MMMay14 Days 19 - 25

Sorry everyone, it's nearly over - normal blogging will resume soon!

Day 19
 On Day 19 I wore my "Love my 'Lisalex" dress to work with a favourite little RTW linen jacket. The dress was obviously too tight when I first made it, but this year it fits, though you really can't tell from these photos.  Not a good move to leave your MMM photos till you're on the way home, especially when wearing black!

Also, note to self: dark alley ways don't help!

I tried to get a photo out in the open but there were so many people going past - so embarrassing - sorry, that's another fail!

Photos taken by me with camera attached to a railing, bench, whatever via my gorillapod, on 10 second timer, with camera on continuous burst mode.


Day 20

Learning from my mistakes, day 20's me made was photographed at the start of the day on my way in to work.  Actually this isn't something I made, it's a top my mum made, but my MMM14 commitment lets me include other people's sewing (yes, I know that's a bit cheeky...)

 

 

Photos taken by me with camera attached to a railing via my gorillapod, on 10 second timer, with camera on continuous burst mode. 


Day 21

On day 21 I went for a walk to Circular Quay at lunch; I was planning on using the "Coathanger" (the Sydney Harbour Bridge) as a backdrop but because the lunchtime light was terrible for photos in that direction I flipped my camera around and used the city as a backdrop. I was wearing a silk twill skirt made from Vogue 1174 (which is a dress pattern, but very easily altered into a skirt pattern, and seems to suit a variety of fabrics) with an altered green silk RTW top (my mum's alterations though, not mine) and green cotton RTW jumper. I haven't been wearing this skirt lately as it had become too loose, but it only took 5 minutes on the sewing machine in the morning to add a couple of centimetres to the pleats - and whooshka, a skirt that fits again! I also hadn't realised it went with this lovely vibrant green; yet it's so much better a match than the teal blue I was wearing the skirt with last year!

Photos taken by me with camera attached to a bench via my gorillapod, on 10 second timer, with camera on continuous burst mode.


Day 22

On day 22 I wore my Vogue 1193 "Out of Darkness" dress - it probably looks OK from the front, and with a belt, but this dress is getting seriously baggy! I've included a photo that shows the side on baggy view, but if you look back at the original post you'll see this dress was meant to - and used to - fit like a glove! 

These pictures were taken in a big rush which is why I couldn't manage a proper, relaxed smile. I'd scoped out a nice backdrop on my way to get lunch at a foodcourt, but when I went back there 15 minutes later the place was cordoned off for a televised interview with some bigwig! Lesson learnt for next time: photos first, food second.

 

And here's the baggy view:

 

Photos taken by me with camera attached to a railing via my gorillapod, on 10 second timer, with camera on continuous burst mode.


Day 23

On day 23, a Friday, my manager and I had the pleasure of catching up with a colleague who's now on maternity leave and her darling little daughter.  Do you remember Marylene, who took the bulk of my photos for me in Me Made May 2013? I was wearing my "To the Gallery" vintage Vogue 8811 (reissue) dress with a boxy red linen jacket made from an 80s/90s Vogue 1325 pattern.

Marylene very kindly offered to take some photos for me, and I also got to borrow her daughter for a few minutes - isn't she gorgeous!

 

Photos taken by my colleague Marylene., with camera on continuous burst mode.


Day 24

Day 24 was just a regular Saturday with kids sport and a few jobs to get done. The weather was still beautiful, so I wore this linen top (unblogged, and I made it years and years ago; it's made from a Vogue pattern but I can't recall the pattern number and I know it'll definitely be OOP) with my Tessuti patterns Anita ponte pants and a necklace my daughter made me for Mother's Day last Sunday. I'm not going to show you a back view, but suffice to say these pants really need a longer top; the fabric is not really thick enough and it appears I've inadverdently done "leggings as pants". Oops, won't happen again!

 

Photos taken by me with camera on el cheapo tripod, on 10 second timer, with camera on continuous burst mode.


Day 25

Day 25 was a very productive day - I practically finished my Papercut patterns pleated pants! If you follow me on Instagram you'll know I started them last weekend, and there have been some dramas along the way.  After reading everyone's reviews I went boldly ahead and cut them out 2 sizes smaller than my measurements... well, guess what? The new prints of the pattern aren't as big as the original prints, and the sizing is now true! So these pants now have "feature" stripes down the leg outers, and hidden stripes down the leg inners. They do seem to fit though, which is a relief.

Oh yes, and I wore another Vogue 1174 pleated skirt in aqua linen (hmm I've made this pattern about 4 times I think...) with a grey pleated t-shirt made using a vintage Advance pattern. It's still warm weather here...

Photos taken by me with camera on el cheapo tripod, on 10 second timer, with camera on continuous burst mode.

 

I'm aiming to wear 10 me mades each 7 days in May. My tally for this week is 10 me mades in 7 days, including repeats and a top made by my mum, and to date that's 38 me mades in 25 days.

See you soon


Gabrielle x

MMM Days 4 - 10

Here goes - more Me Made May documentation, taking me up to Saturday the 10th of May:


Day 4

Day 4 was a quiet Sunday at home, with a park playdate in the late afternoon. My house is freezing, so even though it was a lovely sunny day I absolutely rugged up - in my Tessuti patterns Anita pants in "Bleach Boys" ponti (pants blogged here). Rachel has a matching pair; did anyone else make Bleach Boys Anita pants?

Photo taken by me with camera on a tripod, on 10 second timer, with camera on continuous burst mode.


Day 5

Day 5 was a day of annual leave for me, but I couldn't just laze about in ponte pants all day because I had to go visit a school and make a good impression on the staff.  I basically dressed as I would for work: my recent floral silk twill top coupled with black RTW trousers, black shoes and a lightweight black RTW coat (not pictured).

These pictures were taken on my way home from the school. The top is really hard to photograph for some reason, even up close!

 

Photo taken by me with camera balanced on my car using the gorillapod, on 10 second timer, with camera on continuous burst mode.


Day 6

Back to work. The days are getting cold on either end, but since I work short days I can mostly ignore that and dress for middle-of-the-day-in-the-city weather (which is up around 20 - 22C lately).  I wore this wild, floral jersey dress (Vogue 8511) that I don't wear too often - I worry that it's too exuberant for work, but when I posted this Me-Made-May dress on Instagram I got lots of encouragement, and I've decided the big colours can come back and stay. [Although I do need to take this dress in before I wear it again.]

Anyway, at lunchtime I took my exuberant dress for a walk down to The Rocks, to a lovely bright pink door I'd spotted last week. I attached my camera around a telegraph pole, and waited for people to pass so I could take some photos. While I was waiting I noticed a woman hanging around way past the end of her cigarette to watch me. I took a couple of photos and checked them, and then she approached. "Art project?", she asked. "No, no, it's me made May, which is a month when people who sew from all over the world wear things they've sewn and take photos to share what they've worn blah blah blah..." "Aha! Yes, art project!" And now satisfied, she was able to walk away.

Photos taken by me with camera attached to telegraph pole, on 10 second timer, with camera on continuous burst mode.


Day 7

On day 7 I wore my blindingly white Vogue peplum top (it's too white, I need to dye it - the colour is awful on me, though you won't be able to tell because it's apparently impossible to photograph) with THE pair of work pants that fit and my perfect-for-this-time-of-year unlined wool Donna Karan jacket. I love, love, love the shape of these clothes together, but they really do not want to be photographed!

My work day was hectic so I didn't have much of a lunch break to take photos. I found a simple backdrop in some shade, and found a railing to attach my camera to, but the photos I got were hopeless. I must have been making some pitiful faces as I reviewed my efforts, because a group of random passersby - fellow office workers - smiled and offered to help! Oh, the kindness of strangers :). They did a pretty good job too, considering the challenge of photographing both black and white together! 

First photo taken by passersby :) on continuous burst mode, second photo (earlier) taken by me with camera attached to a railing, on 10 second timer, on continuous burst mode.

Day 8

Day 8, and my son woke up feeling and looking ill so I stayed home with him and took the opportunity to tackle some challenging code while he read and did homework (that's right, staying home sick is not fun around here!).  I wore the orange/coral and cream merino wool top I made last year. It coordinates with the blue one with horizontal stripes, though obviously I'm never going to wear them together - but they're some of my absolute favourite colours.

Photos taken by me with camera on a tripod, on 10 second timer, with camera on continuous burst mode.


Day 9

I love Fridays! It's nearly the weekend, and my Friday workload is usually absolutely reasonable. The weather turned glorious and sunny in time for a walk at lunchtime down to the King Street Wharf before a delicious vegetarian curry at Peace Harmony on Erskine Street.

I wore my blue Anita ponti pants, found last night hiding under some RTW pants (I've been looking for them for so long!), with an ex-maternity top, the grey wool Donna Karan jacket I've been wearing nearly constantly, a colourful scarf and some equally colourful felt beads from a sale in a children's clothing shop.

 

 

Photo taken by me with camera attached to a handrail or pylon using the gorillapod, on 10 second timer, with camera on continuous burst mode.


Day 10

It's the weekend! Saturday started off busy with kids' activities, but the afternoon was lovely and quiet. I wore my Grainline Moss Mini denim skirt with everything else RTW - I was planning to wear more me mades, but was too tired when I woke up to sort out an interesting me made outfit.

Photos taken by me with camera on a tripod, on 10 second timer, with camera on continuous burst mode.

I'm aiming to wear 10 me mades each 7 days in May, and my tally for this week is 11 me mades in 7 days, including repeats (my wool jacket). And to date that's 15 me mades in 11 days. 

My wardrobe still has plenty of choice in it if I ignore fit, but the photo taking is becoming an impost and my Instagram pics are pretty dodgy. Anyway, time to head over to the Flickr pool and share these me mades with the group.


Thanks for reading!

Gabrielle x

Beating Cold Weather with Cool Pants

School holidays have just ended here in Sydney, and we took the opportunity to take our kids on a proper winter holiday - they'd never seen snow before! 

We decided to travel to Mt Hutt, near Christchurch on the South Island of New Zealand. I'd been keeping tabs on Andrea's blog through late May and June - and she was talking about really cold weather and even snow :).  

Two days before we left I mentally reviewed our clothes for cold weather.  Mr UpSewLate has an internal heating system that keeps him toasty even at ridiculously cold temperatures, so he was fine. We were all OK for ski clothes, but I wasn't sure about the non-skiing days...  how cold would it be? Would my jeans be cosy enough?  I didn't think so...

The threat of cold weather was a great excuse - I'd been planning these pants for months, even before I saw Rachel make the same pants from the same fabric! (What can I say, great minds think alike??).

The fit on my earlier Anita pants turned out to be quite wrinkly under the butt area (oh really, I didn't show you that photo?) - as usual (grrrr), should've expected it - so two nights before we were due to leave I switched to study mode and cut myself off from normal household conversations.  I studied Ruth's fitting comment on my red pants, scanned the pants pages of Sarah Veblen's "Complete Photo Guide to Perfect Fitting", and logged onto Craftsy to fast forward/rewind/fast forward my way through Sandra Betzina's pants fitting tips. And all swotted up, next morning I whipped these pants into a better shape :).



Doesn't look too cold in these photos, does it... but look past the trees, to the right. There's snow!!!

This spot is just somewhere we pulled over for photos on our way to a walk at Rakaia Gorge - to me it's a typical, gorgeous Canterbury Plains view. It was so much colder than it looks - you get a better feel for the temperature in this next photo, taken about an hour later (but excuse my ridiculous boots):

OK, OK, enough with the tourist shots, talk about the pants.

Some close ups now, and I'll describe the fitting changes I made:

Just a few small under-butt lines, + pattern matching over side seam

As I mentioned above, my earlier version of these pants suffered from under-butt wrinkles.  I always have this problem with RTW pants, and the last jeans I bought that fit reasonably well were described as a "curvy" fit.  To paraphrase Ruth's comment on my red pants, wrinkles under the bum say "you need a prominent rear adjustment" (and when you combine this with a swayback Ruth says you get the much more charming sounding "pert bum adjustment"). Translated to a ponti, I figured I could just add a bit of extra length in the curvy area of my bum.

To do this I scooped out the bum curve just a little and extended it about 2cm for a deeper crotch. The inner thigh seam had to join up to this new deeper crotch, so I did a rough bit of grading to adjust the inner thigh line. Scooping out the bum curve also removed a bit of fabric at centre bum (perhaps in the under bum area really?), and I was worried this could remove necessary fabric width across my bum, so I added 0.5cm width to the sides around hip level.

I don't seem to have clear photos to show how well this worked: there is still a little bit of wrinkling under my bum, but it's absolutely inconsequential compared to the amount of wrinkling I normally have in leggings or pants. Very small changes in the crotch curve or length seem to have a big impact on fit!

 

With a much thicker ponti than first time around, I went up a size from the size my snug measurements indicated for the full length of the front leg pattern pieces and from the hips up on the back leg pattern pieces. The muscles in my front thighs get bigger when I run, but the muscles in my back thighs seem to stay kind of inconspicuous...

I also removed the tapering from around knee level down, and because I wanted cosy ankles (and don't we all?) I added about 10cm in length to the legs... not quite enough as it turns out, so I didn't hem them.

I cut the pattern pieces individually as they would wrap around my body so I could pattern match going around my body, starting at the back left side seam. The fabric matches pretty well on the centre back, right side seam, and centre front, and reasonably well on the inner leg seams, but mismatches on the left side seam:

Reasonable pattern matching over inner leg seams

When you've finally finished taking all your blog photos, then and only then can you sit down and relax!

Longer legs to cover ankles

Phew!

And in brief, the kids also each scored a last minute NZ merino wool top that they could layer over a thermal top for skiing days:
 

My son's top was drafted using a too-small size 6-8 RTW top for the sleeve and body widths (to make it really snug) and a too-big size 9 RTW top for the sleeve and body lengths, and uses slightly smaller bands around the wrists and neck (twin needle stitched at the neck). My daughter's top used a Burda pattern (which I am feeling too lazy to dig out), simple folded over fabric rather than bands at the wrists, and a band around the neck which is not twin needle stitched down.

Although I find Burda patterns to fit my kids really well, interestingly in this case I prefer the fit of the top that was made without a pattern - looks like my kids' shoulders are narrow - and I like the separate wrist bands on my son's top.

Both of these tops got worn on the coldest skiing day (the one where I had a skiing accident and hit my head on icy snow and may have had concussion, but that's a separate story), but apparently they're itchy and can't possibly be worn without thermals underneath. 

And so concludes the ski holiday sewing!  


See you soon,
  Gabrielle x

Cleansing the Palate

A quick project after some kids' leggings (too boring for shared photos, to be honest) and before sewing anything complex: some Tessuti Anita pants made from a gorgeous ponte fabric (also from Tessuti). 

This photo proves I've been wearing them outside of the house, but it doesn't show you the wonderful colour - so unfortunately I'm back to the side balcony photos :(

 That's better - but there's not much to say about a pair of ponte pants, even if they are blue!

Let me see. The Anita pants pattern is simple and quick to make.  The shaping (crotch, legs) seems pretty realistic, and since it's sewn from thick stretch ponte fabric you don't have to get the fit exactly right. I sewed the size that matched my measurements and it's quite a snug fit, so for a thicker ponte I'll probably go up a size. For me the waist is a tad long and the legs a little short (both normal for me and easy to adjust), but the pants are ultra comfortable and I know I'll be making more.  I even have the fabric ready!

And since I have nothing much to say about sewing these pants, I'm going to ramble about the colour these pants approximate. My latest favourite - International Klein Blue:

Blue Venus, Yves Klein

I think it should also be known as Matisse Blue though:

The Fall of Icarus, Henri Matisse

Blue Nude, Henri Matisse

 

Matisse prepared the Jazz prints (including The Fall of Icarus, above left) in 1947. The painting on the right is one of Matisse's Blue Nudes, from 1952.

Klein's painting career began, apparently, as a 19 year old (around 1947?) 'on the sand with friends, he looked upward and “signed the sky” as his first piece of art'.  He started painting monochromes in around 1949, but they weren't only blue. He apparently decided to really focus on the now famous Klein Blue from around 1958, and his gorgeous Blue Venus dates from 1962.

Looks like the same blue below though, and this one's an even earlier Matisse, from 1912-13:

Portrait of the Artists's Wife, Henri Matisse

As usual I'm running behind with my posts. This afternoon was the Sydney Sewists High Tea (yay! cake!), which was just as much fun as you'd expect, and perhaps more, but I can't post about it properly till I've transferred my photos to the computer and had a sleep.

And finally, it's probably time to move... everyone else has left the building... 

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