My life in times of a Coronavirus Pandemic- Part 2- photo post

Let's see if google has fixed their photo issues....If not I have devised a method to know which pics go where so I can re-load if necessary!

Illinois has now been in a Shelter-in -Place or Stay-AT -Home order now for 32 days and we are fully expecting that to be extended soon. Most likely through the month of May.

I know that many people around the world are in the same situation and in many ways I am lucky. I am still able to work my full time job and I have a nice apartment and I live alone. (Both a blessing and a curse!)  I am quite busy and the hardest part of all this is my worry that my pancreas will act up and I will need to go to the hospital. I really, really want to stay far away from the hospital! So , I am making very sure that I take care of my health. It is also very hard not being able to see my family and my friends or to just do the normal things of life.

It's like our whole world is just sitting On Hold while this pandemic sweeps across.

I also worry about my Mom- she is considered an essential worker and works in finance at the local hospital near her. Luckily they are in a separate building from the hospital and they are taking many precautions to keep the workers safe. Still stressful!!

Anyway.... onto the fun stuff (or maybe the more fun stuff) Pretty crazy how quickly my life as adapted and how my relative feelings about things have adjusted to this new temporary reality.

I have made a lot of masks- about 210 so far. Currently on a break from just sewing them as I find making them very stressful.  I am cutting some out while I cut out other projects- seems to soften all the feelings if I sneak them in here and there.

 I am very grateful for technology and wish ALL my virtual meetings were just fun ones!!!

Easter zoom with the family in our Easter Hats, Sew CHicago ASG neighborhood group monthly zoom meeting, Bi-weekly Zoom sewing meetings with Sarah Veblen (fun getting to know new sewing people on these!)  and of course my daily FaceTime meetings with the Princess.

We had alot fun on Easter with a big family Zoom that my sister set up. We had the family from all over the US and Netherlands on and it was great fun to be with everyone. Here are just a small collection of the hats! My mom made a sewing themed had which was super fun!

 For my hat I used all of the various flowers that I have made over the years and I took the opportunity to make 2 new ones. Silk carnations- that I added to my hat and I sewed each one on with basting stitches so that they can always be removed for later use.

Here I am all dressed up in my Easter outfit!  Yes, it was fun to get dressed for no one but myself!

I have also been having some fun baking- low fat chocolate chip cookies and homemade soft pretzels. These are so yummy! I made a big batch of 18 to freeze so I can pop them out at any time. SO I finally made myself an apron!!  (more on this in a later post)

 

 One of the other things that I have been doing is writing letters to people. I try to write a letter or note to someone every single day. I have always been a letter writer and a prolific pen pal was I was a younger before we had all this great technology. (oh man does that me sound OLD!!) I thought that the one thing I could do was to let people know that I am thinking of them and let them know they are not alone in all of this craziness. It has been so nice to get so many replies!! Living alone during a pandemic and social distancing is hard and seeing all these cards and notes is just uplifting.

I hope that wherever you are and however you are being effected by this pandemic that you have some good ways to help deal with this unique stress that we find our selves under. I am ever the optimist and always strive to make the best of my situation... so I will keep on doing that! Having this face to check-in with me on a daily basis sure does help!! It's also a 2 way street- I think it does her a bit of good as well too :)

Happy Sewing! or baking or napping or crafting or whatever you are doing to give yourself some joy every day!

My life in the time of Coronavirus Pandemic

I, like almost everyone on this planet, am having so many conflicting emotions and feelings regarding this pandemic. Stuck in my apartment in downtown Chicago by myself. I think I have gotten past the panic stage and am onto the okay, let me make the most of this stage. We shall see how that goes.

Due to this I have had a hard time blogging… I have items that I want to blog about and will certainly do so. I even have several written with photos ready.

However, Blogger- the service I use for blogging is having issues at the moment with photo’s disappearing. I initially thought this was due to user mishap or some other user error. Turns out it is not. It is something widespread across google blogs. Irritating. Very Irritating. Especially since I have been blogging for over 10 years and I put a lot of time and thought into my blog posts. To just have your photos go missing is not fun.

SO, while I wait for google to fix its shit, I am creating blog posts and parking them on my computer and getting them ready for when things are somewhat back to normal. If google can’t fix it maybe it is time to change….

In the meantime, please enjoy this single photo of my Easter look this year.

The Weirdo Dress- inspiration from an artist

When my sister told us all about her solo art show some time last year I knew that I wanted to make a special garment for her, The velvet jacket and of course one for me! You can read all about her jacket in this post and construction details in this post.

For my outfit, I knew that I wanted to wear the jacket that I made using one of her designs that I had custom printed on fabric at Spoonflower. You can read all about the jacket and the original outfit HERE. From 2016.

For this special event I really wanted to create a dress that was fully inspired by my sister’s creative mind and her artwork. I spent some time going through my fabric collection to pick a fabric that would work with the jacket. At the same time, I worked on sketching out ideas in Procreate on my iPad using My Body Model Croquis. Here you can see the original design that I sketched out and used for a guide in creating my dress.

I used my princess sheath dress pattern as a starter and made new front panel and back panels to try out the idea. With the muslin on I then placed the straps to create the upper design element. With this done I drew and then cut out the motifs at the bottom. To create the shapes, I used the shapes from the print on the jacket run under the main green shape.

With the muslin done and me being happy with the design I finalized the pattern pieces and got to work on the garment. The fashion fabric is a beautiful wool/linen tweed from with blue and green yarns that I purchased from Michael Fabrics/ A Fabric Place in Baltimore. I underlined these pieces with off white silk organza and lined with a blue silk.

If you look closely at the back neckline you can see that the left and right sides are slightly different. This is because of the princess seams at the front being asymmetrical up to the shoulder. I did my best to create a similar shape on each side and moved forward. I could have purposefully done something asymmetrical on the back neckline as well but I thought that from a design perspective it was too much.

To create the cutouts around the bottom hem I first made sure that the hem was deep enough so that the inside was wide enough to cover the entire cutout area and used a lightweight fusible interfacing throughout the entire hem area. It was helpful to have the muslin so that I could carefully plan where the shapes would be placed so that they looked even and did not interfere with the kick pleat.

From the front, on the hemline I stitched an organza patch, cut out the center, pulled it through to create a window and then secured the organza on the inside using super fine Japanese fusi-web and tiny catch stitches. Then when the hem was folded up I basted around each shape and then very carefully cut out the shapes leaving about ¼ inch and carefully snipped and folded these under and slip stitched the back to the front along the window edge. If interested more in the window technique Gail Patrice Yellen has a book called It’s all about Embellishment! that has more information on this.

The only ‘issue’ that I had with this garment was that my bra wanted to keep peeking out of the cutout in the corner. To fix this I just put the bra on with the least amount of show- and also happened to be one of my older bras- I marked it with a frixion pen to where it was showing and then since it was a foam cup I could easily just cut away the area and no more peeking! I also made bra strap keepers to keep everything in place.

The day of the event we got to the museum early before the opening and my daughter played photographer. It was so MUCH fun to have my garment photographed with the artwork that inspired it!!! You will have to forgive the wrinkles – I did have to sit in the car to get to the museum and this fabric has just enough linen to wrinkle. It shows its character!!

PS - in case anyone was wondering why I have called this my Weirdo dress- as my sister was creating many of her art pieces she would refer to them as her weirdos or her weirdo army or weirdo friends. So, I felt right at home in that ‘space’. Hence the name – Weirdo Dress!

Happy Sewing and please Stay Safe and Stay Home!