Gorging on fabric and inspiration in the city

Back in early January, when everyone else was making very sensible resolutions to stash diet, I got sent to Los Angeles for two weeks for work. So, what was I supposed to do with that opportunity? Not buy fabric? So I guess I’m a yo-yo stash dieter… because I binged a bit in LA. But from now on! Oh, who am I kidding. I’m not strong enough to stash diet. But here’s my spoils, so all you more scrupulous stash dieters can live vicariously through me.

The top row is my haul from my favorite fashion district haunts: a nice teal doubleknit and a small piece of striped knit from the Michael Levine Loft, and a lovely drapey charcoal jersey, super stretchy drapey avocado jersey, and a great print poly-lycra from the FIDM scholarship store (which I finally arrived at early enough to spend more than 5 minutes there). The blue print is obviously perfect for a DVF wrap dress, and the stripe for the top of another wrap dress if I can find a good contrasting print for the skirt.

What I didn’t find downtown, though, was bottom-weights, so I actually went into Mood for a minute and restricted myself to the denim aisle only. I found a great stretch denim and a black and white striped stretch cotton for (gasp!) more skinny pants.

But by far my favorite stop in LA this time was a new-to-me place on La Brea called The Fabric Store. They’ve been a presence in New Zealand and Australia for a long time, but they just recently opened an LA store to share the goodies with us Northern Hemisphere folks. Ms. McCall of Brown Paper Pattern clued me in to its existence, and was kind enough to take me there (probably because I bugged her about it nonstop once I saw what she’d bought there). From right to left I got: an awesome pink polka dot merino remnant for a skirt maybe, a blue and a green 200g merino jersey that is pretty much exactly the fabric my beloved Icebreaker bike jerseys are made of (finally! I can make real bike jerseys!), a lighter weight yellow merino jersey for a top, and a fantastic navy ponte knit that I’m going to make into a moto jacket with a pattern from the new Burda Easy magazine that Ms. McCall also generously loaned me. Oh, and my weird impulse purchase at The Fabric Store is the green and white print in the middle – it’s a cotton voile-like fabric with a cool abstract embroidered texture under the green bird(?) print – I’m thinking summer tank top.

But lest you think that the only sewing-thing I did down south was buy fabric, never fear! I also caught the (free!) Diane Von Furstenburg dress exhibit at LACMA. (Well, kind of at LACMA. It’s in a building on the corner of the museum campus, but the exhibit isn’t on their website at all, and I found three different addresses for the exhibit online… But trust me that it’s in the building on the corner of Wilshire and Fairfax and you enter from the back.) Basically, for the 40th anniversary of the wrap dress this year, they assembled something like 400 DVF dresses and put them all on creepy mannequins on step units sorted by color in a giant room. It was pretty amazing to see all those dresses in one space, and up close! Oh, I so badly wanted to touch them though. Is there a waistline seam? How is the binding attached? Is there a pleat or a dart under there? Ah, so frustrating. But still cool. It was interesting to see how that 70s jersey hasn’t really held up very well, and that some of the older prints were fabulous and some were the ugliest thing ever. Though the more recent dresses also were pretty evenly split between fabrics I loved and fabrics I would never ever buy. But I did find the section I fit in with! (The dress I wore was not my DVF knock-off, but a similar Butterick I made a couple years ago. Gotta wear a wrap dress to a wrap dress exhibit, right?) Obviously I am attempting a creepy mannequin pose:

And there were so many different kinds of wrap dresses! I took pics of the ones I want to copy… I fell in love with the halter wrap. One or two of these are going on my summer make list for sure.

And the lace one is so. pretty.

And look at the front gathers on this one. Plus the parachute print!

Anyway, it was a really cool exhibit and totally worth checking out if you’re in the area. It runs through April 1st.

So I’d call my work trip a resounding success in the sewing department. Except, of course, for all the sewing I didn’t do while I was down there. Ugh, I’m the worst kind of stasher! My stash in/out statistics are atrocious. Well, at least the Orange Terror appreciates my efforts…

A Tale of Two Thurlows

Even after I got really serious about sewing my own garments, I never thought I’d make pants. They’re too complicated, I thought; they don’t really fit into my quick-and-dirty instant gratification style of sewing. I’ll just stick to those one-day-project knit dresses. But… then I stopped finding pants that fit in RTW. So I made some shorts. And they weren’t too bad. I still thought of pants as a big project, though – that is, until I made not one, but two pairs of pants in one day marathons. Two days, two pairs of pants. So, I guess they’re not the monster project I made them out to be.

Right before Christmas, I realised that I owned only one pair of long pants – not exactly ideal for a week-long trip to Northern Nevada. So with just a day before leaving, I pulled out the bag of Thurlow pants pieces that I’d cut out of a brown corduroy almost exactly a year before for the same reason, but I’d run out of time to sew them up back then. Not this time! So I hunkered down and pulled an all-day pants-a-thon and put them together in one afternoon and evening. Really, once you break down pants into little chunks of sewing, they’re not that hard. I just pushed through out of desperation, and I discovered that it is possible to make a complicated garment in one day, if it’s all you do… I find Project Runway slightly more believable now.

Now, when I cut these cords out last year, it was after I had only made one pair of Thurlow shorts, and I hadn’t fine tuned the fit yet. I remembered that I had added a half inch to the rise when I cut them out, which I later determined wasn’t necessary, so before sewing I trimmed most of that added length off the top. I hadn’t really remembered that I’d cut a size 10, though, or it didn’t really occur to me that my last couple pairs of shorts were on the biggish side, so I was a bit surprised to find that these pants were much too big when I tried them on before attaching the waistband. I took them in at the side seams by maybe a quarter inch, then put on the waistband and basted up the back seam. And wow, there was a lot of extra fabric in the bum. And for me to say that, it means really a lot of fabric, because I am not lacking in the bum department. After some consideration I decided to take in the back crotch seam from the inseam to right where the basting starts by about a half inch, basically increasing the back curve substantially, and that solved most of the weird bagginess.

They are, however, still just a little too big. I mean, they’re not falling off, but the additional ease of a trouser-style doesn’t play nice with this heavier corduroy, so they’re just not super flattering. (Plus, they are very wrinkled in these pictures.) Now, don’t get me wrong, they doubled my number of things-to-wear-on-my-bottom-half-in-cold-weather, so obviously they got some use, but they’re not my best work.

So I resolved to do better, next time. And although I have bravely resisted the skinny pants trend for the last, oh, 8 years or so, this incident really brought it home that maybe trousers and wide leg pants weren’t doing me so many favors after all, and just possibly it was time to see if skinny pants weren’t the evil I’ve always seen them to be. Plus I was going to an indie rock concert and, well, I wanted to blend in.

So in early January, out came the Trusty Thurlow pattern again, but this time also out came an ancient pair of RTW cropped jeans with slim legs that I love the leg fit on (but the rise is much too low, sadly, so they’re not worth copying entirely). I traced the top part of the Thurlow front and back, but – get this – in a size 6 hips grading to an 8 in the waist, something I should have been doing from the start, I think. I also increased the back crotch curve, as I had learned from the previous pair. Then I laid out my RTW crops on the pattern paper and did a quick and dirty trace of the legs, extending them to full length. I considered this a shot in the dark – after all, I’m not the sort to make precise measurements – but what do you know, it worked!

I traced and cut the pants one day, then took the whole day before I left for Los Angeles for 2 weeks (more on that later) to sew them up. Hey, I knew it was possible! And when I pulled them on at the pre-waistband stage, they actually fit. Like a glove, really. I put on the waistband and rolled up the hem and suddenly I had a pair of skinny cords that I was willing to wear. Nay, that I liked!

Now, they’re not perfect, of course. I’m having a terrible time with the waistband pulling funny when it’s attached (I really need to find a walking foot for my old-style Bernina ), so the waistband lining shows a bit in front (but I never, ever tuck shirts in, so it’s cool). They also don’t have the best range of movement in the knee-bending department, so they’re not exactly bike suitable, sadly. I think I can fix that by giving myself a little more room in the calf and thigh areas, so the pants can slide up my leg easier when I bend my knees. Oh, and in my rush to cut them out and my ever-present but somewhat inexplicable need to use fabric in as efficient a way as possible, I forgot that corduroy has a nap and I cut the front pieces and the back pieces facing opposite directions… so the corduroy is fuzzy in one direction in the front and the other direction in the back. Oops. I’m hoping this is one of those things that only sewists would notice or concern themselves with. It is, right?

And I’m not sure if I got the grainline right on the pattern pieces when I merged the top with the new leg… The seamline seems straight on my leg, but when I fold them up the legs are all twisted. Is that okay? Are my legs just that weirdly shaped?

But, oh, I have big plans for this pattern now. I’m gonna try to jeans ’em up a bit more when I make a denim pair by converting the back darts to a yoke. I already have the back patch pocket pattern that I traced off a pair of RTW jeans and used on both of these corduroy versions, and for future jeans I may try rounding the front pocket to more of a jean shape too. But the bones of the Thurlow, the waistband and rise, are such a good fit for me, I think I’ll never use another one. I’m so glad this pattern is proving to be so adaptable, and that pants-making has turned out to be not nearly the ordeal I assumed it would be when I first started sewing.

But don’t worry, I’ve got knit dresses on the brain (and on the cutting table) again, so I haven’t strayed too far from my roots…