What? No sewing?

Alas, the sewing has taken a back seat this week. I do have some mending I really need to get done, and my plan was to have both MIL shirts done by Sunday- so there will still be some stitchery by the weekend. In the meantime, I thought I'd let you know why there's minimal sewing going on and then treat you to a wildly delicious recipe I've recently discovered.

The reason for the lack of sewing is that I'm exhausted. Completely W.I.P.E.D. O.U.T. I have decided that this is the year to run my first (sprint distance) triathlon. I've been thinking about it for several years, but this is it and I'm letting everyone know so that wimping out is not an option. The big day is six months away because I'm not in great shape now, but look out September 13th, here I come!

This is the first week of training and so far I have run 6.23 miles, biked 9 miles and swam a measly 300 yards (6ish + 4 + 600 to go). I have been not so good about keeping in shape so far this year so my body is screaming in protest this week, but I am adjusting pretty quickly so I expect I'll be back in full swing by next week.

In the meantime, I recently discovered a recipe for bagels. It is so much simpler than I would ever have guessed and has yielded perfect bagels three times so far which makes it a TNT in my kitchen. Hubby has been in a breakfast rut (all of his adult life) and only wants 2 fried eggs and 2 pieces of toast every single day. Every. Single. Day. Until now! Now he only wants bagels during the week, what a testament! We dip the bagels into a mix of parmasean cheese and garlic powder before baking them... mmmmmmm. Here's the link to the recipe! He says it's as easy as baking a loaf of bread, but I say it's easier because it's too simple a dough even for my trusty bread machine! They take about an hour and a half from start to finish.

A learning experience

I'm making progress on my MIL's shirts, I'm mostly through the first one which is the solid pink. I've opted for 3/4 length sleeves on that one and short sleeves on the stripey one. I think what I'll do to settle the collar issue is make up a self collar in two pieces for a chevron effect and then make up a white one and decide what I think when the top is nearly done.

In the meantime, I wanted to share a learning experience with you. I almost never make a pattern as it was intended. I'm always making some kind of design change or combining this part with that part to come up with a hybrid. Because of this I would really love to learn to draft patterns myself and have been working on that. I've made several attempts at drafting my own patterns, sometimes from scratch and sometimes from BurdaStyle patterns (which I downloaded when they were free, it still annoys me that they're $4 each now).

To kick my drafting attempts up a notch I had decided that I would try to draft a polo shirt for my MIL. I used a BurdaStyle tank top pattern for the base and drafted sleeves (with instructions from Shirtmaking) and then also drafted a front placket based on the sleeve placket from Shirtmaking. This worked fairly well. Somehow I was off several inches on the collar when it came time to put that on, I'm not sure if that was a measurement failure since I am not great at math or if it was a failure to stay stitch the collar. Maybe it was a combination. (The photo is blurry because my photographer is impatient and doesn't believe in re-doing blurry photos...)

From Grillo Originals

From Grillo Originals

The part that kept me up at night was the part where the placket met the collar. On the RTW shirts I analyzed the collar comes halfway into the placket and the placket is about 1.5-2 inches wide. I couldn't work out how all the seams were finished or in what order everything was made. It made me COMPLETELY NUTS for about a week. Finally I wound up with a workable version only to realize that I had inserted the placket crooked. Ugh. I used snaps instead of buttons too because I didn't interface the placket and was not looking forward to digging the flimsy knit out of my sewing machine. I liked the snaps, I will probably do that again sometime. I'll try not to repeat the crooked placket though.

Here's what I wound up doing at the collar/placket junction. Not the neatest finish, but not that different from RTW.

From Grillo Originals

I wore the shirt a couple of times, but as it turns out the crooked placket is irritating. I'm thinking I'll cut the shirt either into a tank top or into a little polo for my friend's daughter (she wears a 2T so it would probably fit!)

Anyway, chalk that one up to a learning experience. Someday I will get to a point in my abilities where I can just dream something up and more or less make it. For now even the failures bring me some enjoyment so I'll just continue trucking along.

Happy Easter! And a shirt

Here's the finished shirt- it was BWOF 04-2009-105. I have to say, I'm not impressed. Not that I expected this to be perfect, I'm not sure what my fitting issue is with shirts, but it is certainly not better with the alterations I made.

This shirt didn't have much of a chance from the beginning anyway, seeing how it had no darts. What's with that anyway? No darts? I see that it fit the super slender boyish bodied model in the magazine, but anyone with curves or a chest shouldn't go with this style I don't think. I also don't like the sleeve cap height they've got on this pattern. I was thinking it was pretty extreme when I was tracing it but didn't fix it. I should have.

I made some unsuccessful alterations- I added the darts from my last Vogue dress... which worked in the front, not in the back. I also made a forward shoulder adjustment and an arm flab adjustment and a full bust adjustment.... none of which fixed the fact that I can't reach forward in this shirt without popping seams. Please pipe up if you have any idea what causes this tightness- Hubby says I look like I'm doing a dance in this photo so you have to click through to it. It's super tight across my back about where my bra strap goes. I have my arms up as high as I can reach in the shirt.

I did get compliments on this at Easter dinner, so I guess it's not too terrible. Here are the photos (I did iron it before I left, what a pain it was!)

From Grillo Originals

From Grillo Originals

Overall I think this will be a wadder. I wore it, it was okay, but it was a BEAR to iron and I don't really like it. I do like the color, luckily I have more of the sheet I made it out of. I think I'll try something else with it next.

One funny thing is that the shirt was almost six inches longer than this to begin with, so I went to trim it and.... oops, too short! So I had to finish it with bias binding and it was still too short. I got so mad when I realized what I had done that Hubby made me go for a run to cool off! Ha! It worked, but it didn't fix the shirt.