CPUs. Cayce Pollard Units. That’s what Damien calls the clothing she wears. CPUs are either black, white or gray, and ideally seem to have come into this world without human intervention.

William Gibson
Pattern Recognition

I wasn’t a big fan of William Gibson until I read Pattern Recognition, when Jane told me that the protagonist reminded her of me. And it’s true, the line above sounds a lot like my wardrobe: black, white or gray (plus a few shades of blue jeans) with as few logos, brands or embellishments as possible. Clothing that, as Gibson writes later, “could have been worn, to a general lack of comment, during any year between 1945 and 2000.”

I work in software, where the standard office uniform is a t-shirt and jeans, so I can get by with a rotating assortment of Gap classic t-shirts in long or short sleeves, in black or gray. When one wears out I replace it with the same piece. In the summer I wear tank tops, in black or white. I avoid shopping for jeans until the ones I’ve got are worn out and I’m forced to go try on a zillion pairs to find something that fits well and doesn’t make me look like I’m trying to pretend I’m still 16. For dressing up, I have a couple of black skirts (one wool in an a-line, one linen with a box-pleat), which I usually wear with black tights, and some ribbed silk sleeveless turtlenecks. Although I keep buying cute shoes at Designer Shoe Warehouse, the only ones I ever wear are a pair of chunky black Italian pumps or knee-high boots, plus sneakers for every day (which is a relatively new development – for years I wore Doc Marten’s with almost everything).

I do buy new clothes. A few times a year I get the urge to go shopping, and I buy things that fall outside the range above and are rarely worn, or I buy things that mostly fit my style but don’t quite fit my body. Either way, most of these items end up being given away. I wear the pieces that do fit until they fall apart – which often doesn’t take very long.

All this lengthy introduction boils down to why I’ve decided to try to learn to sew better, to alter patterns so they fit me better, and maybe even to modify patterns to suit my own style. I’ve done a bit of sewing over the years, but mostly piecing quilt blocks (always with straight lines). The few items of clothing I’ve made have either been from really, really simple patterns, or ended up at my mother’s to be finished (often both). I’d like to make a few well-fitted shirts and tops, some comfortable, casual pants, and perhaps a couple of dresses. I don’t need a lot of clothes, but a few options would be nice.

A couple of weeks ago, I posted the various steps involved in sewing my own canvas grocery bags. The result was six bags that looked like this:

A few days later I set out to dye the bags blue. I only did some of them, and what I discovered almost immediately after pulling them out of the (hot water) dye bath – before even drying them – was that the canvas had shrunk!

Now it’s not like I hadn’t considered that there might be some shrinkage (100% cotton + no prewash = some shrinking), but I didn’t realize there would be so much. What began as a bag with a 34″ circumference, 11 1/2″ height and 4 3/4″ gusset ended up as a bag with a 33″ circumference, 9″ height and 4″ gusset. In other words, I lost about an inch around, which wasn’t such a big deal, but I lost almost 6″ in height and depth. The post-dye bags have only about two-thirds of the volume of the pre-dye bags.

Lesson learned: always wash and dry your fabric before you sew something, even if you don’t think it will matter that much to the result, or you may be disappointed in the results.

One of my early bookbinding instructors repeatedly drilled into us the instruction, “Don’t throw away your paper scraps, no matter how small.” She took unwanted scraps from class with her to use for creating collaged covers when she taught bookbinding to children. I am not very good at the “no matter how small” part, but I do save any scraps that seem large enough to be useful for something, someday.

Last weekend, in my drive to use up existing supplies before purchasing new ones, I went through some of my boxes to see what I had around. I found a large pile of decorative paper scraps, and a number of pieces of card stock and watercolor paper that I had apparently precut in anticipation of making ATCs and postcards. I decided to see what I could make out of it all.

I’m not very imaginative when it comes to this kind of thing, so massive collages and multi-media pieces were unlikely. I did, however, come up with some simply decorated items that I might actually use. So, here is my list of things to do with paper scraps.

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Previously, I explained how to cut the cover boards and spine piece, how to cut the decorative paper and book cloth, and how to assemble the case for a photo album.

In this section, I’ll explain how to case in the album block. This is the last step!

Rather than stopping to take pictures every few minutes while I was dealing with fast-drying glue and trying to hold the book in position at the same time, I decided to create a video tutorial.

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Previously, I explained how to measure and cut the cover boards and spine piece and how to measure and cut the decorative paper and book cloth for constructing the case.

In this section, you’ll learn how to assemble the case. Put down some waxed paper or scrap paper, because today we’re going to glue!

Keep a damp cloth close by when gluing, and change out your scrap paper or wax paper frequently. It’s very disappointing to discover that you’ve accidentally set your beautiful paper or book cloth in some leftover glue. Wipe your fingers quickly whenever you touch the glue. I like to rip off a dozen sheets of wax paper and stack them beside me before I start gluing. I fold over the glued part as I use each sheet, and grab a new sheet as I need it.

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Previously, I explained how to measure and cut the cover boards and spine piece for the case.

In this section, you’ll learn how to measure and cut the decorative paper and book cloth to cover the case. How much of your cover is book cloth and how much is decorative paper is a matter of personal preference. Common proportions are for the book cloth to take up 1/3, 1/5 or 1/8 of the cover board width. You’re going to need a little math for this.

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Previously, I talked about tools and materials you’ll need for making a cased-in photo album.

In this section, you’ll learn how to measure and cut the book board and spine piece. My sample book block is a 30-page, medium-sized album block from Hollander’s, but I’ll explain how to measure for any block size.

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In this section, I’ll cover some of the tools and materials required to make your own hard cover photo album.

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A trip to Britex yielded three patterns: from Burda, the bustier (6801) and a sleeveless dress (3477), and from McCall’s, a second sleeveless dress (4768). Now that I look at them together, I realize that there’s not much difference between the two dresses except that one has a flounce. I preferred Burda 8072, with the pleats (but without the flaps), but Britex was out of stock.

I plan to make the flouncy dress in the black linen/cotton blend, and the plain dress in the dark red linen/cotton blend. Not yet sure what to do with the bustier.

I don’t know why, but I am on a sewing kick right now. Yesterday I finished the last two grocery bags, and then decided to rip out and re-fit a skirt I made a while back from New Look 6843 (the view in the bottom right of the pattern). It’s a simple a-line skirt and it fit right around the waist, but it was too wide in the hips and around the bottom, and I also made it too long. I took it in about 2" around the hips and 4" around the bottom, and I hemmed it above the knee. It still doesn’t fit quite the way I’d like it too, but it fits better.

Today I was at the Discount Fabrics store a couple of blocks away to pick up some fabric dye for the grocery bags and I found some surprisingly good quality cotton/linen blend fabric for only $6/yard, so I bought enough for two dresses – one in black, and one in a deep red. I was inspired by this alteration of Burda Style’s Celestina dress pattern (for the black fabric) but the instructions look to be beyond my current sewing abilities. So now I’m searching for some new patterns.

So far I’ve mostly discovered that searching for patterns online is a royal pain. On every major pattern manufacturer site I visited, the thumbnails were too small to get a good idea of what the dress looked like without clicking through. On most sites, the search was weak: typing “sleeveless linen dress” returned no results at all on Simplicity, and returned all dresses on Vogue, Butterick and McCall pattern sites: only Burda returned meaningful results. It seems like it would be useful to be able to search by fabric type and by style (e.g. sleeveless) as well as the most basic searches.

Sites like Pattern Review and thePattern Review forum on Craftster are helpful in that they allow you to see what other people have made from the pattern and get a better idea of what it might look like on your body type (and not some perfect model), but even those are hard to find things on. You really need to have the pattern brand and number already, and then search for pictures/reviews.

The patterns I’ve liked so far:

• Burda 8511 (the dress, but not the jacket)
• Burda 8061 (again, just the dress)
• Burda 3477
• Burda 8072 (though without the flaps)
• Burda 8076
• Burda 8071 (though not for the linen fabrics)
• Burda 8229
• New Look 6375
• Simplicity 3747
• Vogue 2941 (just the camisole and skirt – also not for linen fabrics)
• Vogue 7848
• Vogue 2091 (the high neck view)
• Vogue 2900
• Vogue 8357 (not the jacket – what’s with the jackets?)
• Vogue 8232
• Vogue 8025 (I actually like the jacket on this one – but it’s not for linens
• Vogue 8409 (not for linen)
• Butterick 4974
• Butterick 4598
• Butterick 4183
• McCall’s 4768 (I like the little flounce on this one)
• McCall’s 4369

(I hate the Simplicity web site most of all. Bad search, no way to scroll through the search results, no way to load all of the search results on a single page for faster scanning, you can’t search for New Look and Simplicity patterns at the same time, and you have to go through a popup to a PDF file to view the recommended fabrics.)

I also like this bustier/corset on Burda – look at the result (and also this one in red Dupioni silk, made by a guy on the Burda Style community for his fiancée!