Plaid Tunic Dress, Part I

Draping the uncut fabric on me to see what
the dress will look like.





I'm not really sure what to call this dress.  It's a true T-tunic in layout, but it's certainly not medieval.  If you aren't sure what a T-tunic is, it is a garment cut on doubled fabric in the shape of a captial T, which approximates the human form.  That is, the stem of the T covers your body, and the cross-bar of the T covers your arms.  You sew front to back together along the sides and cut a hole for your head.  Simple!  And I'm a simple gal when it comes to style.  It's not quite done; have to add some buttons and ties for fit options, but we're getting close.

I've been inspired by the One Dress Protest to make this, although I haven't decided on my participation in the June experiment.  Still, I've been wanting to do something like this for a while, and here is a good excuse.

The Magic of Twig the Fairy

Greetings!  I have been away for a spell, taking a trip in Texas.  And while I may have neglected this blog in that time, I was most certainly accumulating many merry memories.

My visit to Scarborough Renaissance Festival was my second to a "real" renaissance faire, or what most people mean when they speak of faires.  Everything was great, but the one thing I had to see when I went was Twig the Fairy.  She was amazing.  She held kids and adults alike entranced.  She is beautiful, yes, but magical too.  Her expression, gesture, smile, personality, generosity, and love are windows into a world of hope and wonder.  She represents everything that is right about childhood.  We lose some of that rightness as we age, and she reminds us, with a little sprinkling of fairy dust, to return to that innocent joy.



Photo by Alaskan Dude via Flikr, used under Creative Commons



 Visit Twig's website at http://www.twigthefairy.com/, subscribe to her on Twitter (highly recommended), and look for internet videos by fans.  Simply wonderful.

Patching Clothes, Old School Style

I have had many an occasion to observe other people mending their clothes.  Most of the time, but not always, it makes me want to cry.  It's not my friends' faults; they don't know they're actually shortening the clothing life instead of extending it, which is the purpose of a mend.  So here I'm going to describe a good way to do one kind of clothing repair: the patch.

The patch is just what you think it is.  It's an extra piece of fabric slapped on to fix a hole in the main garment.  But where does it go?  What stitch should you use?  What fabric and thread should you use?  These are all important questions, and the answers depend on how formal the clothing is, how strong the base fabric is, and how much stress you will put the garment through.

Clothing Style: If you're a dirty hippie like I am, then you have lots of clothes for which an obvious patch would be an accent, not a detriment.  Matching colors and prints doesn't matter at all, nor does patch shape.  But there are also the times when you kind of want your repair to blend in.  You could choose a matching fabric to apply on the outside in a plain square or oval, and you might try to keep your stitches invisible.  Or, instead of invisible stitches, you might prefer machine stitches, for that factory-made look.  That's up to you.  You might not be able to wear this to a job interview anymore, but you would avoid dirty looks in department stores. 

Base Fabric Strength: Your patch fabric and thread should match your base fabric, period.  I learned in museum collections care that when sewing a label onto a textile, choose your thread so that in a battle of strength, it will lose to the textile.  That is, if the tag gets caught on something, you want the tag to rip off rather than the tag ripping a hole in the textile.  Same with your patches.  Patch and thread that are too heavy will wear out the base garment, but patch and thread that are too light will wear themselves out and need replacing.

Stress:  A wedding dress that will never be worn or laundered again doesn't need much from a patch.  It's not taking much strain.  But heavy-duty work pants will take a lot of abrasion, body movement, and laundering.  Eliminating raw edges in the patched area will keep the garment from fraying under all that stress.  You may also need heavier thread or closely-spaced stitches in this case.

Also ask yourself if patching is the best solution.  A seam is the thread that holds two separate pieces (or two different areas) of fabric together.  When the seam rips--that is, when the thread breaks but the fabric is unharmed--you only need to replace the seam.  You only need a patch when the fabric itself is damaged.  Also see darning.  Sometimes the base fabric is so worn out that there's nothing good to sew your patch to.  Rather than fight a losing battle, consign such worn out garments to the rag bag.

Some people make seams where they should make patches.  A hole develops in their base fabric, and they pinch the two sides together, seaming on the inside.  This does keep raw, frayed edges from view, but it alters the geometry of the fabric.  Think of a piece of fabric in a garment.  It lays flat, like a geometric plane.  But pinch some inner piece of the plane out of existence, and it's got depth and puckers.  It's 3D in the wrong way.  And now it is smaller in all the places that cross this bad mend, while the rest of the garment is the same as it was before.  This difference causes stress in the mended area, and stress means you are more likely to make a new tear.  My hiking parter J ripped his pants in the crotch, already a high-stress area.  He put a seam in them.  They ripped again, nearby.  Another seam.  Another rip, even sooner.  As the crotch of his pants got smaller and smaller, he ripped them more and more, until he finally gave up and hung some fabric from his waistband to cover his junk.  Then he had to buy new pants.  This is what happens when you make a seam where you should have made a patch.  So lets learn how to make patches, shall we?

 

 Here's my favorite skirt.  It's gathered to a yoke at the hips, which you see here.  I had a safety pin in the yoke and accidentally ripped it out. (Remember the lesson about museum tags?)  So now I have a hole in the fabric, and it's complicated by being so close to both the hip seam (to the right in this picture) and the side seam (just above).  Since it used to belong to my aunt back in the day AND it's my favorite, it's got a lot of wear in it.  It was also a relatively light fabric to begin with, so I need to make sure not to go overboard with the patch.  I pick a lightweight blue fabric, and cut it into a square, and choose all-purpose sewing thread.




I turn my skirt inside-out and baste the patch to the skirt, using red thread here.  This keeps the patch from moving while I work.  Pins would work too.  The basting comes out later.  Turn the edges of the patch under so you can't see them, and sew around the patch.  Use whatever stitch you like; I've used a running stitch.


 

Going back to the right side, I carefully turn under the edges of the L-shaped hole, again so I can't see them, and stitch.  I've used a whipstitch. (I mistakenly put the patch over the seams inside the garment and had to deal with them getting in the way and showing through here.  Because of them, it was hard to turn my raw edges under in some places, so I covered the raw edges with a very dense whipstitch.  You can see it at the bottom.)  My basting thread is still in, but I will remove it before I wear the skirt.

This kind of patching results in a fabric with no raw edges, inside or outside.  Nothing to fray and endanger all your hard work.  It was the method used historically for undergarments (when you only have a few, you really want to make them last) and for sails (and if you don't have them, you're not making it to land).  It won't work for everything, but it's a strong and servicable repair for single-layer items.

For information on different kinds of stitches, see here.

Edit, May 2012:  Here's another example, outside and inside, of this style of patch.

 

Banana Bread to the Rescue

I'm continuing to avoid needlecrafts as much as possible this week, so I turn to the kitchen for a likely project.  Ah, here's one!  I do detest letting delicious ingredients go to waste.

Not appealing

It may not look good enough for a fruit salad or a smoothie anymore.  It may even be brown on the inside.  But inside banana bread, the overripe texture doesn't matter and the sweetness rocks.

Looks delicious!

In fact, I think most fruits and vegetables, cooked if necessary and then mashed, do well in quick breads.  Think carrot cake!  Sweet-corn bread!  Zuchinni bread!  Pumpkin bread!  Your overripe produce can yet be saved!  Plus, it's fast and easy.  Use any banana bread or pumpkin bread recipe; I make fake pumpkin bread every winter with whatever squash I have on hand.  You can even add another handful of mash and skip the eggs.  (It might be a good idea to squeeze and drain the excess water out of very liquidy mash.)

Good luck!

A Day Out

A couple of years ago I hiked a good chunk of the Appalachian Trail.  It's very accessible to newcomers as backpacking trails go, and it's also life-changing in some unexpected ways.  One often makes friends out of strangers after as little as one night spent together.

I knew G on the trail for two or three weeks.  We quickly bonded over museums, but the shared experience of the trail made a tighter bond.  Recently G and I met up to appreciate the great weather. After a little art and garden tour...

...there was communion with Earth's creatures...


...delicious food...



...and a serious amount of self-guided nature exploration...

...not to mention fire-building, sand-sculpting, bench-jumping, woods-walking, pebble-throwing, grass-whistling, and flower-picking!




Life is grand, if only you take a look.

Making Butter

Ever since finishing the afghan, I've not had much interest in yarn work.  I suppose I've just been fixing dinner and the like these days.  I'm not a Martha Stewart hostess-entertainer type; in fact I wouldn't even call myself a "cook."  But I do like preparing food, especially in ways homely, simple ways.

My first grade class, years ago, made butter for our Thanksgiving feast.  Heavy whipping cream + Mason jar + marble + shakeyshakey = homemade butter.  So simple.  I loved it.  I would do it for fun in high school and college, and I even regularly made butter with kids for one of my summer jobs.  There was a butter song we taught them to chant while churning:

Come, butter, come.
Come, butter, come.
Johnny's standing at the gate
Waiting for a butter cake.
Come, butter, come.

So when I found leftover cream in the fridge, I decide to make butter again!  I started off by simply pinching the carton closed and shaking.  I find it helps to have some air space in the container, so you might want to pour a full carton into any jar with a tight lid.  The liquid cream first becomes fluffy and thick.  It's straight whipped cream, and already a treat at this point.  Good for strawberries!  Here's the cream in the whipped state:



I've made butter without the marble "dasher" before, but this time the cream wasn't moving on its own, and it needed a little more agitation to become butter.  I slipped a marble inside, but it just got stuck in the cream.  A smooth stone with a little more weight did the trick.  As I shook the carton, the stone dashed the whipped cream until until the fat (butter) separated out and clung  together.  It looks a little lumpy at first, like cottage chese, and is surrounded by the white buttermilk.  I poured the buttermilk off and drank it.  I hear commercial buttermilk is nothing like this.



You can actually use the butter at this point, but it will keep longer if you work the little pockets of buttermilk out of the butter.  Rinse under cold water while patting and squeezing the butter with a wooden spoon (or your hands, but they will melt the butter a little).  The water will turn whitish and cloudy as it takes on the remaining buttermilk.  Discard this water, and keep rinsing and patting until your rinse water is clear.  At this stage you may add salt, herbs or spices, garlic, honey, etc.  I like it straight.  Then form into a patty, or press into a mold, or put it in a pretty bowl.  Whatever makes you happy!

Ta da!  Bake up some hearty bread, maybe even throw in some honey, and pretend you're a not-too-oppressed peasant in some fantasy novel.  Actually, try not to think about oppression just yet.  Be happy you have unlocked one of the mysteries of food production.  Very DIY.  Keep it up!

Grape Pudding

Last weekend I made a delicious grape pudding using a family recipe.  We've got access to a Scuppernong grape vine right now, so it seems we always have processed grapes on hand.  You know how muscadine grapes have that pulp like snot?  It's not an appetizing image, but it's delicious, right?  Because the resulting pudding is similar, it's no good for me to include an image.  Rest assured, however, that this pudding is a rare treat and a delicious way to experience muscadines. 

Photo by flattop341, via Flikr, used under Creative Commons

Grape Pudding

3 c. sugar
2 1/2 sticks margarine
6 eggs
1 c. milk
1 T. vanilla
4 c. self-rising flour
1 qt. processed grapes

Grease and lightly flour a 13x9x2 inch baking pan.  Beat sugar and softened margarine until creamy.  Add the vanilla and then the eggs, 1 at a time, beating for 1 minute after each.  Add flour and milk alternately, beating after each addition.  Fold in grapes (not drained).  Bake in a 350 degree oven for 45 to 60 minutes.

For a more cakelike consistency: Drain and reserve juice from grapes.  Add milk to juice to measure 1 cup of liquid and use this in place of milk in recipe.  Also, powdered milk may be added to juice.

When I made this recipe, it nearly overflowed the pan.  We ate on it pretty constantly, and still had to freeze half of it!