am able to caretake and enjoy the moments with my kids despite it).  Sleep deprived, of course, but content. The whole experience was identity-jarring, which has left me with an even more intense minimalism/decluttering urge for convoluted psychological reasons better left explored over coffee with a sister or bff, but eh. Despite my aspirations and birth plans and idealism and well-intentioned attempt at unmedicated labor (HAAAAAHHAHAHA. NOPE), birth is intense and sometimes horrible and sort of existentially traumatizing, at least for me, but I seem to have bad luck in that department. She’s wonderful, and worth it all, and her brother, too, who has been amazing adapting to everything, too. I’m so blessed in that.

Funny, though, that most of the women I know told me that you’ll know labor is imminent when you get a burst of energy and want to clean the house. That sensation is utterly unknown to me. I did get zoned in on working on a pattern for about 12 hours straight, though, which I’m still grading and testing, but hope to release very soon. The world is full of good bra patterns, especially in the boom of interest over the last 3 or so years, but it makes me feel better to work on something I enjoy and I feel much less isolated when I engage with the world via a craft I care immensely about. It’s helping me to really systematize my understanding of stretch reductions, cup sizing, grading different bra parts, and using Illustrator, so that feels like an accomplishment. Once I’m satisfied with the nuts and bolts of this one, I have quite a few ideas for less common, more vintage inspired pattern styles in the future. It’s a simple demi style bralette with slightly angled seam lines and an angled center front band, which works well with the lines of rectangular torsos like mine to imply a little curvaceousness, worked well with the belly I had when pregnant, and allows for a front of bra lace longline detail:

More to come as that comes into shape. 🙂

Adapting a Sloper to Your Measurements – The Maternity Sloper

Amanda WynnLeave a comment

I thought it might be useful to share the process of adapting a sloper pattern to actual body measurements, and what more extreme sport version of this could I do than showing how I adjusted my usual sloper size to fit the ever shifting, radical transformations of the pregnant bod? Things have shifted, swollen, and rapidly expanded in ways that I have never drafted for before. These changes are specific to certain body parts, so simply sizing up till something fits wouldn’t give me anything that fits my actual skeletal structure. I have to bust out the scissors, tape, scrap paper, and all the best swear words I learned from my time in the restaurant industry for this transformation.

I’m starting with my high bust measurement, which pre-pregnancy was 36″. (With swelling and rib cage expansion as everything gets displaced upward, my current measurement is *slightly* larger, but I’m choosing to disregard the slight discrepancy since the bones of my neck, shoulders, and upper chest are still basically the same. These bony structures are the place that most garments will hang from, so I’m choosing to prioritize this over the softer fleshy areas that have slightly swollen (or vastly expanded) where adjustments are easier to make because fewer planes of the body are intersecting.

After printing and assembling the sloper, I’m using my Body Measurements for Sloper Comparison worksheet to record the sloper measurements and my own body measurements.

front-and-back-waist-length-measurement
First, I check the vertical positioning of my front waist length, back waist length, and bust position. For my size, the front waist length of the sloper (taken from the high point of the shoulder to the waistline) is approximately 16.25.” My body measurement from high point shoulder to the area previously known as my waistline is approximately 15″. Since this is imprecise at best given my current shape, and because I know I’ll need additional length in the bodice front to cover my baby bump, I’m choosing not to adjust the waist position.

For the back waist length, the sloper measurement is approximately 16.75″ and my body measurement is 17″, so I’m not going to make any adjustments here.

bust-position-sloper-measurementFor the bust position, I measure the pattern from the high point shoulder to the bust point/apex/nipple, and the measurement is 9.5″. My actual body measurement is 10.5″, so for this area, I’m cutting the entire dart area out and shifting it 1″ lower and redrawing the side seam, and comparing to make sure the length still matches the back side seam length.

bust-position-sloper-adjustment

bust-position-sloper-adjustment-redrawn

vertical-adjustments-completed

Then I move on to the horizontal girth measurements, where things get really intense. The total waist circumference of my sloper is approximately 30.5″. My body measurement is about 41.5″ right now. The sloper measurement includes .5″ total ease at the waist for this size, so my total desired waist circumference in my adjusted sloper should include .5″ over my body measurement as well, so the total width of my personal sloper after adjustment should be 42″ total. The majority of that difference is in the front of my body, so when adjusting the sloper, most of the adjusting will be taking place in the front. From previous pattern work, though, I do know that my waist is proportionately larger than most patterns’ standard sizing, so for the sake of balanced distribution, I will add a bit to the back waist width as well.

The front waist measurement of the sloper is 16″, .25″ of which is ease, and my body measurement is 23.75″, which is 7.75″ of difference. If I add .25″ of ease, the total front adjustment I need is 8″. (I want to maintain at least about a half inch of wearing ease in my pattern, I want to be sure to add about a half inch over my total body measurement at the waist.)

24″ actual body and ease – 16″ sloper measurement = 8″ adjustment needed to full front bodice at the waist.

So I’ll be adding 8″ of extra width to the front waist, total. Since I’m working with the pattern piece that covers a quarter of the body, I’ll only be adding 4″ to the actual pattern piece. (All of these changes will be doubled in the actual fabric since this piece is cut out twice.)

For the pregnancy shape, the front waist darts are definitely not needed, (unless you’re going for something super fitted at the underbust, in which case you could shorten the dart to the length needed and end it higher, well above the waist). For my current purposes, I don’t need the dart at all. It’s 1″ wide at the waistline, so eliminating this dart adds 2″ of total width to the front bodice, or 1″ of the needed 4″ width in the quarter body pattern piece.

I still need to add 3″ to the quarter body front bodice piece, or 6″ to the full front bodice, at the waist. To determine where and how to add this extra width, I’m going to consider what amount I need for the back as well. The sloper measurement is 14.5″ in back, which is .25″ ease. My body measurement at the back waist is 17.75″. If I add .25″ to that body measurement for ease, the width I want the back waist to be is 18″. So for the back, the total adjustment I need is going to be:

18″ actual body and ease – 14.5″ sloper measurement = 3.5″ adjustment needed to full back bodice at the waist.

This means I’ll need 1.75″ added to the quarter body back pattern piece. The back dart is 1.25″ wide at the waist line, so one possibility would be to eliminate it, but I don’t want to do that and entirely lose the shaping it provides. Though my waist is wider than typical proportions, my back definitely does have curvature there that a dart allows the fabric to follow. I may narrow it slightly to add some width, but I’ll wait to see how much. Another possibility would be to slash and spread the pattern along something like a princess line hinged at the underarm area, but this is probably more complicated than what I need, and would involve changing the hip, too.

For the sake of simplicity and trying to add girth to the pattern in a way similar to the rectangular body shape I actually have, I’m going to reduce the waistline at the side seam by straightening it, making the same adjustment to the front bodice side seam, because those pieces must match in length and their alignment is crucial to the balance of the final pattern. This adjustment adds 1.25″ width to my quarter body pattern pieces in back and front. The remaining amount I need to add at the waist is .5″ to the quarter body back piece and 1.75″ to the quarter body front piece.

side-seam-adjustment

To finish the waist adjustment to the back, I’m going to narrow my back dart width by .5″, leaving me with a .75″ back dart for shaping. To finish the waist adjustment to the front, I’m going to add to the center front by essentially slashing and spreading along the line where the dart was to add space for the additional body volume here.
I want to slash and spread enough to make the waistline 1.75″ larger. (Interestingly, in historical patterns, the center front seam often was curved along this line. To me, this seems like a potentially more accurate two dimensional depiction of the actual body shape in the front of the torso, which is rarely flat, unless you’re very athletic and far more disciplined about food than I.) Another benefit to this pattern adjustment is that in the future, when/if/to whatever extent my body does return to normal, having a center front bodice seam will allow for easy repeat alterations, so my maternity wear isn’t necessarily going to be relegated to the back of the closet for the rest of time, but can shrink back down with me as needed.

all-waistline-adjustments

Next, I want to look at the high hip. The industry standard for this measurement is approximately 4″ below the waistline, with the full hip approximately 8″ below the waist, though of course this varies from person to person and between different figure types. I want to compare the high hip of the sloper (36″, .5″ of which is ease) to my high hip body measurement (39″), remembering to add .5″ of ease to my body measurement. I know from previous pattern work and from my belly bump that the entirety of this discrepancy is in the front of the pattern.

39.5″ actual body and ease – 36″ sloper measurement = 3.5″ adjustment needed to full front bodice at the high hip.

This will be 1.75″ needed in the quarter body front pattern piece. If I weren’t pregnant, I would probably slash and spread outward at the side seam to add the needed amount, but since the protrusion of my figure is along the center line, I’m going to add it to the center instead. Since I already slashed and spread at the waist to angle the sloper pattern outward and didn’t yet adjust the hip area, I can just measure this amount and alter the center front curvature to add or reduce as needed here. The amount that was already added at the hip by my previous waist adjustments works just fine here.

high-hip-adjusted

Then I want to look at the low hip measurement, which is approximately 8″ below the waist, give or take based on height and figure type. In my case, and in the case of any full abdomen to some extent, since the belly bump expands both vertically and horizontally, it will be a bit lower than this, especially in the center front. I’ll be adding extra length to the bottom center front to cover everything. The sloper measures 39.5″ here, with .5″ of that being ease. My body measurement is 41″ here. So I’ll add ease to the body measurement and then calculate to find my needed adjustment:

41.5″ actual body and ease – 39.5″ sloper measurement = 2″ adjustment needed to full front bodice.

So I only need to add 1″ horizontally to the quarter body front pattern piece at the low hip. My previous waist slash and spread adjustment angled the low hip line outward more than this, so I’m going to curve that line back in towards the original center front line a bit. I’m also going to add length here, too. My sloper measures vertically about 9.75″ from waistline to low hip, but my current body measurement is 12.75″ here. I’m going to add about 3″ vertically to cover this.

low-hip-and-full-abdomen-adjustment

And that’s it for the major adjustments for the pregnancy belly. I’ll have to add more to the center front as I continue to expand, but the principle is the same. This is by no means the definitive way or the only way to do this in the flat pattern. Most patterns I’ve seen for maternity tend to add extra room/ease at the side seams, which works too, but in a much more drapey way that feels a bit too much like a shower curtain to me. The shape here hugs the curve, much like the cup of a bra pattern curves to encase the shape, rather than just draping over it. The downside of a center front curve like this, though, is that if the curve is bigger than the actual body shape, there will be sagging and wrinkling like a sagging bra cup. But that center seam allows a lot of adjusting as needed to happen during fitting, and changes made there are more independent of the rest of the garment than altering at the side seam might be.

Tutorial on flat pattern adjustments for maternity by Blue Hours Atelier. Click through for more on how to adjust a bodice sloper for maternity.

I hope this was helpful, and I hope that my hormone addled brain didn’t make any blatantly obvious, embarrassing simple math errors. 🙂 There are some other adjustments I do to my own sloper for a forward shoulder and broad back that I’ll probably cover in a different post soon. Happy Friday!

lazy saturday, sewing and self-soothing.

Amanda Wynn2 Comments

pretty-in-pink-lace-tulle-sheer-underwired-bra-blush-lace-1

made this today, out of nylon bra tulle, a blush floral lace, and a self drafted pattern drafted around a demi wire. I wasn’t really thinking about proportions when I altered it for the wider wires I’m using now (thanks, pregnancy body), but could have expanded the cradle / reduced the back band for a little more front band real estate, but the fit is good. My wire size is significantly larger than what would be typical of my cup size, so the proportions aren’t standard. *shrug*

Here’s an internal view:

pretty-in-pink-lace-tulle-sheer-underwired-bra-blush-lace-2

making this one is complicated! I do the band and cup separately, leaving the underarm elastic for almost the very end of the process. For the band, since doing the gothic arch in the center requires flipping the elastic, but you want to preserve the scallop edge of the lace and still enclose the seams, i find it’s easiest to work with the tulle layer separately from the lace overlay for most of the construction process. I sew the tulle cradle and lace cradle separately, only joining at the center front top edge between the cups. Then I add the elastic to the bottom edge. Once the first pass of elastic is finished on the outward facing side of the tulle, I turn it to the inside and then pin the ever loving crap out of everything to keep it in place, using the second pass to secure the lace in place. Then I baste the edges that I’ll be adding elastic to or setting cups into, because it’s easier than dealing with multiple translucent layers slipping around.

For the cups, I didn’t want to split the lace in two and then have to match up the patterns in the lace, so the lace is a darted single piece cup over a two piece tulle cup, and the lace has stretch that the tulle doesn’t. So I treat each separately, join at the top edge, and then pull and stretch the lace just slightly over the rigid tulle to align the shapes and seams as much as possible, pinning it like something from a Hellraiser movie, and basting. A lot. 🙂 From that point, setting the cups in and everything is pretty typical.

these complicated tulle/lace underwired pieces have been a great distraction. i’ve spent a few days working at being mellow. I’m in my third trimester now, which is both good and bad. i will be happy to have my body back as a sole proprietorship, and yet am keenly aware of creeping ever closer to delivery, which sucks any way you slice it, especially for a doctor/hospital/needle/invasive body procedure-phobe. not helping that my first birth experience was so terrible I swore I’d never do it again (pre-eclampsia, induced labor for 53 hours before giving up and having a c-section, endless throngs of well intentioned visitors in my room while i had no pants and no sleep, and a kiddo who refused to nurse or take a bottle and had jaundice, etc). but as al swearengen says, announcing your plans is a good way to hear God laugh. (I may soon be the first person in human history to whip out her phone and loop Deadwood clips on YouTube to get through labor.)

this time around, i have a doctor i have more confidence in, and she’s been monitoring things pretty closely. my labs in earlier months have been good, except protein in the urine, which means i won’t be surprised if another bout of pre-eclampsia is in store for me a bit further down the road. this week’s labs also showed low platelets, which is a horrifying thing to google. If it continues to trend downward it probably means no epidural because of the risk of spinal hematoma and an elevated risk of bleeding problems with delivery that make a c-section less ideal. (but really, the epidural was useless the first time anyway.) it can also be a symptom of a particularly dangerous variety of pre-eclampsia called HELLP syndrome. UGH.  So I’m trying to balance wanting to be an educated patient aware of symptoms and things to act on if they happen, and trying to stay the f**k off of google because, ummm, holy hell, I don’t need to raise my blood pressure worrying about all that. my doctor plans on watching all the physical stuff closely, and I see her in a few days, so there will be quite a barrage of questions for her. my nesting instinct is shit, but it’s kicked in a bit now that I know induction is a distinct possibility if my health gets wonky over the next 12 weeks.

on a happier note, Fetus is bouncy and seems to be coming along contentedly in there. she kicks extremely hard for 28 weeks, which I’m choosing to take as an early indicator that she is a strong, fierce little critter. she reacts to music and seems especially responsive when her brother talks to my belly, which is the most heart melting sweetness. I couldn’t ask for a more loving, gentle spirited son, and he’s so happy about it all.

so today is for researching how to make newborn onesies (i have dreams of mother/daughter ziggy stardust bodysuits, not gonna lie) and mellow, soothing tunes and playing with watercolors and trying to distance myself from stressing about things out of my control. i’ve been trying to enjoy the small moments this summer, and playing with a camera a bit more to capture them.

 

we spend a lot of time playing on the kitchen floor.
we spend a lot of time playing on the kitchen floor.
sweet kitty.
sweet kitty.

happy saturday, everybody. I hope it’s been a relaxing one all around.

Finished Object: Champagne and Black Demi Bra

Amanda WynnLeave a comment

champagne and black lace underwire bra blue hours atelier

Pregnancy is rapidly rendering my once favorite bras uncomfortable, so now that the second trimester is upon me and I’m actually able to make it through my day without three naps and seven meals, I’ve had more waking hours and energy with which to put them to use.

So this weekend I dug out my tried and true bra band and adapted it for a demi wire and a three piece, very round cup shape. I chose to make the cups out of a gorgeous beige stretch lace I’ve got in my stash and lined it with stretch mesh in a blushy skin tone, so that the cup could conform to variations in my shape depending upon planetary alignment, tidal schedules, water retention, engorgement, etc, lol. I used a slightly lighter, stretchier power net for the back band that I usually do to build in some extra give in the band, too. Thank goodness for spandex.

Now that I have a pretty solid understanding of materials and construction methods in bra making, I like to challenge myself on the finishing details, so I went all out on the interior on this one.

champagne and black lace underwire bra back blue hours atelier

I used a gothic arch on the elastic, since I’ve found that especially as my tummy expands, the elastic on the bridge rolls in a weird, uncomfortable, and unflattering way and it seems like that can cause it to look worn out over time in some of my older bras. The gothic arch is trickier to construct than an unbroken piece of elastic but I think it sits much better against the body, especially over the life of the bra. I enclosed all the seams using the mesh lining, which I think gives a great feel against the skin and a good look, too. The strap elastic is enclosed where it joins with the bra as well.

I’ll be adding this to my Etsy shop after a few more iterations and a few more tweaks on a bra size / style guide I’ve been working on, along with a few other full cradle and partial band bras. More soon. 🙂

 

love set you going like a fat gold watch

Amanda WynnLeave a comment

I’ve always loved Sylvia Plath, though I think she is a kind of Rorschach blotch that says more about the interpreter than the interpreter can reveal about who she really was. We are all such mysteries to one another, even to those most intimate to us. Biographers and scholars and angsty teen girls, 20-something poets, thirty something mothers who don’t find time or inspiration to write anymore amongst the dirty laundry and the floor needing vacuumed and the grocery lists and the car licensing due dates are all grateful someone gives their inner state such apt utterance. Her motherhood poems speak to me at this point in my life, while her father issues and black moods spoke to me in another. I think people mythologize her in unhealthy ways because of her suicide, and that bookend has made her legendary in a way that sadly eclipses her craftsmanship, not unlike Kurt Cobain and so many others.

If I remember correctly, she wrote Ariel by getting up at something like 4 a.m. on a daily basis, to have the luxury of being a mind separate from others, to work, to think, before the children she was raising without her husband awoke. It is hard to think freely in the proximity of other people, and sometimes we have to escape into ourselves, even from those we love more than our own selves.

But the dark hours of early morning are heavy, too, with the duty of parenthood. I think often of my father rising at 5 a.m., packing lunches, stoking the fire, as well as working out in the basement before his work day began. There’s a poem by Robert Hayden, Those Winter Sundays, that describes his own father doing the same:

Sundays too my father got up early
and put his clothes on in the blueblack cold,
then with cracked hands that ached
from labor in the weekday weather made
banked fires blaze. No one ever thanked him.

I’d wake and hear the cold splintering, breaking.
When the rooms were warm, he’d call,
and slowly I would rise and dress,
fearing the chronic angers of that house,

Speaking indifferently to him,
who had driven out the cold
and polished my good shoes as well.
What did I know, what did I know
of love’s austere and lonely offices?

Perhaps daughters are different, because while we may have never thanked my father explicitly, we knew the extent of his labors for all of us, and we loved him for it. His hands, too, were cracked with his labors, and calloused from years of them. We sometimes helped stack the wood that he split with a Zen-like cheer and a practiced, masterful efficiency he had developed over many years of swinging an axe. My father was an artisan, in his way, and a soft spoken, gentle man, and our home was warm, though I think sometimes of his quietness, his gaze into the horizon, and I wonder who he was to himself, what thoughts were his in his quiet mornings carved out to be alone with them.

…

Mornings are my own, for now, until the night wakings, the haze of 3 a.m. nursings begin, the blue hours of dawn and the contented murmurs of an infant become my life again. That is not a complaint. There is something deeply content about those moments, and quiet, and transcendent.

Is that quiet blissfulness merely oxytocin? Merely, as if the brain chemicals that code are experience are somehow less real for being chemical and determined by forces other than our inner monologue that thinks it is our true self? So much of the self changes in this pregnant state and the nursing, caretaking state later, in response to biology’s programming, chemical surges that seep into and color the narrative we tell ourselves about who we are and what matters, that it often unnerves me.  Another line from Plath’s Morning Song:

One cry, and I stumble from bed, cow-heavy and floral
In my Victorian nightgown.
With my son, I felt almost alien to myself, life-long brooder transformed by my body’s responses to pregnancy into a contentment I hadn’t felt before, though with a vulnerability snaked through it that found me sobbing over news coverage of the BP oil spill in the Gulf that had begun over the three days while I was induced and in labor (and which they’d wisely hidden from me until after the birth), news stories about the ugliness and exploitation that come so readily to us from all over the world. I felt such joy at my son’s being and yet such fear and worry for a creature that must learn about suffering and death and I, helpless to lighten the burden of such knowledge, with no answers to give, despite all my own years of wrestling with questions about what it means to be alive, to love, to try to connect with anyone in this fragile, beautiful. painful world.
For a long time, that contentment inoculated me from much of my own sadness. All it took to keep me happy was enjoying the presence and infectious joys of my happy little infant, and then toddler, and on and on. He is no less a wonder and no less a joy to me, but as the years have progressed, I could feel that biological contentment drain gradually from me and the old clouds return, but in a strange way, it wasn’t a bad thing. I felt like my mind was my own familiar dark wood again, though my son will always be the sun filtering through the canopy of leaves, the birdsong, the sweetness within it. It is easier for me to believe in my own mind and its workings when it incorporates the shadow as well as the light. I feel less sharp, somehow, when my contentments dull me.
…
So here I am again, wrestling with myself and being gradually internally transitioned into and to change far more still into cow-heavy blissfulness. And I do have so many reasons to be happy. Our genetic tests all came back with good results and all seems to be well. The test revealed that we’re having a daughter, which is what I’d hoped and perhaps even intuited, and which will probably bring a pleasant balance to our home. Maybe fewer tentacles and explosions and a little bit more fairy tales and lace around here, though with my tomboy genes and our feelings that a child should choose for itself what it likes (rather than only providing traditional gender specific options), there might just be more engines and dinosaurs and toy cars to fall over, and that’s okay, too. We heard her heartbeat for the first time yesterday, and our son was with us, too, smiling and burying his face into his dad’s neck, overwhelmed a bit with it all, but happy. Same here, really. Overthinking and conflicted and broody about it all, but in my way, happy.

reset the 1 days without pregnancy tears counter, gorilla newborn bonding is trending on twitter *sobs*

Amanda WynnLeave a comment

I was doing pretty well for awhile. I almost lost it earlier this week when I went to the grocery store and brought home a seedless watermelon with every intention of eating half of it in one sitting, cut it open, relished the smell, bit into it and almost puked because it was overripe and mushy. I cannot convey with words the depth of my disappointment as I silently carried it out to the trash.
But then this morning, this:

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Had an appointment yesterday for an ultrasound to screen for any potential genetic issues, and a short rehash of high school biology class re: chromosome duplication in the human reproductive process, although I didn’t  really process much of it because 85% of my brain was concentrated on not peeing on the genetic counselor’s couch. For the ultrasound they say that a full bladder is required, and that one should drink 24oz of clear fluid an hour before the appointment. To which I think every pregnant woman could respond by paraphrasing the Hulk: My bladder is always full. Combine a constant need to urinate with a ton of water and an hour of wait time and then my bladder was so full it was pushing the uterus back and away from view, so then I had to go empty my bladder anyway in a shared bathroom with three doors, one of which I noticed from my seated, out of reach position was opened into a hallway, but I was operating on pure lizard brain by then and relief > shits given. Such, such are the joys.

The ultrasound was really neat, though, because most of the utter bewilderment and raw panic had been burned through the last time we had an ultrasound, and because it was abdominal rather than via a big phallic rod up jammed up in my business (though they would have resorted to that if needed to get a good image). The baby was visibly bouncing off my uterine wall and it gave me all the squishy mommy feels, because it seemed so much like exuberant little bouncy house bouncings in there that I could feel sort of awed and something like happy about it all.

The genetic testing was new to me this time around, and since I’m above x age for certain statistical probabilities of risks of x,y, and z to increase, we opted to screen for everything. This is a bizarre process, because these tests are done early enough in the pregnancy that you have the feeling that if certain results come back, that there are certain very hard choices that people have to make, but even though you get a 20 minute slideshow of what human chromosomes look like and a brief lesson on trisomy, those possibilities are never mentioned and you feel like a monster for even assuming  some people do choose to end pregnancies when testing shows certain conditions about which nothing can be done. If it were only me, I think I’d not test for anything, because if a screening shows a chance of something, I’ll make myself sick for six months worrying about it, and the cortisol onslaught would probably be more harmful than any genetic potentialities. I also know that even if tests came back showing something, I don’t think I could choose anything other than continuing on and hoping against everything in my cynical nature for the best, though I don’t judge anyone’s choices to do otherwise. Heavy shit for a Monday morning.

The way they do this particular test, the NIPT (non-invasive prenatal testing), is to have blood drawn so that they can count fragments of the baby’s DNA that are in the mother’s bloodstream from the placenta. Having watched Alien: Covenant this weekend, let’s just say that thinking too much about sharing a bloodstream with another creature, even my baby, makes me queasy. Thinking too much about the mechanics of the biological structure housing me as a person makes me queasy anyway, which is why I could watch the baby during the ultrasound but when they started checking out my ovaries I stared at the wall. I know consciously I’m just the illusion of a self delicately tethered to this meat, but I don’t want to think too much about the actual status of the meat, k? And I am a huge baby about having blood drawn. Huge. I once tried to give blood in high school and passed out during the health questions they ask you *before* the needle was even in view.

So despite having had a triumph of self control and having blood drawn last week like A Grown Ass Adult without incident, unless you count staring at the wall and stress babbling like a manic standup comedian, yesterday’s blood draw was rough. Bedside manner is everything; the wielder of the needle should not try to drag me back from my disassociation from my own body by meta talk about the process which she is doing, the status of my skinny veins, or any potential difficulties she foresees ahead, lest she drag me back from my vacation in Camp Denial of Reality. This lady was a nightmare, patting my veins and sighing, rattling tubes, et cetera, while I closed my eyes and concentrated on breathing for four counts in, four counts out like just I tell my poor anxious kiddo to do when he’s stressed out. Luckily my significant other was with me holding one shaky hand and with the other steady in the middle of my back in case I lost it. We aren’t much for explicit discussions of big feelings, but I have to say that feeling a steady hand on my back even when I’m upset about something that seems silly from another person’s perspective was a pretty big deal. As is being comfortable enough to be vulnerable and visibly under duress in front of another person. I don’t do that well.

It was good he was spotting me, too, because even though I made it through the draw process just fine, after she was done and had me hold the gauze chunk on my arm, she drew it back a few times and said, “Oh, you’re a giver.” That blew my fragile little mind and I started to feel pukey and floaty and to feel an urgent need to get off the exam table and onto the cold floor where I had nowhere to fall, which came out as a seated person insisting that she needed to sit down, so they just laid me down for a few minutes. Vasovagal response, maybe, where your heart rate slows and blood pressure drops in reaction to certain triggers. Since anxiety increases the heartrate, it’s unusual to actually faint from it, unless you experience a vasovagal syncope, which I think might be why I once passed out and crashed through a book display at a Barnes and Noble job orientation. (And never went back, despite working in a book store being a long-coveted job of my youth.) Yikes. My mom does the same thing over stuff like her kids getting injuries, changing earrings for the first time, or stabbing herself in the finger sewing, which is kind of hilarious, because she’s pretty damn invincible otherwise.

But we made it through the process, and we’ll have results relatively soon. What’s also cool is that we get a gender reveal out of the deal, since the chromosomes will make that obvious. I’m glad we’ll know that soon, and have been brooding a lot on what potential differences there might be in parenting a boy and girl as a person with a lot of complicated thoughts on gender and society. More on that after I stew, for sure. Also fun was that they think from the fetal development I’m a bit farther along than the initial LMP based estimate, and my due date is now Halloween, which brings joy to my black Morticia Addams heart.

8 weeks down, 32 to go. :/

Amanda WynnLeave a comment

We had the first prenatal visit and ultrasound a few days ago, which has helped, in that I have gone two whole actual days without uncontrollably sobbing every 3 hours. It’s good to feel some agency or some control over my emotions for now, and to feel actually energetic enough to want to try to do something.

The first visit was reassuring, in that I liked this doctor better than my first, in that my partner was with me throughout it this time, in that the (*gulp* transvaginal alien probe) ultrasound showed enough detail that we could see little arms moving and wiggling happening in real time. During the first pregnancy, my son didn’t become a real little person to me until much later, when I could watch him bounce around with elbows and feet and knees poking out of my belly. Sometimes the thought of a little person down there is a comfort. Sometimes, though, it induces a little throb of claustrophobia, as if this body is too crowded and I can’t escape it. Some women love it, and more power to them, but it feels a bit like being a host in an Alien movie sometimes, like something might burst out. (P.s. body horror as a genre is not working for me right now.)

The physical changes and the discomforts are more immediately obvious to me than during my first pregnancy.  I’m already showing and uncomfortable in my clothes. My lower abdomen is more sensitive to pressure, so wearing pants low or unbuttoned isn’t going to work like it did till about month 6 of pregnancy number one. I have worn pajama pants to take my son to school *twice* now, which is unheard of for someone who uses clothing as a social armor to hide behind.

So my mission for Easter weekend is to make some pants. They have to come up over the bump in the front, and for comfort’s sake, I’ll be going with a back zipper closure on pretty much everything for the next year of my life. At this point, a basic full abdomen alteration will suffice, I think. Hot Patterns has the best tutorial I’ve seen so far on how to do this (here). An illustration of the flat pattern changes from their page:

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I have a pair of very large men’s dress pants that I bought from Goodwill that I might disassemble for fabric for this one, if my energy holds up. Updates to follow. 🙂

images of mothering…

Amanda Wynn4 Comments

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This photo is from my book stash, a Mode Illustree from the 1880s, if memory serves. I love it because it seems so candid for a fashion illustration. The woman’s hair is down, which seems a rarity in these old illustrations, and the affection depicted is something universal and warm, one of the best feels motherhood has to offer, really.

But there are many feels in motherhood, and people don’t usually talk much about the not-so-pretty ones outside of Roseanne reruns or feminist discourse about the economics of human labor. Somehow it seems rude to talk about the less than blissful elements without airbrushing them away with platitudes. It is all worth it, of course, but for those of us with a gloomier turn or problems with touch or physical proximity, there is much to keep to ourselves.

I have my first doctor’s appointment in about two weeks, at which point I’ll be nearly 8 weeks, and I have a laundry list of things to tell her. Please don’t worry if I cry every time I get off of the scale, it’s fine, I just get upset. I always get upset after a pelvic exam, please don’t be alarmed. It’s an invasion of body boundaries thing. Rationally, I completely understand the necessity of what you’re doing and I want it to be done, but I can’t help crying at the feeling of being overrun physically. My pulse goes crazy at the doctor. It’s an anxiety thing, I promise. I’ve had an EKG done with my GP over this. Needles sometimes make me pass out. I’m sorry I’m so intense. I don’t want to be this way and am deeply embarrassed by all of the above.

Maybe it would be different if my being felt less defined by its physicality than it does at this moment, but somehow, pregnancy makes me feel reduced to it, caged by its hormonal upswells and digestive tempests, an automaton that can’t help dropping into sleep mode when resources so often deplete. Capsules to take, pressures to measure, fluids to fill. I wonder if it’s similar to the frustrations of aging, when the will is strong but the body takes primacy with pained joints, physical constraints and dangers, easier fatigue.  I can sympathize with that kind of frustration.

I have a sister who loves being pregnant and who is master of her domicile in a way that I can only marvel at. Sometimes I wonder if it is possible to be allergic to progesterone and that’s why I fall into an almost immediate depression while my sister beams with excitement and enjoyment of the feeling of bringing another person into the world. I understand her reasoning for her feelings, but those buoyancies and happy forward lookings can’t cut through the fog of whatever it is that descends on me when I’m gestating a kiddo. People admonish me, “Oh, enjoy it. It will be the last time. This is a precious experience.” None of those things are wrong, but there’s also a shit ton of pain involved in this experience, and somehow, no one used this logic to gloom-shame me when my wisdom teeth were extracted, even though that was the last time I’d have that particular experience.

I feel like even writing that sentence is somehow a shameful thing. My great aunties would be appalled that I would compare a miraculous event like bringing another precious life into the world to something like having a tooth pulled. I am being flippant, really, but the fact that a certain range of feelings seems unutterable among polite people is strange to me when it’s a process that also involves me being pantless in front of strangers. I can’t feel excited yet, and I certainly can’t will myself not to be afraid. People act as if it’s a waste that I feel such apprehension. There is some truth there, in the same way that feeling any anxiety is a waste of energy. Anxiety is a deep, dark well of anguish that you fall into and climb out of over and over and over again, and though you know the process is a waste, you can’t brick it over. You know that anguish lies waiting to receive you, and there’s no vigilance or act of will that will stop your fall back in.

The cultural image of mother in our time seems a cheery, breezy thing, laughably neurotic about nesting urges or food cravings or teary-eyed at silly little domestic spats, but on the tv and the ad spread she is dressed in Breton stripes with whitened teeth in a sunny kitchen in a sleek, orderly beige house, yelling through a smile for her kids to come to a healthy, gourmet dinner that she either whipped up in a spasm of uncomplaining efficiency, or better yet, crockpotted on her way out the door to work that morning and plated up on a dish set that perfectly coordinates with her carefully curated decor.  She’s heath conscious enough to make her own baby food, but not opinionated enough to be off-putting or difficult.  If she breastfeeds, we never see the tension when she has to decide between making people with old school ideas about it feel uncomfortable or having to isolate herself and the baby for half hour chunks of time when everyone else is at the family BBQ enjoying themselves. We certainly never see her snarling obscenities at her breast pump at work, while she sits cross legged on a dirty bathroom floor to reach a power outlet and cringes any time someone tries the door.

Clearly I have nothing in common with this woman, except maybe the occasional Breton stripe. But imagine my surprise and my happiness to find this portrait among the Schlesinger Library portraits of breastfeeding women, alas unnamed:

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That expression speaks volumes to my heart, somehow. I’m unclear what cultural images of motherhood were during the Victorian era, though I suspect it must have been seen as a celebrated role if it would be photographed in this way. I know that the seriousness of her expression is probably more about the way people carried themselves in portraiture of the era. But I can’t help but love that look and relate to something in it more than the plasticized expertise or earthy granola joy imagery of contemporary maternity. That expression says I love being a mom but this shit is complicated and I have a lot of feels and I will cut you if I have to.

 

 

3,078 random maternity feels.

Amanda Wynn4 Comments

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It’s been a week since I found out I was pregnant, and my feelings on the matter depend on the day and the intensity of my caffeine withdrawals. I’ve resolved to write/sew/rant my way through it, mostly because I have way too many feels not to grasp for catharsis wherever I can find it, but also because my experience seems so out of step with that of most women I know that it makes me feel like (even more of) an alien outlier, and it might be of some comfort to other women who don’t find their experience reflected in the usual cultural apparatus of motherhood.

I hate being pregnant, though I love being a mother. I have one child already, who I love with an intensity I’d never have thought possible. He’s nearly eight. I hated every moment of being pregnant the first time, and maybe some of that was because I was younger, less emotionally prepared, less certain of my ability to enjoy motherhood or be a good parent. Or maybe it’s because pregnancy is invasive and terrifying, among other things. The pregnancy went smoothly until the last three weeks, when I had pre-eclampsia and had to be induced. I was put on magnesium sulfate that swelled me up like Violet Beauregarde in Willy Wonka, and spent 53 hours in induced, miserable, terrified labor before I was given a C-section, which I was so exhausted I mostly snored through. They had to wake me up to give me my baby boy, and it took me a few minutes to wake up enough to be into the experience, but the rest was what my grandfather aptly calls “joyful stress.”

Both times, I had some inkling before taking a pregnancy test that something was off, accompanied with the distinct sense of being sent on the long walk to the gallows by my boyfriend’s penis. He stuck around the first time and actually kind of wanted another kiddo the second time, but there’s a big difference in saying, “I’m there for you through this,” and having another consciousness embedded in your uterine wall for the next nine months. Each time, there has been the feeling of a cage door closing and shrinking walls, not because I don’t love and maybe even want more children, but because it’s inescapable, and because I will be weakened and reliant on the help of other people to function and be healthy and, from a certain point of view, to survive the next nine months myself. As a stubborn, private, recalcitrant woman, this is an unbearable feeling if I linger on it too long.

When my significant other prods our son to cooperate with going out to eat by suggesting that we need to help mom, mom will get sick if she doesn’t eat, my being chafes against what I know is intended as thoughtfulness. Mom is not a delicate flower. Mom is a force of nature to be cherished and feared. I want my son not to feel any worry and certainly no responsibility for my well-being. I want to roar like the strong tiger mother I am, but in the same moment this damnable weak body demands I sit my crazy ass down because my blood sugar is being crazy and I have the shakes and don’t want to humiliate myself in the parking lot of Denny’s.

Speaking of humiliation, let’s talk about pregnancy gas. After taking the pregnancy test and the sobbing and the alternating waves of almost acceptance, terror, grave responsibility, and tiny rays of almost-excitement, I had this really sweet moment cuddling and fell asleep with my son resting on my chest and my significant other playing video games beside us. I awoke suddenly, scared awake by my own blast of flatulence, to find my significant other right there laughing and no way to deny it. We have been together 12 years. He has heard this happen exactly once before, because I will usually herniate myself rather than fart in public, (unless it’s in front of my son, because he finds it hysterically funny).

Goodbye, dignity. Maybe I’ll see you again in 2019.

More on this to come, for sure, and much related to sewing for maternity, as I’m currently learning all about sewing for a rapidly expanding belly and hoping to strategize so that I can cut clothes wide now and reduce them later as needed, rather than buy or make clothing strictly to wear while pregnant. Maternity fashions and existent patterns make me very sad, so there will be much pattern drafting to come. Also to explore at length: were maternity corsets an evil instrument of the patriarchy, or did they provide some much needed back and belly support in the way that currently marketed belly bands do? I process all my emotions through sewing and historical rambling, so pregnancy the research project, here we go.