Category: Uncategorized

Another day, another sewing fail.

Amanda Wynn2 Comments

When you wake up with the opening song from To Wong Foo in your head, you know a) you need more Patrick Swayze in your life and b) it may not be a good day, but it will be a *fabulous* one. Bring on the glitter eyeliner.

5SJJX5gAlas, my muslin / vomit green sage suiting version of the Hello, Sailor! pants are a bust due to my tree trunk of a waistline and the much dreaded camel toe that the tightness throughout my nether regions resulted in. Sigh. Light colored suiting seems especially prone to this.  Next try: going a size bigger and going with my usual natural tendency to do 3/8″ seams rather than forcing myself to do 5/8″ ones. Also, the characteristic bib type opening of the sailor pants as depicted in the pattern does have a certain kind of charm, but my buttonholes still aren’t quite ready to be up front and center in any garment. Saying screw it and doing grommet lace up closures on both sides with a button or two in the waistband on each side at the top. On another go around I want to try expanding on the idea of the bib-ish-thing of the original pattern and instead of having its weird long underwearesque fold down opening, make the whole front half + front waistband of the pants fold down in the same way with buttons along that side edge.

The way I learn is to expose myself to enough instances of the thing I’m trying to grasp that I gradually, subconsciously observe the patterns involved. My current Theory of the Pants Fly Feature is that it has to open up to the widest point of the hip but if it does that, it can open up and reattach almost anywhere along that waistline and fasten in almost any way as long as it’s sturdy. Experimentation to come.

(image borrowed from here: http://imgur.com/gallery/AqnB2)

Pattern du jour: Hot Patterns 1016 Hello, Sailor Pants

Amanda WynnLeave a comment

My current sewing project. I’ve been sewing like crazy for the past couple of months, with very little success, since my learning methodology with crafts seems to involve trying to most elaborate interesting project and failing repeatedly until it sticks. Case in point–these. I’ve never owned a pair of pants like this, so I have no working knowledge of how they work to draw on. The instructions are also pretty brutal.  But that’s why the internet is amazing because there are a few other blogs I’ve found with the same problem to draw on. Also, buttonholes–my machine is very basic, so I have no button hole function and have been winging it with chalk markings and my zigzag stitch. As a perfectionist, I tend to be appalled by the results–but then eyeing buttonholes on my ready made clothing makes me realize no one notices these glaring mistakes when they aren’t the ones making them. There are huge asymmetrical oopses all over my storebought clothing, and sewing has really opened my eyes to this (and, more on this another day, the fact that my store bought things are probably made by hand by someone overseas working in awful conditions for little money and I never think about the ways I’m feeding into that system with my happy little “bargain hunts.”)

I’m sewing it first in this ugly military green suiting that I bought online. I’m a sucker for a pretty color on my (poorly calibrated?) computer monitor, which upon arrival, tends to fall far short of my expectations. I’ve learned to buy reds that look almost black on screen to get that rich, bluish deep wine red that makes me drool. I’ve been burned a few times into buying what I thought was a beautiful burgundy that ended up being bright tomato, which isn’t my thing. So I can mangle this pair if need be in the attempt to figure out that front flap feature. No grommets this time around, though in the future I might try them for a fly closure.

Which brings me to why these pants are amazing, theoretically, for my body type. It has taken me decades of living as a woman to realize the real meaning of the fact that body types differ structurally. No amount of stomach exercise will ever make me look like a Victoria Secret model, not because I am less of a woman somehow, as I tended to assume subconsciously in my younger years. But because of fucking geometry. The mass of my body is arranged in such a way that a broad rib cage sits on a nearly nonexistent waist stacked on narrow hips. I will never have an hourglass figure, and the little belly that results from this configuration used to make me feel crappy. But I’m starting to understand the female skills of style and dressing as a systematic analysis of body types and how to flatter them. They are visual representation hacks. And these pants will be fantastic for that, since the flare at the bottom flatters my body type (apple shaped. See: Penelope Cruz, Angelina Jolie, Sigourney Weaver) and eventually when I’ve mastered the pattern I will attempt it with buttons on the side seams instead, which will take mass away from my already pronounced belly curve and put it on my undefined hips where it actually does some good.

So for today: attaching all the parts together in the right configuration. Hopefully.

Worst. Blogger. Ever.

Amanda WynnLeave a comment

In a year, this is my only blog post. I facebook things sometimes, but have the stomach for it less and less. It’s hard to log on to that or my newsfeeds and see things like rhino breed pronounced extinct juxtaposed with I saved $30 couponing or this new keratin treatment is sooo amazing omg. People act like the Internet changed everything for my generation, this strange generation on the cusp of digital nativity and free range disconnected existence. I don’t think it’s the Internet so much as the cell phone and the development of our willingness to be constantly in contact. There’s an inner wilderness that demands conservation. Though I used to blog my ephemeral overwrought gooey feelings quite prolifically, I find it difficult to put much out there these days. And the more voices chatter on, the less anyone listens, I suspect. 

Nothing Changes on New Year’s Day

Amanda WynnLeave a comment

Remember when U2 was good? Me, neither, I think I was a zygote. Ah, but once. There was a time when they were…oh, Bono, in your bemulleted Joshua Tree Days.

But about new years.

One of my resolutions is: to work more diligently at the writerly blog. I used to keep one, back before my Internet puberty hit and I began to distrust everyone and feel a need to mask my interior life a little better. And to log IP addresses.

I’m still uncertain of how to navigate the personal/public divide that the internet so problematizes. So all I can promise is some half formed essayistic rambles from time to time, and a kind of collection of things that inspire or intrigue my consciousness. A newsfeed of things on my brain. Mostly though, hopefully, a nest of inspirations.

My goal is two posts per week. Even I can manage to take note of a few things I find stimulating or invigorating or challenging to my worldview a week. A few things to incite me to engage more fully with the world than I was doing before I noticed them.

I have interest ADD, so I offer no promises what these might be. You, oh Gentle Reader, might be stuck with knitting patterns, gardening tips and memes trashing Monsanto. I also might, at times, become a bit tiresome in my gender/class warrior modes. I also might bore you with a barrage of recipes and productivity hacks and interior design enthusiasms because I’m domestic like that. You’ve been warned.

We’ll see how this all plays out.