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Kitty Calash

~ Confessions of a Known Bonnet-Wearer

Kitty Calash

Tag Archives: mistakes

Failure is Always an Option

09 Friday Aug 2019

Posted by kittycalash in Making Things, personal

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

I sew for money, mistakes, sewing, work

Or, if not failure, at least screwing up.

The big cold box….

In my more exhausted moments, I make interesting mistakes and choices. Once, I engaged in an argument at work in which I repeatedly used “orange” when I meant “blue.” Another time, I lost the word “refrigerator” and had to coin the phrase “big cold box where we keep the food.” My brain is an interesting place.

When I sat down to start on a commission for some officers’ white linen sheets to be 60” x 85” I was tired. I chose not to do the math on paper as I measured, but in my head. And using a 60” tape measure, I measured and marked 60” and then added 16” to make up 85” plus seam allowance. Yes, I measured 60 + 16 = 85 finished inches.

Obviously not.

Round two of thread pulling to cut the second sheet correctly.

But it was not obvious to me until I held the fabric up, ready to iron, and realized it was just a little bit longer than I am tall. Since I am not 7’ tall, something was clearly wrong. I dropped the fabric to the ironing board, messaged Drunk Tailor, and took to bed in mortification and hope of a nap.

I tell you this story not just to make you laugh, bring you a modicum of schadenfreude, or to make plain that we all screw up sometimes, but to remind you that mockups are good, and so is math on paper.

Really, I’m not sure how this happened. But there it is: upside down.

Starting a project without laying down some ideas on paper or making a muslin is a quick trip to madness, or at least dismay. Creative problem solving will undoubtedly result, but that’s energy you could put into planning your next project instead of salvaging your current one (as I have salvaged my sheet).

Here are some measures I’ve learned to take to prevent repeating hilarious mistakes:

  • After hemming skirt fronts that put pocket slits upside down, I now pin notes to the panels so I know which make up the left, and which the right sides of the gown skirts.
  • I have been known to mark linings extensively in pencil or chalk; I sometimes pin notes to sleeves to denote left and right, front and back, especially if I cut pieces long before I will get around to sewing them.
  • I make lists of which pattern pieces I need and must cut, and then tick them off as I go, to make sure I have all the pieces I need.
  • To make sure I’ll have enough fabric and can minimize piecing, I will do a rough layout of all the pieces before I do actually cut anything.

It is by no means an extensive list, but once you know the types of mistakes you are most likely to make, you can take measures to prevent them. You know, like measuring twice and cutting once, or doing math on paper to double check your work.

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Bloody, Bratty, Boning

27 Friday May 2016

Posted by kittycalash in Clothing, Fail, Living History, Making Things

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

18th century clothing, infrastructure, mistakes, sewing, stays, underwear

File_000Sometimes I am a terrible brat, as in this past weekend, when the autocorrect on my phone insisted that the proud four-letter Anglo-Saxon words I was typing were not what I meant to say. Darn tootin’ they were.

This is not my first rodeo with stays, but somehow I’d forgotten about the special stabby hell of boning the beasts. I’m machine sewing the channels for these, mostly because I calculated the time required to completely hand-sew them and realized I would not finish them before I needed them. I’ve rationalized this by acknowledging that I’m not using the hand-woven brown wool sateen I covet, but instead a dark blue wool twill.

A bloody, messy business
A bloody, messy business
all around
all around

I know, I know: there’s a reason staymaking was a man’s trade. My hands are pretty strong, but it took some doing to figure out how to slide the pieces in neatly without jabbing the ends repeatedly into the freshly re-opened split on my thumb.

d'oh! surgical tape made this *much* better later.

d’oh! surgical tape made this *much* better later.

It takes discipline to keep doing this, the way it takes some discipline not to eat ice cream for breakfast just because you can (though I did, just this week). Spencers and dresses are so tempting, but there’s not point to making a new dress of wonder unless I have the stays to wear it over: infrastructure is required.

The stomacher and the two front pieces are boned… six more pieces plus whipping and eyelets and binding, oh, my! It’ll be a race to have them done by June 24th:  Discipline’s the thing.

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About that Spencer…

13 Wednesday Nov 2013

Posted by kittycalash in Clothing

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

buttons, Clothing, fashion, mistakes, Regency, sewing, silk, Spencer, worsted

It's better on a human than on a hanger.

It’s better on a human than on a hanger.

Take my Spencer, please.

I’m close to being finished– all that remains are closures, but the sewing is done. It fits, though I haven’t yet tried it on over stays.  It looks less wretched in the mirror than it does on a hanger, I will give it that.

The wool is a yard and a quarter worsted remnant, and while it has a nice hand, it was sometimes annoying to press. It may have been the fault of the silk, though; I used a very light weight silk–even lighter than Booth’s “persians”– and that was probably a mistake.

DSC_0405

Last-minute peplum and button additions.

The Swedish Spencer closes with clasps, and while hooks and eyes are pretty common for center-closing garments (men’s and women’s) “clasps” was new to me. The double-breasted riding habit coat in Janet Arnold (from the Salisbury Museum, no photos online) closes with covered buttons. That seems reasonable for this worsted trial garment. I’m beginning to wonder if the Swedish Spencer is really finished, or if the clasps might be a later addition. Time to write a letter, I think…

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