From the Women’s News section of the Reading Eagle, Tuesday, February 2nd, 1971: an ad for the Dot Pattern System:

Um… wow. $1 for a 90 minute demonstration, and husbands admitted free? Awesome!

I had no idea Google was archiving newspapers like this. Check out the article “Fashion Disillusioned Jacques Kaplan Working on ‘Water Floor’ for the Home”, or the “You’re Sew Right” advice column, or “Jean Adams’ Teen Forum” on the same page.

When I visited my parents last, my mom loaned me The Dot Pattern System Deluxe, a pattern drafting system from 1969. The way it works is that you take your personal bust and hip measurements and then use a special tape measure to scale the pattern from the binder to your own size, by sticking one end of the tape through a cross on the pattern page and then making marks for each dot at the specified distance. So this:

turns into this:

Talk about a maxi dress!

There are over a hundred patterns in the book,covering just about any type of garment you might want to make. House dress? Check:

Office wear – or is this a cocktail dress? Either way, check:

Jumpsuits? Sure…

And I’m not even sure what this ensemble would be called – but you can make one:

Some of the coats are actually cute – though it’s the styling on this one that I love. Over the knee red rain boots?

and that hat!

Practically, you’re also covered for your wedding:

and what follows:

There are even patterns for your man:

and of course the kids (creepy, creepy kids):

I actually like those two coats, and I might attempt one at some point. Or maybe something simpler to start – I could really use a house dress…

Once upon a time I found some white handkerchief linen at Discount Fabrics, and I thought it would be perfect for a pair of drawstring pants I wanted to make from one of my Japanese sewing books (One Day Winter Sewing, 2008). So I bought it, and I made them, and they turned out pretty well and they’re super comfortable, but of course white handkerchief linen is kind of sheer, and the resulting pants can’t really be worn outside the house in sunlight without violating decency laws (even in San Francisco). So the white pants became pajama pants, and I went looking for some different fabric to remake them from.

Fabric.com was having a flannel sale and a seersucker sale, so I thought I would pick up some flannel and make a pair of cool weather pajama pants, and some seersucker for summer. And herein lies my cautionary tale. I saw a cheerful and cute flannel that looked like little chrysanthemums on an aqua background, so I bought it–neglecting to first check the scale of the photograph and the actual size of the flower motifs. So when I received the fabric, I discovered that those cute quarter-sized-looking flowers were actually huge:

I like to call these “fugly pants” because they in no way match my style, and between the size of the flowers and the rigidity of the flannel they look huge. Ugh. But they are comfortable, and even though E. winces every time I put them on I have been wearing them to sleep in.

The seersucker was another story. The scale is what I expected from the photo, but the colors are brighter, and with the striped pattern… well, I call these “circus pants”:

The seersucker is cool but not quite as comfortable as I would have thought – the puckers are kind of stiff and scratchy. I’m hopeful that a few washes will take care of that, and take some of the stiffness out of the flannel.

So I now have several pairs of pajama pants, but still nothing I’d want to wear outside the house. But I have some black linen/rayon blend fabric with some textural interest that has lovely drape, doesn’t wrinkle as badly as the pure handkerchief linen, is cool and light, and is neither sheer nor fugly. So I might be revisiting this pattern one more time. On the bright side it takes very little time to put these together–there are just two front pieces and two back pieces; the waistband is folded over and has buttonholes for the drawstring. On the other hand, maybe I should use the linen/rayon blend for a pattern with a bit more shaping…

In the interests of (trying) not acquiring new stash until I’ve used up what I already have, and also being crazy busy and so doing the smaller, simpler projects first, let me present the Kusha Kusha scarf from Habu. I bought it as a kit from Knit Purl when I was in Portland last September. It’s a simple stockinette pattern, with a few stitch decreases at the beginning and further tapering about two-thirds of the way through that is achieved by gradually decreasing the needle size rather than the number of stitches. The main point of interest is that it’s knit with two lace-weight yarns held together throughout, one stainless steel and one merino wool, and then felted slightly to finish.

The results are (1) interesting texture and waffling along the edges, caused by the wool yarn shrinking during the felting while the stainless steel does not, and (2) if you crunch the resulting fabric into a ball with your hand, the stainless steel yarn holds some memory of the scrunch, so you can get some sculptural texture.

I didn’t fully follow the pattern: after the first transition to smaller needles the instructions say to drop the merino yarn and only continue with the stainless steel. I tried it, but I didn’t like the abrupt change in color (the merino is black, and the stainless steel is about the color you’d expect from stainless steel) and I had a lot of the merino left, so I decided to just keep using both yarns until I ran out.

I had a full skein (plus a bit) of Cascade 220 left over from last year’s Christmas knitting, so, inspired again by Kirsten, I decided to use it on the Destroyed Cowl.

I have mixed feelings about the result. I like the pattern, but I think the yarn was wrong for it. The Cascade 220 is prone to felting, so after blocking there’s not a lot of stitch definition and it feels sort of soft and mushy. For this pattern, especially for the “destroyed” parts, I think more structure would have worked better. (It also might have worked better with a tighter gauge–I used 5mm needles.) More structure, or alternatively more drape–this middle area is just kind of bleah. The dropped stitches tend to roll under and hide, so it requires a little coaxing to show off the detail.

I still like the pattern, though, so I might try it again with a different yarn. (I also may just be being overly critical–one of my coworkers thinks it’s still very pretty.)

Seattle Fabrics, for all your all-weather fabric needs. Not to mention webbing, buckles, cord, toggles, you name it. (It’s where I bought the seat belt webbing and slide hardware for the Bonsai and Replacement messenger bags.) Check out the annotated version of the photo on Flickr for more details.

I’ll give you a hint: these ones aren’t for me. Well, their intended project is not for me. The giant pile o’ samples is giving me ideas though.

I’ve been sewing a bit lately and having some good successes and less frequent failures. The bottleneck in blogging is (apparently) getting photographs of the completed items. But here’s this weekend’s success, the popular jacket model J from Happy Homemade Vol. 1 in blue linen.

This turned out remarkably well, aside from not having quite the same crinkly drape that the pictures in the pattern book had (you can see them in the fourth image on the book link above)–I think they used a linen blend with silk or rayon. I also think mine will drape a bit more when I wash it again (I washed the fabric cold and dried it hot once to shrink it before cutting, but I can tell there’s still quite a bit of sizing in it).

I like it now though. It’s getting a lot of love from my coworkers today too.

PS: the T-shirt is the basic crew-neck from Jalie 2805. I folded it over at the neck and stitched with a twin needle, rather than a sewing on a separate neckband, so it’s not as high as the version on the pattern envelope.

If I can just have a goshdarnit-that-was-smart moment here:

Through Yoshimi the Flying Squirrel, I found the Japanese pattern company anneedeux, which has some nice top patterns and sells them (and other patterns) as downloadable PDF files. With a little help from a Japanese-speaking coworker, I was able to download two of them last week (payment is through PayPal, and everything went quite smoothly once I got through the cart checkout). I was super-excited until I went to print off the PDF files, and realized that (1) Mac Preview software doesn’t read the PDFs properly, they require Adobe Acrobat (it took me two days to figure that out); (2) the pages scaled down slightly, so I had to change the printer settings to not do that; (3) the reason why the pages had scaled down slightly was because–of course–the PDF was A4 size, not US letter size.

So I shrugged and figured I could take the files to a print shop and print them on legal size or something. Slight delay, no big deal. But today E. and I were taking advantage of Superbowl Sunday to go shopping downtown and as we made the rounds of our usual haunts, we stopped at Maido, a Japanese stationery store in the Westfield shopping center, to stock up on Pilot HI-TEC-C 0.4mm blue-black rollerball pens. And it was there that I found the answer to my problem: A4 Kraft paper!

(I had already reached a similar solution this morning in the ‘tub: I could cut some large sheets of card stock down to A4-size sheets on the Kutrimmer and manually feed them through the printer. Except my Kutrimmer is buried under a pile o’ stuff right now, so I left the idea percolating.)

On the way home, I reasoned it was unlikely that electronics companies would make different printers for the US and Canada than they would for the rest of the world, and I was right: the paper tray adjusts to take A4 paper. And the lightweight Kraft paper went through the printer without difficulty. So I was able to print off the pattern sheets and now I’m going to tape them together so I an cut out my patterns. w00t!

The skirt I mentioned in my last post that I thought my attention span was too short to work on? Done. It’s the Tulip Skirt by Jenny Gordy of Wiksten-Made, which appeared in the Fall 2008 issue of Stitch Magazine. I made it in (surprise) black linen and used the Japanese vintage buttons I bought from Kirsten some time back.

Considering it’s the first time I’ve done anything with buttonholes, and a waistband, and more than four pieces, and–well, not the first time I’ve done a pleat, but more pleats than I’ve ever done–I’m shocked at how well it turned out. It was considerably easier than I expected. Maybe I’m getting better at this sewing thing after all. (Picture coming soon. Or soonish.)

I am emboldened. What else can I sew this weekend?

Geek Brain and Creative Brain have been fighting each other pretty hard lately for control of my free time. Sometimes when this happens I find it difficult to start a large project. Although I have plans to start a new skirt (with a lot more pieces than my usual basic A-line patterns), I don’t have the attention span for it right now. So small, immediate-gratification projects are my current thing. The one above is for my knitting necessities, and it’s a big improvement over the rainbow-and-unicorn embellished card tin I’d been storing them in for the last 20 years!

Fortunately small projects are a good way to use up small bits of the expensive Japanese or hand-screen-printed fabric I’ve used on other projects. This case is for pencils, pens, glue sticks and other journalling supplies.

This was an experiment. The red linen is lighter weight than the denim, so I lined it. It turned out just fine, but I like denim better.

There are a number of tutorials available around the web for making zippered pouches, but I’ve found this one to be the clearest, and it’s the one I used for all the above. In most cases I cut the fabric for the front and back and lining pieces to 8-1/4″ wide by 5″ high (the robot one was only about 6″ wide).

I didn’t have a tutorial for the last one, I was just going with a picture I saw somewhere, but this tutorial is very similar. I didn’t line mine, just used a serger for all the seams. (In the interests of full disclosure, I made this one months ago, but it fit in with the theme and was a result of the same ADD behaviors. I use it to take my bookbinding tools to classes, as the denim is sturdy enough to take an awl point occasionally poking through.)