The Comfortable Sweats of the Soul

Hey, we had a picnic yesterday!  It was chillier than expected--thank you, 15-mile-an-hour wind--but it was dry and mostly sunny; we had a solid turn-out, and a lot of random interested foot traffic, and some fighting, and some musicking, and some dancing. (Also, it is warmer when you are dancing.)  I am pleased to say that I can reliably stumble through the alto recorder part of "Sumer Is Icumen In" now.  Even though sumer had not, in fact, cumen.

More immediately relevant: I wore the pink linen dress I cut out for last Pennsic, which I have not yet altered.  Now, I noted at the time that I thought it might need a little bit of taking in; and probably it could be, but a) I didn't want to rush into that since it seems that my body is merrily shifting flesh around and why waste all the effort to redo it all in another two months and b) I wondered if possibly this was more correct for a working dress of the era.

So I wore it as-was, had an active day of moving tables and bransle-ing and whatnot, made no cosmetic boob adjustments or anything else during the day, and then took a look in the mirror when I got home.  It was by no means the Hello I See You Have Already Met My Breasts look of the high-fashion 14th century; but it was perfectly controlled and adequate.  And it was comfortable all day--I mean, I felt a little insecure without the feeling of tightness, as my large-breasted readers will understand, but I ran (well, the shambling lope that passes for a run with me) several times during the day and felt none of the usual discomfort that goes with unsupported sprinting.  All in all, I think my theory is correct, and this is the right fit to aim for if you're a working girl (ahem).

I have so much accumulating on my plate, but work is ratcheting up to a fever pitch; I do have a go-live date for the Project From Hell[1], at least, so I know when that stress should end[2], but I've just won three more high-profile and short-time-scale projects in the bonus round, and this is sucking all the oxygen out of my brain.  I'm having to triage pretty ruthlessly at the moment; the immediate priorities are--

• the Project Management Techniques for A&S Projects class, which I find I have agreed to teach at our local A&S night next week
• creating the walkthrough video on Measuring Your Tent For Pennsic (a thing that has been historically challenging for our camp members, so I want to see if an alternate way of presenting the information works better)
• create this year's form for collecting camp members' data

I did finish a small knitting project

I'm a little depressed at the thought of all the sewing I want to do vs. what I can do.  I'm trying to break everything down into the smallest possible tasks, so even when I have almost no energy, I can still find something productive to do that gives me a feeling of accomplishment.   There's some buttons about to happen, for instance. 

[1] a fortnight from now.[3]

[2] unless it goes pear-shaped[3] and I have to apologize in the full Yakuza sense of the word

[3] AAAAAAAAAAAA

So-Called "Good Problems" Are Still Problems

it me, apparently

I had previously mentioned my sad situation, wherein the silk dress I had been laboring at for a couple of months turned out to be excessively too small; and although I did not mention it at the time, you can bet I was not just going to leave it at that.  Because that pattern had just been fit in October; according to my monthly measurements check, my numbers have not changed appreciably between then and now; and although I am as much at home to the Fuckup Fairy as the next person, I really don't think I'm so bad at my craft as to have screwed up this badly.

Therefore yesterday I packed stuff up (dress, shift, pattern and all) and laid my problem before my Local Expert.  We managed to get it laced up all the way with much labor and grunting; and after poking and hmm'ing and yanking and squishing, some facts emerged:

1) I need a finer-weight shift to wear with this dress,
2) I had in fact made the dress precisely to the pattern (go me!),
3) the pattern no longer fits me, as my back is now over an inch broader than it had been in October.

WTAF, you may ask?  Well, I have been diligently working out three days per week since early February, incorporating a good deal of bodyweight and upper body workouts.  And my monthly measurements, being for health rather than sewing reasons, have only been measuring the circumference of, e.g., my chest...not the front half + the back half, which is a significant matter in the clothing world.   Which, I mean, yes, I knew that difference is important if you're measuring someone for a fitting; but it didn't occur to me that my exercise program would change either a) so soon or b) in this way.  Again, my under-bust and over-bust total distances are still the same; but a portion has migrated from the front to the back.  

this is what mitigation looks like
or maybe it's a Georgia O'Keeffe sketch

So it was comforting to know that I had not made any errors of execution; but this did not get me any closer to a wearable garment.  We knew that we had to add more fabric at the back, but it was important to get it right on the next edit; this silk is exceedingly unforgiving, and any pin or needle holes you make are there for all time.  To get in the right ballpark, Beth traced the shape of the gap that resulted in the front when it was as laced up as much as it could be; and I will use that to cut out a strip to add in the center back seam.  I'll baste it in and we'll see if that fixes things enough to get on with.

I will also need to add a strip at the center front hem, because I tried to be clever with the CF gore and I fell onto the wrong side of the line between "clever" and "stupid".  That's a whole separate post, though.  It is also not today's problem; I need to change tracks and take a look at the dress I intend to wear for our event next Sunday, and see what edits it might need as a result of these recent findings.

Done, other than second tie

In between all this drama, I managed to bang out a coif for my dashing consort.  I am sure that I waaaaay over-thought it, but eh, I did it in one afternoon, and the next one will be even easier.  The center front looks a little bit too pointed maybe, too.  But it's not a big deal.  It covers his head and it does the job.  

Restarting The Engines

I've not done a thing in the sewing realm since my last confession.  Partially this has been due to a whirlwind of social activity; and partially because the stress is ramping up pretty seriously at work and on the nights I am home, all I have been up for is flopping and staring at the One-Eyed LCD God[1].  And I'm about to leave for a work conference, so the ball is not going to get moved any closer to the line for another week.

On the bright side, I got to see Hamilton.   

And also, inspired by one of those social outings (a trip to the Knit Night at Club Cumming), I have at least managed to start a knitting project that had been stalled for [redacted out of embarrassment] because I had broken the needle I required for it.  Serendipitously, there is a friendly neighborhood knitting store right around the corner from the club, and they hooked me up...a two-minute job I could have done at any time in the past [redacted]...but anyways, a nice small comfortable project is off and running, which is a thing I find can sometimes help me limber up my sewing mojo.  

To be fair, I have started some back-brain processing about my dashing consort's 14th-century kit.  I daresay I can knock out the shirt and cap with minimal drama, and that should give me a leg up to start worrying about the hard bits.  I would have said that about the braies, too, but a bit of desultory looking-around suggests that there are more options and directions than I quite realized.  There's what most people do, which is in essence loose linen boxers with a drawstring waist.  But that's not as who should say accurate.  Plus, accuracy is a moving target, depending on when you are in the 14th century, and whether you're doing the new-fangled tight-fitted fashions, and so on. (Here's a nice survey article of the situation.)    Since this is supposed to be field wear, I guess we should err on the side of working-man styles--? but the sort of faffing involved is something that many modern people find vexing (ask anyone who's worn a great kilt to Pennsic).   

I was inspired in my morning blog-reading[2] by a post where the author makes watercolor sketches of her planned outfits--not fashion-sketch style, but each piece individually next to each other.  To me, this is a brilliant way to think through an outfit as a whole, and how it will work together, and I'd like to try it.  Watercolors per se are probably a terrible idea for me, but I have a lot of colored pencils.  I am not sure my sketching ability is up to snuff, but let us find out.   

[1] I also had a bad dream where I was running around an event or fighter practice or something with a pourpoint in my hands that I was frantically trying to fit to someone, or anyone, and it kept getting more ragged and more flat and less-padded and embarrassing to acknowledge as my work, and and and.  Fuck you very much, brain.

[2] this is what my generation does instead of reading the paper in bed, y'all