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Why? Who knows... I find it very difficult to throw away any pieces of fabric that I love or pieces of fabric from a meaningful project (i.e., made for someone I love). I tell myself that there is enough left to make something... (True, if that "something" is a bikini for a Barbie doll!)
Maybe it's not my fault. Have the researchers on the human genome project said anything about a "pack rat" gene?
You may be thinking that the above picture doesn't look so bad. Well, as long as I'm confessing... When I opened my closet door to take a picture of my "scrap stash" I was so embarrassed that I cleaned it out first! Here are the rest of my scraps:
And this fabric:
Among other things, he is... (wait for it...) ...a musician! ;)
Here is a semi-recent school picture, in which he is wearing one of the Hawaiian shirts that I made for him:
I'll probably end up sewing his brother's shirt first, just because that pattern is so much quicker and easier, but, don't worry, I'll get to this one. It's in the queue... ;)
I was able to take my work laptop, with an "aircard", so we had an internet connection to help with communication. It did help, but what helped even more is that Ana is becoming more willing to try out her little bit of English with me. (As much as I've mangled the Spanish language, I can't imagine that she is worried about looking bad. I've got that market cornered!)
For all the course corrections that this project has taken (take inches off the top, forget the elastic waistband, drop the ruffle, etc.), I think the skirts are turning out quite nicely and they are feeling pretty good about them! And they are already excited about our next project - dresses with zippers! (vestidos con cierres) Now, if I can just talk them into cotton!!! ;)
So, these are currently in my queue... I'll actually get to them pretty quickly, in part because it really only takes 20 minutes or so to make one. Also, I'm looking forward to posting the pattern and instructions in some detail, in case anyone else could use this idea. :)
When, exactly, is "pretty quickly?" I don't know, but don't worry, I'll get to them. They are in the queue...
Life is like playing a violin in public and learning the instrument as one goes on.
Samuel Butler (1835-1902)
That quote expresses a bit of how I felt today, during our first "real" sewing lesson. I think that the more muscially gifted members of the audience MIGHT have been able to pick out the tune "Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star"... But don't buy tickets to see me perform in Carnegie Hall just yet! ;)
So, today was the day - we started the skirts (las faldas). Ana (ironing above) and Juana (at the sewing machine below) had each selected a sheer overlay and a polyestor lining. I was concerned about working with those fabrics and came up with a two-part plan to minimize the difficulties.
First, I had them use steam-a-seam (double-sided, fusible, 1/4-inch wide tape) to secure each seam before stitching it. That worked very well - much better than using pins with those slippery fabrics!
Second, I had them sew French seams (to minimize fraying). While this should help with future fraying, it did interject its own unintended consequence - overly wide seams (due to lack of experience and practice) that ate up all of the ease built into the pattern. Luckily, we are making A-line skirts, so we simply trimmed about 1.5 inches at the waist line and it looks like the skirts will fit just fine. :)
We didn't get as far as I had expected (I was there for 2 hours). We got the linings cut and those side seams completed and the sheer overlay fabric cut. Next week we'll sew the second set of side seams and do the waistband. The week after that, the ruffle and hem.
Both women were pretty comfortable using the sewing machine by the end of the afternoon - that was nice! One minor nuisance - they had different color threads - so we were constantly re-threading the machine... (I guess that's good practice for them, but it does slow things down.)
The original plan had been to add an elastic waistband, but the skirts (well, the linings anyways) fit so snugly that I'm thinking that we might just bind the top with bias tape as a kind of waistband and skip the elastic altogether.
Ana made me another homemade dessert - I don't know the name of it, but it looks good!
As much as I'm enjoying this adventure, I have been missing doing my own sewing. I did manage to cut out the pieces for my pink dress - although not without some surprises - and I'll try to work on that over the week and let you know how it goes. I can tell you this already - it looks like there are a couple of lessons for me to learn with this one!
I'm not 100% sure why I bought it. It is very wild and crazy! Plus my only experience with piecing was trying to make a square for the PR quilt - and that did not go well... But the bright colors and happy prints just kept calling to me and eventually I gave in.
I have no clue when I'm going to get to this one. But I'll make it eventually - it's in the queue. ;)
What a wonderful afternoon! Ana and Juana were excited and ready to go as soon as I arrived at their house. I quickly went over a few details, such as how much fabric they needed to buy (2 yards each), the fact that the price for 1 yard is on the end of each bolt, and how we would take the bolts of fabric to a person who would cut 2 yards for us. Then we piled into my car and off we went!
Once at the store, we wandered the aisles for a while, and they each fell in love with (brace yourself) - a sheer...
I had actually prepared a number of sentences ahead of time for just this situation. You know, sentences like: "That fabric is difficult to sew," and "I recommend you choose a different fabric for your first skirt."
But, you know that feeling when you see the perfect fabric? It was written all over their faces and I just couldn't say no... I guess we'll be covering french seams sooner than I had anticipated. ;)
Oh, and of course, that means that we have to line the skirts - we selected some generic polyestor lining material. Yes, I know - another pain in the neck to work with...
Ana told me that their word for "yard" is "metrica" (or something like that), not "yarda" (as my computer had told me) and I got a grin from each of them by complaining loudly, "El computadora no tiene raison!" - which means something like "It's all that stupid computer's fault!".
I dropped them back at home with the request that they wash and dry the fabric during the week, but don't cut anything out without me. (Keep your fingers crossed that the laundry part goes okay...)
Next Sunday, we cut and sew! I can't wait! :)
I'll explain the image later in this post, but first:I also wanted to thank Amanda for her good advice for my Spanish sewing lessons, and especially for pointing out that Simplicity patterns DO have instructions in Spanish! I started to feel stupid for not realizing this, but that feeling was quickly swamped with happiness over the realization that I CAN use commercial patterns from my local Joann's store in my sewing lessons! Yea!
And I have to give a special thank-you to Claire for all her encouraging comments! If I hit some rough patches with these lessons down the road, I just know that re-reading those messages is going to carry me through!
Okay, so what's with the pictures? They represent the interesting vagaries of machine translation. I knew from the beginning that machine translation is fallible, so one technique I have been using to (hopefully!) minimize errors in the Spanish sentences that I prepare ahead of time for our lessons is to open Alta Vista's Babel Fish twice, in two different windows.
I set one window for English-to-Spanish translation and the other for Spanish-to-English translation. Before I accept the proposed Spanish translation of one of my English sentences, I doublecheck it by reverse-translating it back into English. Considering that I am using the SAME program each time, you wouldn't really expect any surprises, would you?
Okay, most of the time it works pretty well. Sometimes it is a little bit garbled by the time it comes back to English - in which case I try to come up with a more direct and simple way to rephrase the English sentence. But every once in a while I get a real doozy!
For example: "This skirt has a ruffle." was translated to "Esta falda tiene una colmena."
AND "Esta falda tiene una colmena" was reverse translated to "This skirt has a beehive."
Yikes - ruffle? beehive? I don't think of those two words as all that interchangeable...
So, I started visiting other sites to find the Spanish word for ruffle. Another site suggested "volante fruncido". Given that the section on gathering and ruffles in the Spanish book on sewing was entitled "Fruncido", this seemed promising.
Babel fish, however wasn't having it. Now my sentence reverse translates from "Esta falda tiene una volante fruncido" to "This skirt has a gathered steering wheel."
Ruffles and beehives and steering wheels, oh my! ;)
They both wanted a ruffle along the bottom and they both wanted relatively long skirts. (I forgot to ask about pockets.)
My pre-prepared sentences went quite far. There were certainly times when I was scrambling with the Spanish-English dictionary and there were times when I just gave up and let it go. But, it's pretty amazing how many things you'd LIKE to say that, it turns out, you don't really NEED to say.
I'm pretty sure they understand our plans for next week - I'm going to pick them up and take them to Joann's to buy fabric for their skirts. (Fingers crossed!)
Possibly my biggest surprise (stupid, in hindsight) is that they don't have air conditioning. In Florida - yikes! Lessons this summer are going to be hot...
Ana made me some homemade flan as a thank-you - it was delicious! And she gave me a hug for Mother's Day. It was a pretty wonderful day! :)
I'll try to get pictures of them fabric shopping next weekend. Thanks again to everyone who has been taking the time to give me encouragement and/or advice! It is greatly appreciated! :)
So much has happened in the last week that I hardly know where to begin! I guess I'll resort to that boring, old standby - the beginning… ;)
First, I carefully prepared a number of sentences in Spanish ahead of time using Altavista’s babel fish and went to the restaurant on Thursday afternoon. Anna remembered me and accepted my offer of sewing lessons!
As long as I was reading from my paper, things seemed to go smoothly. It got a bit stickier when I ran out of sentences on my paper, but I think we managed reasonably well. Luckily, she does know a few words in English.
Here is what I think happened: She offered her place for the sewing lessons and gave me her address. She asked if a friend (who also works in the kitchen) could come too. We agreed on this Sunday at 1:00 pm. She asked if they needed to have fabric available for the first lesson and I said no.
Of course, I may have agreed to meet her female friend, in the buff, at a seedy motel for a tryst… My only hope is that if I got all those bits wrong, then I also got the date and time wrong! ;)
Seriously, I am super excited and have been planning and preparing like crazy ever since!
First, I laid out a rough plan. I wrote the plan up in Spanish, so that I can show it to them and we can make any adjustments that they would like.
This week, I plan to go over the flash cards that I am making with sewing vocabulary, practice using the sewing machine a bit, take measurements and draw out skirt patterns on tracing paper. Next week I’ll take them shopping for fabric, and we’ll sew the skirts the following weekend. After that, we’ll move on to commercial patterns and slowly introduce things like zippers, buttons & buttonholes, collars, cuffs, etc.
The first skirt will be an A-line skirt with an elastic waistband. I'll let them decide if they want pockets or not, and a ruffle around the bottom or not. We'll draft out the patterns to fit their measurements according to the instructions in the book "Sew What! Skirts."
The other big thing that has been taking up my time is preparing the flashcards. I easily generated a list of about 50 sewing-related terms (list included at the end of the post) and have spent the better part of two days finding pictures to illustrate each of them. I scanned the pictures and am printing them out onto pre-perforated postcard cardstock (Avery #8387).
Figuring out the Spanish equivalents for all of those terms wasn't always easy either! I used the Singer book, "El ABC de la Costura" and some Neue Mode patterns that I purchased a while ago when they were being sold for $1 each. The Neue Mode patterns have directions in many languages, including English and Spanish, so they became my sewing Rosetta Stone!
I still have to write up some sentences to start and end our first lesson, but I'm pretty close to being as prepared as I'm ever going to be... ;)
Thank you so much to everyone who left encouragement, advice, offers of help and vocabulary! Wish me luck on Sunday afternoon!
Vocabulary: basting stitches, bias, bias tape, blouse, bobbin, bust, button, buttonhole, collar, dart, dress, elastic, fabric, fold, grainline, hem, hip, interfacing, iron, long, needles, pants, pattern, pattern pieces, pin cushion, pleat, pocket, presser foot, ruffle, ruler, scissors, seam, seam allowance, seam gauge, seam ripper, selvage, sewing machine, short, shorts, skirt, sleeve, stitch, straight pins, tape measure, thread, tracing paper, waist, zipper.
He picked this fabric himself, and the two things that it reflects about him are (a) that he looks very good in blues (and knows it) and (b) that he likes fast, exciting and dangerous things. 
Now I do think that he - and our family in general - appreciates this country and has the highest respect for our armed services. But I'm not sure he would have picked the fabric if it wasn't for the cool fighter jets and bombers pictured on it!
My nephews do really seem to like the shirts that I periodically make for them. They often chose to wear my shirts on school picture day. Here he is in last year's school picture, wearing one of my shirts - this one in "American Chopper" fabric, sadly in gunmetal grey instead of bright blue, but full of pictures of fast, exciting and dangerous motorcycles... ;)
As for his Air Force shirt, don't worry, I'll get to it. It's in the queue...
Well, the project I'd like to tell you about this weekend is a bit different. Instead of sewing something, I am going to try to teach someone how to sew something. Someone, that is, with whom I do not share a common language...
It all started with Ani. Remember how I have been sewing things for her - a hat for one of her nieces, an outfit for another niece, and then aprons for the kitchen staff at her restaurant? When I delivered the aprons, one woman asked (through Ani, as she only speaks Spanish and I only speak English) if I also knew how to sew clothes. Later, Ani told me that this woman, Anna, has tried to make some things - a tablecloth, an apron, etc. - in the past, without a tremendous amount of success.
It didn't take much to put two and two together and I started wondering if Anna might like some sewing lessons.
Well, what I was really wondering was: is there any way in the world that I could actually give sewing lessons to someone when we don't speak the same language? (Oh, and of course my friend Ani moved away last week - just a few days after I finished and delivered the aprons - and so is not available to help me with interpretation...)
So, here are my thoughts:
1. I did take Spanish in highschool (almost 30 years ago!), so while I don't remember enough to speak it on my own (unless there arises a pressing need to shout out the word "gato!" [cat]), I am at least vaguely familiar with the language and can probably read outloud (i.e., pronounce) written things well enough to be understood. (By someone patient and motivated.) (Downhill.) (In a hurricane.)
(My apologies to those of you who don't rememer the Joe Isuzu "liar" commercials.)
2. I have a laptop with an aircard that will allow me access to translation sites on the internet such as AltaVista's babel fish.
3. I'm thinking that sewing can probably be taught in large part through demonstration, even if communication is limited.
4. This is the basics I'm talking about - sundresses, simple skirts, simple tops, pajamas, elastic waistbands, installing zippers, maybe some darts and pleats, following instructions... Not couture sewing. Not fitted, lined jackets. Not draping or underlining. Just the basics.
At this point, I was starting to think that maybe, just maybe, I could do this. But I still had one pretty big concern. Even if I did successfully walk Anna through making a couple of simple garments with patterns from the big 4, that wouldn't really set her up to sew on her own, because she wouldn't be able to buy a new pattern and read the English instructions by herself.
Well, it was Pattern Review to the rescue! (Not for the first time and not for the last!) Cidell recently posted a great article on foreign language pattern magazines and one of the Spanish magazines in particular caught my eye: Moldes - Paso Y Paso. According to Cidell, the styles are young and casual, and the patterns are geared toward the beginner to intermediate home sewer!
How perfect is that? If I can help Anna make a few of the patterns out of an issue of Moldes - Paso Y Paso, then she should be able to continue sewing on her own!
There are still some logistics to consider. Ani told me that Anna doesn't have a car or a sewing machine. No car means that I can't ask her to come to my house, so I'll have to find another place to have our lessons. I think I am going to ask the family that owns the restaurant if Anna and I could work there at times when the restaurant is not open - like first thing in the morning or on Sunday afternoons. I can take my machine and whatever else we need to the restaurant pretty easily. And think about all that table space we'd have to spread out on! ;)
As for the sewing machine, I was thinking that maybe I could purchase a small lock box and the two of us could start a sewing machine fund. I would match whatever amount she was able to put into it each week. Even if it was only $1.00 a week (each), it shouldn't take us more than half a year to save up enough to get her a decent used machine.
Finally, my other thought was that I could make up a bunch of flash cards with pictures and common sewing and design vocabulary in both English and Spanish. Of course I'd make two sets - one for me to practice the Spanish and one for Anna to practice the English.
So, that's where I'm at right now. I had been hoping to "talk" (i.e., read carefully prepared sentences off a sheet of paper) to Anna last Friday night, when we went to the restaurant for dinner, but unfortunately she had already left for the day. Hopefully, by next Sunday, I will be able to report back as to whether or not she is interested and willing to take me up on my offer. Fingers crossed!
Needless to say, I would greatly appreciate any advice, comments, guidance, thoughts, cautions, feedback, etc. at all about this project. I'm especially interested in thoughts on teaching sewing to a beginner and thoughts on the language situation and/or anything you think I should know about the Mexican culture that might catch a "gringa" by surprise. Thanks! :)
How about you? What regular maintenance do you do for your machine(s)?
I asked what music people listen to when they sew. Turns out that having the television on while sewing is more common than music.
If I have to work in the family room (for example, to spread the fabric out on the floor to cut extra large pieces), then I have the tv on too. Weekends in our house, it's usually tuned to the Sci Fi channel... ;)
However, when music is being played, the choices among these fellow sewing bloggers (or is it blogging sewers?) include: anything country, Jill Scott, Joss Stone, Christina Aguilara, Justin Timberlake, Eva Cassidy and India Arie.
Hmmm... There are some new ones there for me to look into. Thanks again, everyone! :)
©2009 After the dress... | by TNB
