MMM '13 Friday Theme Post: My Sewing Space

I am wearing me-made pajamas, which you don't need to see. The MMM photo theme for today is Your Creative Space, so here's mine. Any of you who are embarrassed by the mess in your sewing room may now relax and feel superior.
First: the beating heart from which the flow of creativity gushes forth:



It's an old computer desk. I slide the machines back and forth to get at the one I want. Miscellaneous little plastic boxes and shelves hold stuff I might need or haven't put away. Whenever I use the serger the table vibrates so much that everything falls off the back. My sewing and general DIY library is on the lowest bookshelf over the desk, where I also tape up the instructions for whatever I worked on last. In this case the instructions are actually live as I finish up Vogue 1291 which I may wear this weekend, if I also make a cami and skirt to wear with it. Yeah.
You can sort of see my pattern stash under the desk in the green baskets. Also under the desk are two grocery bags full of final exams to grade. Their very presence inspires me to sew. Or blog. Or sleep. Anything but grade.

Here is where I carefully catalog my projects:



I'll explain my system because I know you may want to adopt it. In the upper left corner, below the beer coasters and beside and below the little pink pig, is my fabric stash database. When each new acquisition comes in from fabricmart or wherever, I cut a little piece off the corner, label it with content (if known) and size, and pin it up on the bulletin board. Of course, I haven't gone back and indexed anything I had before I got the bulletin board, but maybe I'll do that now instead of grading exams … . Also tacked up are the downloaded patterns for Three Hours Past's Blank Canvas Tee and Colette's Sorbetto, and the information sheet for Sandra Betzina's pants fitting class on Craftsy. Hey, maybe I'll make a pair of pants this afternoon… . The tea towel was a gift I demanded for my birthday last year: you'll never guess how old I am. I don't remember what's under it but I'm sure it's important.

Then there's my fabric stash itself, and my dress form wearing my nearly complete Vogue 1291.



The bottom bin is for linings and interfacings, I think. I forget what the top bin was suposed to be for but I can see remnants of stuff I made in the past. Several nice active wear knits, some dupioni silk I got at the ASG convention in Los Angeles a couple years ago and a pretty burnout that Margy of a Fool For Fabric Oops, no, it was Jilly Be at JillyBeJoyful (but it's black and white!) made a lovely top and scarf of but I've just sat on for 3 or 4 years are all hanging in there. It looks pretty bare in there, actually, and I don't have a major league fabric stash, really, but fear not, there's more.

Here's my desk (aka my treadle table with a 1953 Singer 15-91 in it--the treadle machine is pretending to be a knic-knac in the living room) where I write and catalog patterns in an excel spread sheet. And grade. Next to the desk you can see another couple of bins of fabric. I don't know what is in them. The shelves hold some UFOs and bits of yarn and lace.



Then, finally, there's my … well, my, um, guest bed, which holds stuff I want to alter, or listen to, or read, or put away, or send to somebody else.



If I ever have another guest I guess I'll have to buy another bin!

I Can't Help Myself

Only last week I was complaining that all of my sewing space had become my DD's bedroom and walk-in closet. So the obvious solution is to turn the rest of my house into sewing space, right? I already had Elizabeth, my 1953 Singer 15-91, just inside the door to the family room where there is just room to open her up and let her straightly stitch. But Elizabeth seems to have spent too much time sitting up to her cabinet ankles in water or something that has rotted away a few inches of one leg, and has to stand on a folded dish towel to be level. So I've continued to scan Craigslist for a replacement table for her. Just a table, mind you. Of course not a whole 'nother machine. That would be silly.
Then I ran across this beauty for well under $50.

So pretty!

But this lovely cabinet is already occupied by a 1901 Singer Model 27 treadle machine.

She sports pheasant decals, many of them silvering, but all of them otherwise intact.


And beautiful vines on her face plate.

The belt is broken (and, for the moment, lost between here and the car somewhere) but everything turns smoothly and in silence.
Now what do I do? I'd love to get my new friend (Virginia, I think) sewing again, but I can't see using her for regular (or even occasional) sewing. The vibrating shuttle mechanism is maybe just a little too quaint, and look at the bobbins!

I think I'll move her to a place of honor (i.e., out of the way), put my 15-91 in her place and get rid of the peg-legged cabinet. But that leaves the universe out of balance, because a 15-91 can't actually be converted to treadle. Hmmm.

June Gloom

We're not actually gloomy here. "June Gloom" is the name for typical June weather in Los Angeles--foggy haze all morning, burning off to sunny in the afternoon. Every. Single. Day. It saves us from broiling under the brutal 16-hour sun of the Summer Solstice. Killer summer doesn't actually settle on Los Angeles until September when, thank goodness, the days are shorter.

But I'm a bit gloomy about my me-made June progress. Technically I'm fully complying with my pledge because I sleep each night and wake each day in me-made jammies, and carry my me-made suede bag whenever I go out. But I'm not about to post daily pix of my jammies.

I did run up a Top 4 from April 2011 KnipMode in a brown jersey remnant I picked up at Mood.



The plan was to finish it in a couple hours, put it on and take a picture, but I took what must be the world's most foolish shortcut--I did not stabilize the neckline before sewing on the facing, so FAIL. But the whole process of figuring out my size in centimeters, tracing the pattern, remembering to cut seam allowances, translating the instructions from Dutch and actually sewing is so challenging that ending up with a wadder is not too bad, paradoxically. Like doing a difficult crossword puzzle in ink and nearly finishing it.

Anyway, I declare today a victory. Yesterday I stopped at Goodwill (with my me-made bag) on my way to Costco--I'm so the jet-setter!--and bought this lovely madras dress:



I thought the fit could use a little tweaking, so I went to work on it today (switching between my sewing machine and my serger on a corner of the dining room table) and produced this:



which I am currently wearing. I removed the sleeves and replaced them with the cap sleeves from Simplicity 2580 cut fom the foot of fabric I removed from the hem. The sleeves are a little comical and I will probably reduce their size, and maybe add self ties at the high waist, tomorrow (so I can count it as another new dress) but for now I am happy.

My Sewing Space

I have a lovely long dining room table to sew on. Here you can see it stretching into infinity, and with the addition of yet another leaf, not shown here, it goes to infinity and beyond.



However, DD has moved home from graduate school with her shiny new MESM degree and all her stuff. Here is my table today.



and



and my "sewing room".



I guess it's time to do some gardening.

The Sound of Music?

I like to visit other people's blogs. In fact, one of the primary purposes for keeping a blog (for me) is to keep track of blogs I like to visit. I also like to click "next blog" on blogspot blogs, which usually drops me into craft and sewing blogs I've never seen before. What I don't like is my laptop bursting into song when I don't ask it to, particularly when I am in public (or worse, at work), but really any time at all. It would be one thing if I were surfing blogs looking for my favorite musicians, but why should I expect a sewing blog to start warbling at me? Annoying.

Anyway, not much sewing here. Can't complain--when DD visits from graduate school she lights up my life but takes up my sewing space. Did manage to stitch and serge up a slip cover for my workroom couch.
That involved about a half-mile of straight serging along the raw edge. I feel much more comfortable with my serger now. The wine helped.

My able assistant William is also becoming more comfortable with the serger. (I don't offer music, but I'm not above throwing in a picture of my cat when I've nothing to say.)

Gimme a Tee!

I am awash in T-shirts. Sports fan T-shirts. Funny (and once funny) T-shirts. Loyal supporter T-shirts. Elementary school musical program costume T-shirts. Free T-shirts. Raggedy, much-loved T-shirts. Never-worn T-shirts. You get the picture. The recent room reshuffle that gave me my work room also stirred up the sediment of T-shirts at the bottom of every dresser drawer and they have now come to rest on every available surface. I have bagged and donated so many that all the local Goodwill stores now lock their donation doors when they see me coming. But many are not fit to be given away, and others are too precious.

So I decided to make a T-shirt quilt. I don't quilt, and I don't need a quilt, and I doubt it will be a very attractive quilt, but by promising to make a quilt of all the T-shirts with sentimental value to anyone in the house I can get away with reducing the bulk of what I have to keep from a pile of T-shirts to a pile of knit squares, one per shirt. Brilliant! But it seems such a waste simply to throw away three quarters of each shirt.

At this point the T-shirt presence was coming to resemble the Cat in the Hat's pink spot--every effort to clear it up was making it bigger. I decided to cut off the bands and bulky seams and shred the rest. A week of mindless cutting while watching TV and I have this:

Actually, a big bag of this, and more where that came from. Perfect for stuffing something--but what?

How do you recycle T-shirts? What would you do with this stuff?

Setting Up Still

I mean, still setting up my workroom. I'm reasonably proud of these curtains, which I bought at Goodwill then cut in half. I turned one half up-side down and ran the rod through the curtain pocket of one half and the hem of the other. To conceal the fact that the hem was two inches while the curtain pocket was only one, I top stitched both pieces at the curtain pocket then ran a line of decorative stitching two inches from what is now the top of both sides. Like this:


My assistant William is not impressed either.


OK, now I have my room, my curtains, my familiar, my proposal and my machines:


(including the two printers under the desk, both out of ink!) What shall I do?
My goals for the summer:
1. Write at least two important (or, at least, recognizable) theoretical and doctrinal works to present at conferences and point to as the justification for my fall semester sabbatical.
2. Sew a wardrobe of pretty skirts and tops I can pull on over my lycra bicycle knickers (knee pants, not undies) when I bike to campus or any other civilized location.
3. Related to number 2 but a hair more ambitious, find a style that suits my middle-aged hobbity body and fill my closet with it. If I'm really successful at that maybe I'll start my own fashion line. I already know what I'll call it: Oxymoron. I'll carry only size Petite-Extra Large.

But first, a draft by July 2.

Curtains up!

Welcome to my blog. I'm a law professor who should be writing important theoretical and doctrinal works. I finally have a room of my own, having booted my twenty-something children out of it. That's "twenty-something" years old--not the number of children!

Will it be an office or a sewing room? Can it be both? We'll see.