tova

In 1999 or maybe 2000, I stole a shirt from my sister Molly. “Steal” may be too strong a word for that process of slightly hostile sisterly exchange that must go on in all families. But “borrow” also doesn’t work so well, because at least in this case, I never intended to give it back. It was paper-thin, light blue linen. It was a kind of short tunic that I wore hundreds and hundreds of times for most of the last decade, until it was so threadbare that I might as well have been going out nude. In the end, I couldn’t even bring myself to give it away. It seemed an insult to Goodwill. So did the unthinkable: I trashed it.

But I haven’t stopped thinking about it ever since. I cursed myself again and again that I didn’t unpick the seams and turn it into a pattern. So you can imagine my glee when a year or so ago I came upon a version of the shirt. It was from Jenny Gordy’s lovely line, Wiksten. It’s the tova top and dress. I’ve followed her blog for awhile now have long admired her simple and breezy style. I was particularly exuberant when she started publishing a couple of her patterns last year. Unfortunately, I missed out on the first round of the tova pattern, but managed to snatch one up the second time around this winter.



I bought the blue linen a few weeks ago and I spent four evenings this last week tracing the pattern (I didn't cut it out because I knew that I'd want to make loads of these), cutting out the fabric, pinning and more pinning, sewing, and hemming, and finally, admiring. I did a little bit each night, which actually made the process more fun than slogging through it on a single day.

And the pattern? Well, it's terrific, both because it recalls the earlier shirt and exceeds it (it’s a bit more fitted; it’s not threadbare; it’s longer; and it can also be a dress!). Jenny’s directions are wonderfully clear and precise. I still struggle a bit with gathers (on the yoke, the sleeves, etc.), but I didn’t have to unpick more than a couple seams the entire way through. My only annoyance is that I didn’t make the dress length and I didn’t make two versions at the same time. But I will. Soon.

mass production

My sister and I always bemoan the way that it takes making something to figure out how to make it. This isn’t really a problem in general, but one of economy of scale, or economy of crafting energy. When you make something once, it takes a pretty spell to cut everything out, get comfortable with the directions, and then figure out the necessary techniques. The problem for me is that the first time I do something, I realize how lousy the directions are or how poorly I’m doing it. The first zipper is always the worst and the first seam is always the wonkiest (save, of course, for those 3 am seams when you just can’t go to sleep until you’ve finished the damn thing). We’re always saying, it’d be fine if I had just cut out 4 versions of it.

This time I cut out 8. I finished 7. One became the recipient of all the first technique attempts and thus headed straight for my stash of scraps. The pattern is Heather Ross’s, from Weekend Sewing, and it really isn’t half bad. The real bad was the oilcloth. Never again. It sticks. It pulls. It doesn’t care to do as commanded. Even after I started using the walking foot, I felt my beloved machine pumping and grinding a bit too hard. I almost thought it got winded at one point. After a particularly dispiriting spell of cranking through six layers of material, it demanded a vacation at the Collingwood, New Jersey hospital for sick sewing machines. It's copay was $136.00 and a subway ticket to the suburbs.

I did, however, come to like the feeling of running a little assembly line in my apartment. One day I did all of the cutting, the next all of the ironing, the next the zippers, etc., etc. I liked watching as my seams got straighter and my turns more efficient. I liked feeling—for just a moment—what it might feel like to have a little cottage industry. I liked being a worker bee.

nipple confusion

The end of the semester is always a crazy time -- students frantically trying to write that paper a little better ("can I please just email you one more draft?"), my trying to grade that paper a little faster ("no, sorry. I just can't."(finger down throat gesture)) -- and this year the crazies have been compounded by wedding planning, shower attending, karaoke singing, book editing, weight watching. Usually the semester ends and I approach my summer doings with a relish. In North Carolina, I would plant like mad and sew a quilt top in a weekend, as if all the intensity of the semester would simply translate into all the intensity of summer doings. By August, though, things would always slow down, my ambitions diminished in the heat of the South. This year is different. The semester has ended, but its ending has only made the looming deadline of my book project (a new edited history of Bryn Mawr) more glaring. I still have about fifty years to account for and I'm just absolutely exhausted.

The kind of exhausted that feels like you're always looking through a dirty window, like you forgot to put in your contacts, but they're actually in. Exhausted like you don't feel like taking off your shoes before you go to sleep.

So this weekend was all about resting...and grading those papers, and writing thank you notes for the best (really, truly, the best) celebration with my lady friends last weekend, sealing up invitations, and well, you know, sewing and knitting. I've been champing at the bit to finish a couple project, like this one:

Booties! I love booties. I didn't know that I loved booties until this morning, but I do. I mean, what's not to love? The pattern is from Anna Maria Horner's new book, Handmade Beginnings. This pair is for a super special friend who, I hope, will find these the perfect little coverings for her new babe's tootsies. Horner's book seems to have several good projects and the directions were clear and concise. M would be well satisfied.

But now let's get down to business. You ask, why the cheeky title today? Nipple confusion, huh? Well, that's what I said. I mean that's what I said when my kindly doorman fetched this package for me yesterday:

Yes, it seems that the kind folks at Similac ("For Strong Moms") seem to think that I'm the one due to deliver. I can't quite explain how the arrival of this little care package made me feel. Equal parts bemused, confused, angered and saddened. I will say that the anger seems to have stemmed from a kind of consternation: why does Similac think I'm the kind of lady not to breastfeed? But as I looked up a near-by women's shelter at which to donate this little bit of bizarre benevolence from corporate America, I just felt a strange kind of empty terror. I don't know what else to say about it, but I think I'm just going to sit with that feeling. I haven't yet thought of a brilliant response to Similac (surely this calls for one), but its arrival has got me wondering: why in the world is this company sending me baby formula?

How did I get on a list of expectant moms?

Did this package intentionally arrive the day before mother's day as a cruel joke calling to the absence of a baby in my life?

Might my recent purchase of several baby sewing books put me on a list of pregnant ladies (which doesn't seem like a particularly smart marketing move on Similac's part given all those sewing grandmothers)?

Does Similac simply send formula to all women who have wedding registries? Oh the horror.

Or should I just give over to obvious: that there's just far too much private information out there in circulation and Similac actually knows something that I don't?

In any case, I think this is, in fact, nothing more than a true--and cruel--case of nipple confusion.

saturday morning

I sinned. I cheated. I peaked.

My little sister M sent me a birthday package that arrived yesterday. I should have waited the few more days until my 34th. But I didn't. In a fit a spring cleaning last night, I decided that I needed to recycle its envelop, so I had to open it. And what a lovely friday night treat! M knows my love of hot tea and hot tea that lasts and lasts. She also knows that it drives me crazy when my pot goes cold. So here's what she sent:

A teapot cozy! I've already used it twice, last night with a pot of mint and this morning with some orange pekoe. And it works -- amazingly well. My mint pot stayed warm for the better part of an hour of cleaning. This morning my pekoe stayed warm while I did a bit of saturday quilting. I'm liking the way my wall looks and thinking that perhaps I should just leave the wall like this and forget the quilt. We'll see...

sorrow and stitches

Last night was one of those nights when I’m reminded why it is that my friendships are the most important thing in my life. I was on the phone for nearly five hours straight. It was sort of like being twelve again and holing up in our old phone-booth on peninsula drive. I have no idea what I spent so many hours talking about back then, but I had the feeling last night that the topics probably weren’t that different than those that consume us now: the desire for love, the pain of disappointed love, the expectations of family, the need for sympathy. Last night was a night filled with friends whose lives are changing, and I found myself talking on the phone and pulling scraps of fabric from my closet at the same time. As I listened to the pain of recent separation, my fingers started cutting and sewing, arranging and ironing, as if all I could do was start to mend back together friends whose pain was so palpable. I don’t know what I’m sewing, but I know that when I hear the sorrow of those I love, I feel an overwhelming desire to make something beautiful, as if something just lovely enough will make up for all that sadness.

thin

I remember that during graduate school I often felt like I didn't have enough time. In retrospect, nothing could have been further from the truth. In graduate school, you have years -- years to read and to think and to write. You have time to take up a new hobby and you have years to become embroiled in deeply unhealthy emotional entanglements. When I first met J, he talked about wanting to "press pause" on the world, to stop everything and do all of things he that wanted to. I thought that this was absolutely absurd because graduate school felt to me like seven years on pause. It felt like a kind of suspended animation in which I could recognize change in others -- and certainly in the world around me -- but I always felt myself on pause.

Somehow I have skipped play and am now stuck on fast-forward; everything is speeding by and I can hardly catch my breath. J says I'm spread to thin. I race from one class to the office, to a meeting, to another meeting, to my computer. I'm trying to edit a book that is due at the end of June, plan and facilitate a major international conference on women's education, teach an upper-level college seminar, get out my own writing, keep up a long-distance relationship, plan a wedding, and stay sane. Sometimes it feels like just too much. This is when I want to hop a train to Kentucky and hide out from the world with J.

I know that all this complaining is really rather unbecoming. Instead, I should delight in a weekend with my little sis. After all, we sewed together:

It's another project -- a baby burrito wrap -- from the Lotta Jansdotter book. This was my first experience with her patterns. They sort of crack me up. When I was in high school, I first experimented with making clothes for myself. I used to measure my body and then freehand sketch patterns on old newspapers. They were pretty wonky, but I made a bunch of skirts that way, ones that I wore for years and to tatters. My grandmother made the button holes and I'm sure that she was horrified by my slightly uneven hems and sloppy waist bands. In any case, Jansdotter's published patterns are a bit like my high school versions -- freehand, sloppy, maintaining only a casual relationship to accuracy. But I took it in stride and this little number will hopefully calm a new baby due in May.

We also cooked a treat -- an especially rare treat for someone on a sugar elimination diet -- cinnamon rolls. The recipe is from Smitten Kitchen by way of Orangette. Of course they failed to rise properly, but we nevertheless gobbled them up with the help of a friend. Yeast seems sooo stubborn to me. I can never seem to coax it into action, even as I propped the dough bowl on a steam heater. Steam heat I tell you! It should have been quadrupling in size. But alas, no such luck.


While we were still panicking that the cinnamon rolls weren't going to rise at all, we scurried to make a dutch pancake to serve my friend as a first course. I guess you could say that we were raised right: we knew to panic when we invited a friend over for a sweet treat, she was set to arrive in 15 minutes, and we had stubborn dough on our hands. This is where the dutch pancake never fails to delight. Get the oven hot enough and you're golden...and so is it.

towel hoodie

This is my first post to 550. A (we are going to need to change her name because that is what I call our little sister) has enlisted me to contribute and I finally received my new camera from Amazon! I am the sister that lives on the moon (or in South Dakota) who she mentioned in her earlier post. I don't know that my postings will be as insightful as a's, but hopefully posting will make me finish a bunch of projects that have been lingering, including two quilts that are overdue wedding gifts.

Instead of working on those quilts, I have been sewing a lot of baby stuff. This is a towel hoodie inspired by Lotta Jabsdotter's Simple Sewing for Baby. The reason that I say that it is "inspired" by her book, rather than the actual project from her book, is that the instructions in the book are quite deficient. In some places the instructions grossly understates the amount of fabric required and in others they are extremely wasteful. For example, in this pattern she calls for a 1 bath sheet and 1 matching hand towel (just to make the towel hoodie), yet there was more than enough of the towel left over that you didn't need to buy a separate hand towel to make the hood piece. I made the whole thing and the two washcloths from one bath towel (the diagonal stripe on one washcloth is because I had to piece it together). The instructions call for 1/3 of a yard of fabric to make the binding tape (it doesn't have to be on a bias because there are no curves), but you really need 1/2 a yard to finish the project (not including the washcloths).


Bottom line: This is a great and easy project to make for any upcoming baby shower. It takes around 2 hours depending on how you sew (I spent a long time trying to get the mitered corners right, but then I gave up). But you don't need the book or a pattern to complete this project. Just cut the biggest square you can out of a bath sheet, cut a triangle that is about 16in x 11in x 11in out of the remaining fabric and cut stripes that are 3.75 in for the binding.