Astrogirl

So, I made these leggings:

from Kwik-Sew 3455.

These were a snap to make, and I think I will do another pair. These are a tiny bit too big, and I think I’ll increase the seam allowance and trim when I am done.

These are swimsuit fabric, and I have some swimsuit fabric that looks like the American Apparel “small dots”, but black instead of silver. The fabric cost $10 and they want $42 for them, so I figure I’m ahead there.

I totally blew off a pattern review contest for August. I really *meant* to do it, but I got very busy with work, we did a bunch of house maintenance and I kind of lost the muse. When I’m in the mood, I’m very productive with sewing, but if I’m not, I get nothing done.

I’m going on a backpacking trip next week so I’m mostly preparing for that. I’m not sure when I’ll get back to producing clothes, but it will almost certainly be a couple of weeks.

So, I made a skirt. The fabric is something I picked up for very little at a church bazaar while visiting St. Louis. As it turns out, I also picked up a red invisible zipper at an estate sale later the same day. I bought a cigar box of zippers, and I got lucky on that one. I cannot find invisible zips in anything but neutrals without driving 50 miles each way, and I don’t plan projects much, so I’m often kind of screwed by the lack of a missing zipper. The fabric is at the bottom of the textile heap.

And my invisible zipper foot? Best sewing machine thing I’ve bought in years. If you don’t have one, you need one. Seriously.

The pattern:

I made View 2, but without a waistband. I don’t like them because I am not the same size all the time, and they make the fit really unforgiving. It does fit very well and sits right on my waist. If I lose weight (crossing fingers), it will sit a little lower but still be wearable. I love the pockets!

It’s not red because the illustration is red, honest. It’s red because I have a lot of stuff that will go with it, and it’s not black. I have way too much black. Here’s a close up of one of the pockets. They are BIG! Yay!

My sewing machine part came, and it’s far higher quality than what it replaced. The old shuttle hook had plastic parts, and this one is all metal.

Instead of talking extensively about the projects, I’m going to link to my Flickr stream. I’d probably say the same stuff here anyway. Click on the picture to go to Flickr and read my comments.

This is a Woman’s Day pattern from 1951. I recently acquired another one that I will put up on flickr later. They have the most gorgeous pictures, and I think this is rare for photos on pattern envelopes. Most are not as nice as the drawings, but the Woman’s Day patterns are the exception.

Yes, it’s another halter top, but I think this is the last one for the season. The thing is that it only takes me a few hours to make one, requires little fabric and it’s still incredibly hot here, so it’s hard to think about stuff for cooler weather.

Here’s the pattern:

I also whipped up this skirt. The inside has not a single raw edge, but I don’t have pictures of it. Not yet anyway.

I may still make that wrap around top. Inside the pattern I found pages from the May, 1951 Woman’s Day. Those are also on Flickr.

I use the hell out of the Wii Fit. I like the exercises (though I’m really tired of the music) and I love having my weight recorded every day.

When it weighs you at a different time than the previous day, it tells you that you should weigh in at the same time every day because your weight can fluctuate up to 2 lbs. during the day. So, it recognizes that you could gain (or lose) 2 lbs. that is not actual loss but simply a water weight change. If you gain more than 2 lbs, you get this dialogue:

This list is a bit too short and does not include things like “I ate too much salt yesterday” or “female related bloating”, which kind of leaves me with no answer but “I don’t know.” Once I picked indigestion because I could not figure out what it meant by that and it had no appropriate answer. I found out then that it thinks that is a polite way of saying “I’m constipated” and recommended more fiber in my diet. Whoops! On top of all that, it *knows* I exercise 6 days a week, so why does it even offer that one?

A few days ago, I registered a 1.5lb gain and it gave me the “Try to think about reasons for your weight gain” business while telling me my weight could randomly fluctuate up to 2lbs. a day. WTH?? So, I said I didn’t know, because I don’t know, and today, it gave me this shit:

Okaaaaay.

Another complaint regarding the weight tracking: There’s no trend line. Why on earth? It has all the information, and for a computer, figuring a trend line is pretty simple math. You have to just imagine the line for yourself because no one at Nintendo thought of this.

I used to record my outside exercise in the Activity Log, but since it *still* tells me that I should do other exercise away from the Wii, I don’t bother. It even asks “refresh my memory, do you do any other exercise?” and tells me about the log when I’ve just added TO the log. It makes the software seem really dumb.

I’m still trying to get a decent picture of the “zen sitting” (Lotus Focus) balance game. Hopefully, I’ll remember during the evening hours when we won’t get so much reflection off the television.

View A, the playsuit, is really high-waisted, so there’d be a lot of midriff showing if I just used the bodice. Since that is not what I’m going for, I took the pieces for the bodice, copied and extended it down. The fit is good, but I’m a little disappointed with the crappiness of the fabric, in hindsight. I bought the end of the bolt because I love black gingham and I didn’t pay much attention to how, um, lightweight the fabric was.

My top:

Side view, which is where the interesting stuff is anyway:

My sewing machine was misbehaving, but I already blogged about that. At the moment, I’m not making anything and I’ve been buried in work. Hopefully, the part will come today.

Now that I have completed the Appalachian Trail from Springer Mountain in Georgia up to Sheffield, Massachusetts (where I stopped in 1999), I need to start doing my sections up there instead of in the south. I do not enjoy summer hiking, and spring in New England is mud season, I will be changing my AT section hike from Spring to Fall because of the weather.

I see no reason not to start *this* fall, so I’m planning on doing Sheffield to Bennington, VT in September. It should take me about a week of hiking plus I will lose two days to driving back and forth. If I can afford the time, I might hike a little more since it’s a long drive, but it’s hard to predict what might be going on in September. I’ve actually done Bennington to Danby-Landgrove Road, so I’d have to jump up north farther to add more Vermont mileage on to the trip.

Fall seems pretty distant right now as it’s been really hot the last couple of days.

I have been sewing, but I’ve been too busy to deal with the pictures. Since the projects aren’t on flickr, they aren’t appearing here yet. I’ve decided to forge ahead, because I might not photograph the finished item for weeks.

I used this pattern to make a halter top from a striped knit using View D, and I already posted that.

I then made a pair of pajama pants, and I did not post about that here, but I did at pattern review.

This time I uh, made another halter top, but View B. I made it in a black stretch poplin, and looks exactly like the illustration. It’s pretty awesome, but it has a Bra Problem. My normal halter bra shows bits of bra strap up near the collar, and the balcony bra is very uncomfortable, but looks awesome.

The instructions for the collar are weird. As this was helpfully mentioned at pattern review by at least one person, I read them about four times, and got it right without ripping any seams. I’ve gotten excellent results from all the Kwik-Sew patterns I’ve used, really.

After that, I made a green suede purse out of a pretty stiff pig suede. You’ve seen plenty of pig suede at the mall if you were shopping in the 80s. It can be very nice, or it can be stiff. This is too stiff, but the return shipping was expensive, so I kept the two hides. I used the tinyhappy tutorial again. I posted all about that here.

Top stitching the purse, things began to go wrong. I went through a section with 3 layers of suede instead of just two, and there was a bad, bad noise. The needle was not broken or bent. Usually, that’s what has happened when a noise like that comes out of the machine. After that, it would do nothing but loops on the bottom side — like if there was no upper tension.

So…I took all the case pieces off and had a look. I saw nothing that looked obviously wrong, and certainly nothing wrong above the feed dogs. Tino found a movie of how a sewing machine works, watched that, came in and messed with my machine. He showed me where the problem pretty much had to be. The part is the shuttle hook.

Not only did it need oiling and cleaning (now easy to do with everything apart), the plastic parts of the shuttle hook that need to be baby-butt smooth were ridged, marked and a general mess. This meant that when the thread top was supposed to be released, now holding the lower thread in place…it wasn’t released.

As getting a replacement part looked like a long-term thing — just trying to figure out who had the right hook for my Bernina was darn tricky, and the only one I was sure of was in the UK and 50 pounds — I decided to have a go at the hook. I used a cardboard emery board because none of the nice files would fit where I needed them to go. I used a nail ridge polisher in places…and it worked, sort of.

The new hook is still on order, and I could complete one project, but I had to remove the whole mess (which does not actually require disassembly of the machine — that turned out to be necessary), file and oil twice while I was sewing a little summer top…so now I’m waiting for the part. I eventually found it on eBay for 50 American Dollars instead of 50 British Pounds. It should be along any day now.

Just this weekend, I have discovered two major store sites that hate either Mac users or their shareholders. Or both.

1) Nordstrom. No problem with searching and choosing, but the shopping cart/bag and buying procedure does not work on Safari. So, you can load up your shopping bag full of shoes and fun tights (you know, just as a random example), only to find that you can’t actually BUY the stuff.

A lot of people will walk away at this point. In my case, I really wanted the pair of shoes, so I fired up Firefox and bought those. I bought none of the other stuff as their punishment for having had their head up their ass. Also because a cooler head prevailed re: tights. They will get many many more in next month, but still, I would have bought something else.

I wrote to them, and they cheerfully (and promptly!) acknowledged that Mac users would need to use Firefox for their site. They didn’t make any excuses (no excuses is preferable) or try to tell me that hardly anyone used a Mac (a la the Gap, a really stupid move). However, they didn’t say “yeah we’re fixing that right now” either.

2) Victoria’s Secret. There are no pictures on the interior pages, only prices and drop-downs on the right. I kind of need a visual? Hello? eBay-ers do better than you, Victoria’s Secret. You should be ashamed.

In their case, I will not bother writing to them because I really doubt they would answer. I also will not be purchasing anything from them, but some of the annoyance with them is long-standing. I’m still pissed off about the puppy-or-dog thing.

Ignoring or annoying Mac users costs more money all the time as more people seem to be switching to Apple.

Next time you have the meeting wherein you decide not to support Safari with your website that could conceivably sell thousands of items a week, think “do we really want it to be harder to buy things from us?” If the answer is yes, then by all means, don’t support Macs. Go with an IE only solution or something. If the answer is no, then you need to support Safari.

As a developer, I can tell you that Safari is a piece of cake to support as it is enormously forgiving with Javascript, CSS and HTML. It’s *so* forgiving of bad Javascript, HTML and CSS that I can’t use it to check *anything* I’m developing because having it work in Safari does not mean it will work in Firefox or IE (I generally use Firefox for development and then check IE).

I can only conclude that they view Safari as some piss ant browser from a company that makes toy computers, and it is not worth supporting. As far as I can tell, Amazon has always supported it. My bank didn’t used to, but now does. Audible.com did not support Safari when I got my first Mac, and I still remember what a pain in that ass that was.

Making it a pain in that ass does not make people wish they had Windows, it just makes them mad. At you.

Anyway, the iPhones use Safari, more or less. Amazon has a special iPhone thing, but as I mentioned, they are on the ball. Most sites support it accidently.

If I want to quickly scan if, say, Victoria’s Secret has a new convertible bra before walking to that side of the mall, I should be able to do that. If I’m standing in the mall and no one has the shoes in the size I want, I might want to buy them from your website while I’m hot to do this I actually did this in St. Louis — I bought some Pumas from Delia’s on my phone after being unable to find my size in the mall.

I weep for their shareholders.

This came in the mail on Friday or Saturday.

Wow.

Today I completed my plan of scanning and re-organizing all my sewing patterns. I still have many to actually date (the vintage ones), but I have dated all the Simplicity patterns, and that seems like half the group.

patterns

more patterns

Also, we pulled out an old wood pile and re-arranged all the cars to point the otherway (east instead of at the house). Now they are all parallel parked quite neatly. The wood pile removal rousted a mouse and a big fat toad as well as a whole log of termite larvae. All have been moved far away from the house. OK, I didn’t move the mouse and the toad — I mean the wood and leaves that used to be there, along with the attendant larvae.

cars