Skip to main content

Completely Atypical

I am the queen of quick and dirty sewing. I can usually make myself a dress in about 20 minutes flat.  In garments I make for myself I am willing to tolerate a certain amount of  wonky not quite right.

My friend Shelly called me a few weeks ago and asked me me if I would be willing to make her a silk shell to go with a beautiful embroidered silk jacket that she was planning to wear at a wedding. Shelley had gone shopping for an appropriate top to wear with the jacket. What she found was expensive and badly made.

I agreed to make her the top. I understood that this would not be a quick and dirty sewing job but careful  and precise work.

Shelley and I went fabric shopping together and at Rosen & Chadick. Shelley chose a beautiful navy blue four ply silk. for those of you who don’t know all that much about silk…
Four Ply Silk
Four ply silk is a heavier version of silk crepe made with four ply yarn. A four ply yarn is made from twisting together four individual yarn strands. The resulting fabric is medium to heavy weight, smooth and flat, with a crepe finish and a good deal of luster. The fabric tailors and drapes beautifully and is a favorite for bridal usage.
It’s really nice stuff. It’s also fairly expensive. Let me correct that. It’s expensive.
Most of the people that I know who sew clothing sew muslins, that is, practice garments before they cut into expensive yardage.  I have never made a muslin.

For Shelley’s  top I made not one, not two but four muslins. I finally got the fit tweaked properly.

I was them ready to cut into the fabric. I had cut a pattern out of cardstock. I weighted my pattern down with what in the sewing world are known as pattern weights and what in my pantry are known as tuna cans.
SAM_2326
In the making of this top did things that I normally don’t do at all.  I basted the sleeves into the armscye.  I know, this is a given for most people who sew. I just plunk the sleeve into the arm ho;e and merrily sew away. The truth is, normally my slap dash methods work perfectly well for me.

I  had a slight perverse pleasure in the obsessive striving for perfection. The shirt is completed.
SAM_2327

Shelley is pleased with it.SAM_2328
Frankly, I do prefer my usual methods. It is nice though to realize that I do know how to work slowly and carefully.
Last night we ate the perfect springtime dinner.
SAM_2333
A big salad and some home made tzibbile pleztle, the eastern European version of an onion Focaccia.

Comments

Post a Comment

I love hearing from my readers. I moderate comments to weed out bots.It may take a little while for your comment to appear.

Popular posts from this blog

Barukh Dayan HaEmet - Blessed be the True Judge

In 1986, when I first began working for my synagogue, one of the volunteers was a teeny little Austrian woman. Ida was so little and cute, you could swear you could just put her in your pocket and carry her around. Ida also babysat for a little girl  in our community. When I saw the two of them running around together and laughing as if they were both four, I knew that when I had kids, Ida would babysit for my kids. In order to be sure that Ida would take care of my oldest, I told her I was pregnant at the same time I told my mother. Soon after my oldest was born,  Ida was ready. She was silly, but she was also Austrian. She had her rules. She would care for a child only until they could walk. She felt that she was too old to chase children. She would work only twelve hours a week. The baby had to be fed, dressed and ready to go out when she showed up. Ida's rules made sense. It taught me, and my oldest, the value of having a schedule. Ida and ...
1 comment
Read more

Two funerals and a birthday

 I know that it has been a while since I posted. We went to Boston last weekend to celebrate the bar mitzvah of a family friend. I may post about the weekend in a different post. Two disparate topics in one post is all I can manage today.  Yesterday was a busy day and filled with big emotions. We began the day at the funeral  of a young man who was a Hebrew School classmate of my older son's. I had such fond, fond memories of the sweet, funny, kind and exceptionally bright young man who also had terrible struggles. I kept remembering the young man both  as a delightful child full of promise and the suffering that he and his family have been through for the past many years. I sat with two women whose children attended preschool with the young man. We three held one another in our sorrow. Yesterday was also my husband's birthday. My husband is not someone who wants things.  When we were  at Bingo---the kosher version of Costco I spotted a large package of ste...
Post a Comment
Read more

It All Feels Like Yesterday

Today, an oponion piece in the Wall Street Journal had the headline These Days, It All Feels Like Yesterday. It seemed a perfect way to sum up how we live our lives these days. I have been far more willing during this Covid time to do the sort of slow going work that I tend to avoid like the plague during normal times. I have been working away on Max's tallit. I had decided to get the lettering on the atara in a new to me way. Actually, to be completely honest, this is a method I have read about since I was a kid. You draw the design on a bit of what is called "waste fabric". Then you embroider the design and then you pull away the waste fabric thread by thread. The embroidered design remains, but all of your guidelines are gone, as if by magic. I had more or less finished embroidering the letters. (There were little bits of letters I hadn't quite finished but knew that I could add after the purple fabric was pulled away.) I began by picking out all of my red basting ...
2 comments
Read more