Christmas Dress Blog Party

After ten years blogging I'm finally participating in something! Edelweiss Patterns Blog has been on my bloglist for a while, and this year Katrina is hosting a Christmas Dress blog party. I don't do vintage, but I did have a Christmas dress this year, and an event to wear it to.

I wore the green linen/cotton Regency dress I made this fall to wear to the Omaha NE Fezziwig Ball. It closes with hooks and eyes up the front, then has a bib front that buttons over that. More details on the dress here(so glad I made it ahead of time!). I love that it's so much easier to get dressed with  front-closing gown, but I'm not sure that I like the bib part.

Caleb's uniform is so epic. I love uniforms, and wool, and uniforms made of wool.

Every year putting on the Fezziwig Ball consumes vast amounts of my time, but I guess I like it enough that I just keep doing it! Next year, though, I'm definitely recruiting a personal assistant. This year we maxed out the building and almost covered expenses, and everything went well except Jacob Marley got strep throat, and now I know why actors have understudies.

Introducing the cast for the 2014 Fezziwig Ball. 

Every year our volunteer cast of actors improves and wows the crowd with sparkling renditions straight from Dicken's novel "A Christmas Carol." I'm so thankful for these people who give of their time for the joy of others.

Now that the Ball is over, I'm strictly on vacation, which means if I can work up enough motivation to get off the couch I can start work on that long list of sewing for me, which never gets done during the work week!

Christmas Cheer

Last week I attended the Christmas party for volunteers at the Fort. It's always really fun to go to private events at the Fort: the atmosphere of being in a log structure with no electricity and a wood fire is just fun. There was good food(salmon and buffalo, and chocolate pie!) and a great deal of generous partaking in Christmas cheer, of the alcoholic and tobacco type. Now, I am used to drinking in the Presbyterian sense of generally male-exercised Christian liberty, involving moderate to heavy drinking and cigars/pipes only. But the haze over the Christmas party was a bit more than Presbyterian, if you know what I mean.

It was still fun, though. I drank like a Presbyterian and even though I smelled like cigarette smoke afterwards, I'm glad I could make it this year. There was also live music. Sorry, no pictures: firelight makes for really bad phone camera photos.

Saturday I took a day trip with a friend down to Weston, MO. It was a neat old town all decorated for Christmas. We've decorated for Christmas, too: Mom and Dad tend to take an relaxed approach to Christmas decorating(or decorating in general). When we do put up outdoor lights, it usually looks like a fire-breathing dragon threw up on a section of our house.

The shops in Weston were a little high-end for me: lots of clothing boutiques and home decor. There was a nice liqueur store, and a Polish pottery shop, both expensive, but I bought some small things. The gentleman above was in the Celtic gift store. It's not every day that you come across a shirtless painted mannikin wearing a cargo kilt, so I got my picture taken.

Ten Eyck Coat Complete

 The Ten Eyck Coat is finished.

What I do, since I don't have a male mannikin, is I take my items to Church on Sunday, find a guy the right size, and take pictures. It looks a lot better than using my oh-so-female mannikin in my poorly-lit sewing room.

 Once I got all the buttonholes done on the front of the lapels, there was just a lot of basic stitching left: all down the back pleats and the hem, and down the raw edges of the lapels.

The little arrow-pointed part of the lapel gave me the most trouble; trying to get it to lie smoothly against the small collar over the slope of the chest and shoulder was finicky. Everything else came together fairly well. If I feel motivated you might see pictures of the inside, eventually.

Giving Thanks

My Thanksgiving week was filled with amazingly stressful, costly and dangerous car troubles, and several days spent cheek-by-jowl in a tiny apartment with eight other members of my family.

What happened with my car, you ask? The Ladybug tried to kill me. The throttle jammed and the engine kept revving, and so pushing the brakes to the floor wouldn't stop the car. Being a woman, I didn't know what to do, so I called Dad's cell phone(while driving in non-stop circles around a residential neighborhood), which he had left at home. Mom, also a woman who didn't know what to do, called Dad at the office while on the cell phone with me, and finally Dad told Mom to tell me to just put it in park and kill the engine even though it was still moving. It sounded awful, it was smoking, and I was probably closer to complete panic than I've ever been before.

$432 later, I have my car back and the mechanic told me that it should be fine now. Still, I'm afraid to accelerate. What if the car won't stop? I imagine it's something like falling off a horse and not wanting to get back up. Though I've never been on a horse, just a plastic donkey when I was three and that was bad enough to keep me off all quadrupeds for the rest of my life(somehow my parents thought the whole plastic donkey thing was funny).

Anyway, to tie things in with my post headline, I am thankful that the issue with my car was fixable and within the realm of affordability. I'm also thankful for the break of Thanksgiving and not having to work on Black Friday. It's been a year since I started working retail, and with the exception of my two months at Dress Barn, retail hasn't been what I would call my dream job.

The Ten Eyck Coat: I did the buttonholes on vacation. It's getting photographed and shipped early next week!

Seeing Red: The Ten Eyck Coat

This past week finally despite laziness and ongoing construction in my sewing room I starting work on the Ten Eyck Coat.

On a side note: The construction amounted to rearranging the upstairs duct-work somehow, creating an attic access and a new return vent, and blowing insulation into the attic. We also had to install a new thermostat for the upstairs since it stopped working. All this just after it turned cold. Insulation is messy! And it was all over my sewing room!  And now I know it costs $35 an hour to rent an insulation blower.

Inside of the cuffs. Why can't the underside of my buttonholes look as good as the outside?

The scarlet wool for this coat is such a blindingly bright red, with such shiny brass buttons, this really is a statement coat, and very striking. The pictures don't show how bright it really is; it would be impossible to ignore in a crowd. Ben Franklin probably invented sunglasses because he saw Andres Ten Eyck, wearing this coat.

I don't understand why the coat has these triangles on the sleeves. The only reasons I came up with is either it had to be pieced, or it's just a design element. Anyway, the coat had it so I added it to mine.

The cuffs have three buttons each. 

After closer inspection(ie, staring at the poor quality photos for a long, long time) it looks like the coat has a small collar under the lapel, so I added that too. The back of the coat has the two side pleats stitched closed with a decorative button each, while the center pleat is left split with the lining stitched down along the raw edge. It's a basic shape, but still with lots of those buttonholes, which I am taking with me on Thanksgiving vacation this week!

Managing

I've been having to deal with angry people lately. Angry customers, angry managers, angry dancers, angry Etsy customers: way too many angry people. My manager at John Adams, who is now to be called "The Woman of Critique" never, ever raises her voice, and she's very nice to customers- but she also never, ever encourages or compliments employees. It's not really enjoyable to work for someone who makes you feel stupid, and that's what she does to me. Employees can never work hard enough or good enough for the Woman of Critique. A good day at John Adams is a day I don't have to work with the Woman of Critique.

At Pigtails: I finished Cogsworth.

Now that Hallowmation Day is over, the children's section at Pigtails is closed and though I have way less hours, it's much more peaceful and uninterrupted. Several of my coworkers also left(one of them actually died, which was a shock) but that was mostly good too. I did finish and mail the breeches to the Worskhop Theatre of Nantucket, and then took a few days off from Etsy sewing.

All that to say, I've been working, it's been blah, and so I've not had much to post about.

Wholecloth Quilting by Hand

The Liberty Bedcover: vintage re-purposed fabrics

Since I've added another book to my list, I decided to update my post on wholecloth quilting resources. Here it is again: my advice for books on wholecloth quilting.

Quilting is a popular craft right now, but hand-quilting is rare. A lot of the women I meet who are quilters only do pieced quilting, and then take the quilt in to have in machine-stitched, or only do even easier tie quilting, and most fabric stores cater to that market by stocking more blanket fleece and quilting cottons than quality apparel fabric. Wholecloth quilting is time consuming, but there's great appeal in the hand-quilted look. The simplicity of wholecloth quilting is just as beautiful to me as a pieced quilt!

Good books about Wholecloth and Whitework Quilting

Quilts of Provence, by Katherine Berenson, published 2007. Gorgeous color photos of original antique quilts and quilted clothing. This book focuses on French wholecloth quilting of the 18th Century, with some patterns shown in the back. I love this book. It's worth buying.

America's Quilts and Coverlets, by Carleton L Safford and Robert Bishop, published 1987(a good year). I picked up an old copy of this book for $1.50 at a book sale, and it's really a neat book! Since it's about all kinds of coverlets, not just quilts, there's more variety featured than just wholecloth quilts, but still a good resource. It's an older book, so the photos aren't nearly as good quality as in "Quilts of Provence", but it does cover a wide variety of American quilting and related folk art. Very interesting and pertinent to wholecloth quilting.

Whitework Quilting, by Karen McTavish, published 2004. I don't own this book and the library doesn't have it, but in a world with fifty million books about pieced quilting, this one is about whitework, so it has to be good. It's currently out of print, so even used copies are a little expensive.

Quilting by Averil Colby, published 1971. Another book I picked up at a thrift store for $3. I like this book a lot because it is mostly about wholecloth quilts. The book has chapters on tools, filler, and patterns, then goes through the centuries in order, starting with a chapter on 16th century quilts and going through early 20th century quilts. Great pictures, though all black-and-white, and lots of pattern detail from old quilts. Averil Colby is an interesting figure in herself; read a bit more about Averil HERE.

The Essential Quilter, by Barbara Chainey, 1993. I read a recommendation for this book on some other quilting website. It's a really cheap buy on Amazon! This is a great book for those beginning to quilt by hand because the whole book focuses entirely on hand-quilting, and describes the basic techniques in detail. It's an older book, but still with good pictures and relevant information. Especially considering the price, it's worth buying.

Also check out this list of resources and events at the Nebraska State Quilting Guild website. 

Quilt on!