More concert black and drafting updates

Happy new year, everyone!

I don't know about other people, but I don't always start my new year on a high. Sometimes yes, but not always. Sometimes the weather cooperates, and January is generous with her sunny days, which helps. Sometimes, like this year, we get a long stretch of dim, colorless mornings when 9 am looks like 5 pm and we crawl out of bed only to feel like we really need to get back under the covers. Our family went to Singapore this year-end to visit Mum and get away from the cold post-Christmas. The trip was wonderful, the weather was both warm and cool in all the best ways, and we returned in early January both rejuvenated and missing the tropical sunshine, the freedom to wear very little clothes, and the sounds of birds, traffic and the pulse of a city that never needs to hibernate. 

Today is one of the coldest days we've had so far in Minnesota. I was sitting at my sewing table watching the blue, waning sunlight and decided I needed a break from actual making to come talk with you guys and see how everyone's doing. So I took a series of photos of what I'd been working on for a show and tell. Maybe this will entertain you slightly, maybe not. Maybe it's just to foster a sense of solidarity amongst those of us who are so done with the cold already. Hang in there, friends. Spring must turn up sometime. 

So anyway, I've been working on concert gowns again. My three girls are in various musical ensembles at school and college, most of which at some point have required a dress code for concerts. Emily and Jenna have outgrown the gowns I made them when they were underclassmen, and Kate now needs one herself, so this week I began the process of updating measurements and redrafting slopers. 

Concert gowns are potentially more straightforward and satisfying to make than other kinds of formalwear, for several reasons. One, they're black, which substantially streamlines the process of procuring fabric: we can gleefully bypass the million shades of gemstone and pastel and lace and textured organza, and simply zero in on the black stain and chiffon. Two, concert gowns have gloriously clean lines which are much easier to fit than corsetted bustiers and ruched bodices and the general froufrou of promwear. Three, they're floor-length. Which means lots of fabric to wrestle with but also a standardized hemline that, even if it's a tad uneven, no one is really going to notice unless they're lying on the floor. Four, they're concert gowns, meaning that they get worn every time a kid plays in a concert. Which is several times a year. Which means a lot of mileage on that one garment. Which makes the hours spent fine-tuning the fit sooo worth it.

In short: I kind of love sewing concert gowns.

I realize I never posted about Jenna's first concert dress in late 2022, possibly because I finished it barely hours before call time. So here's one of the few photos I took of it:

In addition to the fancy neckline, it had chiffon sleeves, a column-gown silhouette and the whole thing was satin with a chiffon overlay. For the 2024 update, we kept some of the elements of her first gown, like the chiffon sleeves and chiffon-over-satin layers, but changed the neckline and skirt to something more classic.

The first step after drafting the pattern was this bizarre-looking muslin below. It's made of whatever remnant fabric I have in my stash that's similar in texture and weight, but not necessarily in color. I always include one sleeve, even at the muslin stage, because it more accurately fits the shoulder and neckline than a sleeveless mock-up would. Jenna has similar enough proportions to mine that Fleur works as a placeholder between actual fittings, a fact for which I am grateful as it keeps partly-finished garment parts off the floor. I cannot count the number of times I've accidentally tossed important bits in the trash, thinking they were, well, trash.

I took this next photo of the haul after laying and cutting out. This dress has three layers: lining, satin and chiffon, so it was a lot to cut out, and thus too much work to also begin sewing on the same day. You'll see some hand stitching in that pile: all the satin and chiffon pieces are sewn as a single layer and have to be basted together so they don't separate. Also, center lines have to be basted (since black fabric doesn't take to fabric marking well), particularly with flowy fabrics like chiffon which shift if you so much as breathe on them too hard. This pile doesn't look like much, but that's 70% of the work completed right there. Anyone who sews garments will know that the actual assembly under the presser foot is trivial compared to the layout and cutting, right?

That said, the piecing for this dress was more time-consuming than most because of the double-layered fabric thing. As mentioned earlier, each component that wasn't lining had to be hand-basted to its chiffon counterpart before the disparate pieces could be assembled into the outer garment. So on the first day of sewing, this is how far I got before bedtime - just the bodice and the back skirt, which was attached first so the back zipper could be installed through the entire dress:

Day #2: the full dress, sans pockets. A lot of the seams are hand-basted at this point, just to make adjustments easier.

Jenna had a fitting today and there was very little adjustment to be done, which is always a happy place to be. There's nothing worse than to have sewn all the seams with permanent and microscopic stitches and realize they need to be unpicked and adjusted. I've been drafting for years now, but there is always a part of me that is unsure and thus tempted to second-guess the process and the numbers, but I'm quicker these days to stop myself and trust my methods. If I do, the fit is usually just fine, even at the muslin stage. With this dress for instance, I could've just saved time and laid out on the actual fabric from the start. But I include the muslin, partly out of habit, but also partly to check one thing that a paper draft cannot do: determine the waistline of the finished garment. 

Let me explain. Obviously, it is possible to measure the position of the waistline with a measuring tape. On some bodies, especially those with very well-defined waists, this is easier to do than on others. With little children or expecting mothers who have protruding tummies, for instance, locating their waists (especially in the front) can sometimes be challenging. We discussed this (and its solution) in my long-ago drafting series here. For regular folks, sometimes tying a string around their natural waists is another solution - it's a visible marker of sorts. So it's not exactly an impossible undertaking. Instead, the issue is that there are very few garments we make whose waistbands actually sit at our natural waists - it's an awkward height which shortens our torsos and makes us look misproportioned.  That is to say that often, garments are drafted with adjusted waist heights. Sometimes this is in keeping with the design of the garment e.g. high-waisted vs. low-waisted jeans. Other times, it is in keeping with the proportions of the wearer: those of us with shorter torsos tend to look better compensated with lower waistlines, for instance. 

Enter the muslin: even as just a bodice without a skirt attached, it is quickly visible where the waistline looks best on a particular wearer. On one of my daughters, the final waistline is unchanged from the one on the draft. On another, I always end up lowering the waistline on the the draft by a 1/2" or more. 

And that's where I was today when I left my sewing room to write this post. The first draft (in the actual black fabric) is finished and fitted, and I need to make two tweaks moving forward: one shoulder seam was peaking and needs to be taken in by 1/4"; also the side seams should be let out 1/8" to compensate for the bulk of the seam allowances of all those layers. Which sounds like nitpicking, but this is one of the lovely advantages of custom-drafting: we can tweak an already-personalized garment for maximum comfort as well as a great fit.

I will update again when the dress is finished - heaven knows I need the accountability so I don't slack off and start doomscrolling on my phone or whatever we do here in MN to cope with being indoors so much.

That said, I wanted to share a few more photos of the drafts themselves. When the girls were little, I didn't bother to save their basic blocks/ slopers because they grew so quickly- instead, each time they needed a new garment, I'd grab them and measure them and draft the pattern directly and without a whole lot of precision. That crazy growth is slowing down now, so that it's worth drafting a good sloper and saving it to save time with future garment projects. Here's Jenna's slopers from this most recent draft:

At the top of the cutting mat are the front and back slopers. Directly beneath them are the patterns for this concert gown drafted from those slopers. 

Here, I'll break those down: first, the front - you can see how the rectangular neckline has been cut away from the original jewel neckline in two stages (the first cut was too high). The bust and waist darts have been merged into a princess seam. A skinny sliver has been cut away from the shoulder/armhole to better compensate the set-in sleeve. 

This is similar for the back:  a corresponding sliver has been cut away from the back armhole. In addition, the neckline has been slashed away in a V. 

I didn't save the sleeve block, because it's easy enough to draft one anew when I next need it. I did save the sleeve pattern for this dress, though. The blue line of the sleevehead is the actual set-in-sleeve that fits the sloper armhole. But Jenna wanted a little puff at the shoulder, which is the higher red peak. 

While putting away the patterns, I found the first sloper I drafted for Jenna 14 years ago. She was 4 then, and so tiny.

Here they are, superimposed on their 2024 versions. Isn't it interesting how the shoulder slopes haven't changed much over the years? It's the same body, after all, just bigger proportionally.

These are all the patterns I've drafted for her in the last 14 years. In spite of all the garments I've sewn for her, I've mostly tossed what I can easily redraft, so that what's left all squish down and fit into a single flat envelope. It's almost pointless to save older patterns from years ago because they will never fit into them again, nor  will any other small child, unless their body is identical to hers. And yet I saved them for sentimental reasons, because it was a kind of 3D snapshot of what my kid looked like when she was yea high and loved Disney princesses and colored markers arranged in rainbow order. 

I'm heading to the kitchen to prep dinner now. Have a lovely week! See you back here when Jenna's dress is done - and when I'm working on Kate's!

Menagerie Workshop and Shop Update!

Hello everyone, and - for those who celebrate it in North America at this time of the year - an early happy Thanksgiving!

I had so much fun at last week's Menagerie workshop. I learned so much from the process of prepping and teaching the class, as well as from my four joyful, competent participants. All skilled seamstresses, they were focused, patient, asked fabulous questions and worked with great determination for four hours to make stuffed toys together. We started out in the "do this next" step-by-step way of traditional classroom sequences and then very quickly, each participants found their own pace and rhythm, so that what was left for me was to wander around the room and enjoy watching them instinctively assemble their plushie from its disparate parts (and occasionally poke my nose in their business to see if they needed any help).

Oh, how I've missed being in a classroom! I loved the intimate size of this class, which allowed us to chat randomly between sewing an arm, or a tail, or to demo a particular technique one-on-one. So, so, fun. There was a lot of prep to do beforehand, not only of the materials we'd be working on, but even more so to anticipate the best way to teach someone in a brand new setting, with equipment and technology I'd not been accustomed to using. I mean, for the past couple of decades, my mode of instruction with you guys has been tutorials and photodocumentation. And before that, when I was a high school teacher, there were still chalkboards and white boards and OHPs and transparencies (remember those? Sooooo funny). 

Of all the things I've learned as a teacher, the most vital is this: different learning speeds. These days, we talk about different learning styles: visual, auditory, kinesthetic, and I can't remember the others. But more fundamental is the challenge of presenting the same instructional material to a group of learners who, because each is an individual, will process that material at varying rates. And as instinct leads us to slow down for the student with the most furrowed brow, this concept was drilled into us in teaching college; some professor would always be asking, at some point or other, regardless of whether it was a Science or English or Phy Ed teacher's course, "And how will you ensure that the quick learners will not get bored?" 

I almost went the way of the powerpoint presentation, let me confess. I thought I'd run a slideshow of enormous annotated photos detailing each step to guide most of the class even as I backtracked to an earlier stage to review a particularly fiddly technique with others. 

Thank the stars I didn't. Instead: handouts. Which looked just like one of my blog tutorials, with color photos and do-this-do-that in accompanying text. Did it involve more prep work? Sure, but it was worth it. Some participants followed the instructions, others deviated as they felt creative, and anyone could be on whatever page fit their speed most comfortably. 

My one regret is not thinking to take photos. Grrr! I was so focused on being present during those four-plus hours, that I didn't imagine I might want to share that experience with you guys in this post after. I did take one quick shot - just one, and only because I thought the husband and kids might like to see what it all was like - and the participants have kindly let me share it here:

I wish I'd taken photos of the setup of the room, the various animal displays of both Season 1 and Season 2 Menagerie critters, and the sewing tables stocked with notions and materials at the start of the class. When I got home, I recreated the shot I would've taken:

If I ran this workshop again in the future, I'll be sure to do a better job photodocumenting it! I also need to record all the things I'd tweak and those that worked wonderfully, because the learning process for me was at least as exciting as being able to teach in person again. One of the things that really surprised me was how much I liked cutting out pieces of fabric for the participant kits. It felt like mass-producing (which you all know I adore) but without the actual making, and I had so much fun doing it that I made way more kits than I knew we'd need. It certainly gave the participants plenty of choices on the day of, but it was mostly because I wanted to keep going with the cutting and assembling. Well, now I have kits to put in my Etsy shop for you to buy if, unlike me, you actually disprefer cutting stuff out and just want to get right to the sewing!

There are three different Menagerie kits, and each contains almost all the materials and notions you'll need to make that animal, plus the templates so you can make more of that same animal after if you want. You'd only need to supply fiberfill stuffing and sewing thread. I'll include some instructions (you'll get a black-and-white printout with your order, and I'll email you the color PDF version). 

Here, I anticipate a question: Does the kit come with the sewing pattern?

To which I will say that the answer is a bit roundabout, so bear with me as I try to explain.

These kits are intended to be used with your Menagerie sewing pattern, so if you already own that, you'll find that the print instructions, particularly for the Rabbit and Ladybug, are very similar. If you don't, the print instructions accompanying each kit may be adequate if you already have some experience sewing stuffed animals. There might be some Menagerie terminology (like "rolled ear") that's new to you and which are explained in the Menagerie sewing pattern, but instinctive people will probably be able to work around it. 

You can buy the Menagerie Sewing Pattern here.

In order of challenge level, I'd say the Rabbit is the quickest sew in that it is a classic Menagerie animal with very simple surface details. The instructions are also pretty basic, with a couple of photos or diagrams.

The Ladybug also comes together quickly but because it deviates a little more from the classic four-appendage Menagerie animal, the accompanying instructions contain more detailed step-by-steps and photos.

The Grey Cat is a new variation on the original sleepy-eyed Season 1 cat, 

so the instructions are correspondingly much more detailed. I'd go as far as to say you wouldn't even need the Menagerie sewing pattern with this Cat kit - the instructions are more than adequate. 

And speaking of patterns, I'm thrilled to announce that you can now buy my Menagerie pattern book. In print! 

Limited numbers of physical copies are now in the shop. The pattern book is the same full-color thing as the popular PDF digital pattern, except in hardcopy, 

and spiral bound for your reading (and reference) pleasure. 

For those who want to sew something a little smaller, 

I'm relisting my Spring Bird kits, 

with the option to bundle them with the sewing pattern if you don't already own it. You can select the option in a drop-down menu and I will email you the PDF pattern file after your purchase is completed. 

Finally, and I'm super excited about this - for the first time ever, there are also some actual Menagerie critters in the shop! I've been hoarding all my prototypes since day 1, only some of whom have found space in my sewing room to live

but as I'm working through the documentation of Season 2, I've needed to make duplicates for the photos. The plan was to release all the duplicates when Menagerie 2 is finished, but I. Am. Running. Out. Of. Space. Plus, I want nothing more than for these animals to find better homes and other children (and adults) who will love them now. So this is the first wave; just seven, each uniquely handmade and one of its kind.

Axolotl

Beaver

Rabbit

Dilute Calico Cat

Grey Tabby Cat

Sperm Whale

Narwhal

Lots more photos with each listing in the shop.   I hope you stop by and find fun and creative gifts for yourself and someone you love!

More patterns in print

To clarify: no, I have not struck a business deal with a commercial printer to get my patterns sent to the far corners of the world. I mean that I am incrementally making hardcopies of my thus-far-only digital patterns. I have no idea why I didn't think to do this years ago. Maybe it never crossed my mind that something in softcopy might be nice to have in some concrete, tangible form.  Or maybe it did, but after running some calculations and balking at how much it would cost to actually print full-color books, I decided to deprioritize it till later. 

Well, later finally arrived. Last year, I sifted through countless printing companies insisting on minimums of 1000 copies and found one willing to make single prints. Hurrah! I uploaded a few files as a test-run of sorts, and was very pleased with how they turned out. You can read about that here.

The impetus for finally getting all this printing done was Menagerie. So, as I've been saying for who knows how long, I'm in the (very slow but sure) process of writing Menagerie 2. In contrast to the original Menagerie which I wrote in a few months in 2015, the sequel is taking years. Partly because my life is - surprisingly - so much busier with teenagers than I ever was with preschoolers and elementary kids, but also because the animals of Menagerie 2 are exponentially more complex and ambitious than the ones in the first installment. 

Giraffe, for Menagerie 2

Whale, for Menagerie 2

Unicorn, for Menagerie 2

As I documented each new animal and its instructions, I referred constantly to the original Menagerie pattern in order to keep the terminology consistent. It got to the point where I was opening the digital file so frequently that I realized how ridiculous it was to be speed-scrolling between pages 1 and 87 or toggling between tabs. What I needed was a printed book on the desk beside me as I worked on the computer, whose pages I could flip, preferably spiral bound so it would lay flat or folded behind itself. That was the motivation for the hardcopy version. And then, since I had committed to printing one pattern, why not throw in a few more?

This year, I sent a few more patterns to the printers. I suppose I could've printed all of them in one go, but it would've been a splurge, so I figured I'd pace myself and do just a few each year. The goal is by the time Menagerie 2 is finished, all the others will have been turned into hardcopy, too. This is the haul so far: nine, which is not quite halfway through the whole collection, but in time, we'll get there.

And now, I'm packing kits for the upcoming workshop. It's a ton of work but unexpectedly fun cutting out all these multicolored shapes. The floor of our basement living room was a riot of color and fleece scraps all last week. 

And besides, assembling kits is always hugely entertaining. All those little pieces and components that get to be organized in self-contained sets!

I get excited anticipating the participants' relief that they don't have to cut stuff out themselves and can instead jump right into the sewing and constructing.

Hope you guys are doing well. November can be gloomy here in Minnesota - it has none of the crisp brightness of October nor the magic of December and its sometimes pretty and well-timed snowfalls. Sandwiched between two far superior months, November can kinda be a downer, so I hope you're able to get some sunshine and fresh air, maybe even a fun creative project or two to spike those endorphins! Take good care of yourselves, friends!