SEWING MOVIES! While waiting for the sewing mogo to return: Karl Lagerfeld's new movie The Return about Coco Chanel

Well, a blog entitled Chanel No.6 ought to line up for this one, n'est-ce pas? This little preview features Geraldine Chaplin talking about playing Chanel for Karl Lagerfeld's new movie, "THE RETURN." I have the impression she's not even close to catching the cigarette-husky tones of The Original, but unfortunately, she has captured that gaunt ferocious look that Chanel had in her later years. Let's hope the movie is good.

Because it seems to be a season of such 'hommage' movies and the one about Yves St. Laurent just released here in Switzerland is...oh...dear. Here's the preview for diehards. And this is why you don't have the government subsiding the survival of your film industry, copines.

Down time, quilting clean-up

Missing my daughter especially, I took out a quilt I made for her a decade ago and put it on my bed as part of a little housecleaning and sewing room mop-up. These were all scraps from things I sewed for her when she was little, and as you can see, apart from some khaki and corduroy trousers, she loved pink at the time. The pink mohair throw at the foot of the bed is a very sentimental gift from my mother when I was in my late twenties. She confessed that she had 'accidentally' thrown out my pink mohair 'blankie' when I was a child and she had figured I should outgrow it, but she always felt guilty about pretending it got caught up in a sweep of paint-drop newspapers after my bedroom was redecorated. She carried this guilt for twenty years and finally just bought me a new one!

For over a year, there have been two bags of rags and remnants in the back of my little office. In theory these were waiting for contemplative moments when I would rip fabric into the right width for a basket weave quilt, as in here:

Yesterday while husband was out of town, I emptied out the bag and tried to assess things, sorted colors and starting attaching the long strips end to end. It was pretty meditative, and we'll see how it goes.

Burda 128a October 2011, tie-shirt, version 2, with silk from China

As I wrote a little while ago, I was keen to shove that heavyweight Burda cotton skirt off my sewing table because in addition to the Ralph Lauren vintage jacket my daughter found for me in London needing alteration, my eldest son brought back some marvelous silk from Hong Kong for a blouse for me.

He chose a real robin's egg blue. I used the Burda pattern I had used for the India paisley silk he brought me back two years ago but this time, I made some alternations to the neck design. In the Burda version, the neck ties are fixed to the collar only until the shoulder seam, then leave the fronts of the neckline to hang free, but in my opinion, though I did work hard to make the corners perfect, this left the neckline looking slightly unfinished at center front. Here's how it looked then.

Recently, I decided that although I liked the blouse, I would lurve it if I invisibly handtacked the front ties  to the neckline all the way  around to the very center corners of the slit. Now I love it.

So this time, I fitted the ties right up to the center of the front slit, which required a different assembly, working the fold-back facing around the right point in the ties' neckline section, and then seaming the ties themselves right up to the same spot as accurately as possible. 

This color picks up the faint blue thread in my pale pink Chanel boucle jacket I made some years ago, which daughter borrowed for London and has now returned. The rhinestone buttons are recycled from a silk blouse I made by hand when I first arrived in New York to work for Reuters, using a soft fern green silk I'd brought with me from Hong Kong. That was in 1976. I had no machine, so I stitched the whole blouse from a Vogue pattern, including the buttonholes by hand.

Jobs come and go, but buttons are forever.

Sewing Mojo Killed by Beast and Revived by Ralph Lauren jacket

(*UPDATE
I've gone back in yet again and taken in more of the lower sleeve armhole front and back to reduce the excess that still wasn't working. I think it's ready to leave the house now, just as the Indian summer departs and the snowblower man returns the machine from servicing.)

The 'beast' was the Roman Holiday Burda skirt that I have tussled with since last year. I finally finished it, but it is heavy to the point of unwieldy. Maybe Karen Blixen would wear it on safari, but if a lion tried to get at her, it would have to first chew through ten tons of cotton.

This is the rare occasion when I finished a project merely as a point of pride, and now own a garment that I will probably never wear. I could wear it with boots if it were in a winter fabric, but it's a heavy cotton that overwhelms the bare legs of summer. I underlined it in a heavy cotton and it weighs a ton, so all in all, a wash-out that killed my sewing mojo.

Which is a shame, since my son brought back some lovely baby blue crepe de chine from Hong Kong for a blouse I would like to make and my daughter brought me a 1980's Ralph Lauren tweed jacket she picked up in a vintage shop in London that sat around for months waiting for the skirt to make way.

Finally, I tackled the jacket, hoping to turn this, with its enormous shoulders, relatively high lapel fold and boxy cut:



into something closer to this 2013 iteration from Ralph, (minus the cutaway effect, which asks too much of my zipper and tummy area.)

Once I had opened up the jacket through the center lining seam, I realized that someone had been here before me, and that they'd made an amateurish job of hand-stitching into the shoulders after removing the gigantic pads we all wore back in the late 80's.

It took an afternoon of basting, pressing and testing,

and although it's not a perfect job,  the jacket is once again securely stitched at the shoulders and certainly a fine addition to my wardrobe for the autumn weekends walks in the pasture land above our farmhouse.
Lowering the lapel fold loses one buttonhole which I'll handstitch closed and disguise with an Annie Hall brooch or scarf/pashmina.
 I might still go back inside and try to reduce the armhole around the lower sleeve but for now, I think its a big improvement. (I hesitated  to cut down the armholes all the way around, as there simply is no way with a seam margin of only 10 cm on a size 14 to get it down to a size 12 under the arm without some tension in movement)

 I don't know what my daughter spent in the London vintage shop, but I'm sure it was less than Ralph is asking for the 2013 edition above.

Embroidery inspirations from the Game of Thrones television series

Some of you may remember my memorial post to the great French house of embroidery on the death of the founder. M. Lesage, as well as my monogrammed Christmas-gift pillowcases for my daughter. So you know I'm a sucker for gold initials and delicate flowers, etc.

Reading the publishing blog, The Passive Voice, I was referred to BuzzFeed to read about book cover design, (we're discussing the book covers for my historical novels set in Late Rome now) and from there to an amazing post about the embroidery work by Michele Carragher on the Games of Thrones costumes, and thence to the embroiderer's own webpages.

And you thought I'd never get to the point, here...

If you like embroidery, as I do from time to time, and even if you don't care to do it yourself, feast your eyes on this marvelous craftswoman's work;

here http://www.buzzfeed.com/donnad/these-close-ups-of-game-of-thrones-fashion-will-take-your-br

and look at how she does it, here:

http://www.michelecarragherembroidery.com/How-I-Create-an-Embroidery(2880144).htm

Burda Blouse 102-April-2010 goes on safari at last

Three years ago, I sewed my daughter a sweet cotton blouse which was 'too boring' to be worn. She said it looked like a nurse's uniform at best. I shrugged and wrote it off as a misjudgment.

Now, three years later, she suddenly needed basic clothes to work in Africa. Sticky knits and synthetics were out. She was participating in a diving conservation project housed in a camp on Mafia Island, Tanzania, where there was no running water, much less a runway. (And no electricity, so obviously, no ironing.)
Looks like the shirt was perfect (and I kinda like that groovy African print sported by her diving friend.)

The Floral Trousers, Burda 108B-8-2010

They're ludicrous  . . . and I love them.

 Although I warned myself that flowered trousers were a quickie 2013 summer fashion not worth spending too much money or time on, not to mention rather inappropriate for a woman with grown children, I can't stop cheering myself up with this silly garment.

Moreover, I'm getting a surprisingly amount of wear out of them. We're not getting much hot weather so far. The Swiss summer is fleeting, with rain and hailstorms dampening our enthusiasm for the garden and its usual attractions. Behind me you see an empty lawn—no badminton or croquet set out yet and a hopeful hammock that spends more time drying out than being used. The flowerbed stands devoid of its usual wall of sunflowers. You can't start plants in June that usually seed in March.

So these trousers keep my legs covered in the chill mountain winds while serving as a nod to the trend. And it turns out that I've got at least three tops that go with them, though maroon, pink and green are not my usual 'colorway.' It's just what IKEA offered for less than ten bucks.

For  anyone looking for a speedy gesture towards the floral trousers trend, note that I finished these in a jiff by eliminating the phony-pockets welts at the back and the zippers at the ankles. I had to take them in around the thighs, using a 42-44 sizing and lengthening my usual 10 cm., and they're still not the "slims" Burda promised.
Here I am above,  pulling them out again for a casual Sunday lunch with friends yesterday. The flimsy chiffon top is an old Vogue OOP modelled by my daughter years ago.

The Roman Holiday Skirt--Not quite an UFO, more just a FO that needs landing at last

The Audrey Hepburn skirt came too late in the season to finish, so it ended summer 2012 in a plastic bag. Taking it out for the Russian excursion, I decided I'd been penny-wise-pound-foolish, because in buying an IKEA cotton that is both loosely woven and wrinkles easily, I had the worst of all worlds. To rescue the project and give the skirt some flair, I'm cutting out an underlayer of white cotton to emphasis the flared gores and help the swing a bit.
We'll see if I'm just digging a deeper grave for it, or giving it some character. I hate to give up on any project.

Repairing a bike cover

As any sewer with a family knows, a lot of what goes under the needle started as something very practical or loved that finally wore out. I think that  I spent 25% of my sewing time in the 1990's patching the knees of tiny chinos and jeans or tending to beloved soft toys losing their eyes and tails.

Now it's a bike cover and it brings back the old days of the tearful "Can you fix this?"  It's zig-zag darning-stitch time!

One of my sons is taking a marathon bike trip across Europe before he starts his job in September. Europe has wonderful dedicated cycle routes. He's heading off in a week to explore one.

There was no bike shop in our Geneva area that had a full-sized cover in stock for shipping the bike by plane to his departure point. They offered some smaller covers that required dismantling the whole bike, but he preferred something full-size. So he found a used 'housse' in France full of weatherbeaten tears and splits going for only 20 euros.

This cover is going on the trip, but only after some serious rehab! It looks like it did the Tour de France one too many times. I'm using a jeans needle, a lot of thread, and patches made from worn-out dark blue jeans from my rag pile.

The Great British Sewing Bee— two farewells, rather than one.

Bravo for the winner of BBC2's The Great British Sewing Bee (last episode), in which Ann Rowley won the trophy and Sandra and Lauren came in close on her heels.

What touched me about the production were the programming elements that felt less ruthless than some of the moments in earlier episodes, and more embracing: a moment with the families of each sewer, that charming last sequence, when the surprise fitting models were members of each contestant's own family—now there's a realistic scenario!—and the finale in which all the original contestants returned to congratulate the winners and celebrate the show itself.

It felt more like the sewing world I know.

Well done to all, and a special shout-out to the sewing adviser, Claire-Louise Hardy of The Thrifty Stitcher whose backstage notes are a delightful resource for those GBSB addicts looking for more info on the patterns and techniques employed on the show. I, for one, have already used her video on sewing a fly zipper while finishing my floral pants for the summer.

Meanwhile, a sad farewell to fellow blogger Karin of Sew Here We Go Again! who wants more time for family. But we can still catch up with her sewing on Pattern Review.com, so it's not totally sayonara. I will miss her generous comments, though. Big hug, Karin.