The Anti-Pinterest: Making You Feel Better About Your Home, Body, Parenting...

Where do you go for your daily dose of self-loathing? If you're anything like me, you probably get it at Pinterest. 

Most of us used to rely on lady mags, Martha Stewart, and judgmental friends to make us feel bad about our bodies, home decor, and parenting. Thankfully, we no longer have to wait until the beginning of the month, or even pay to look at pretty pictures of unattainable bodies, home decor and parenting!

I'm on Facebook! ("Like" me if you like!)

I've been on Facebook for years, but only just finally created a Facebook page for my blog. It didn't really occur to me how important it was until I noticed how I almost never miss a post by those blogs I follow on Facebook. (In particular, I find it hard to keep up with Wordpress blogs, because they don't show up in my Blogger feed. Also, my time for blog-reading is limited, so I appreciate the ease of seeing posts all in one easy-to-read-on-my-phone place). So to help those readers who may not be blogger members themselves stay connected, I created a Facebook page. "Like" it and my posts will appear in your feed, so you never miss anything!

Best Thing/Worst Thing — One More Thing!

I love you all so much. Thanks for sharing anecdotes about your own challenges, and how you deal. The best way to gain perspective is definitely to shift gears from wallowing in your own misery to feeling empathy for another.

Immediately after posting yesterday I regretted not linking to or mentioning this amazing column in the Atlantic, which ruminates much more eloquently on the subject of trying to be happy with what you've got. The writer has a disabled son, and beautifully reframes the question constantly posed to women today: "Can we have it all?" For those who haven't the time to read it all, here's an excerpt:

When I look at friends and acquaintances, many with perfectly beautiful children and wonderful lives, and see how desperately unhappy or stressed they are about balancing work and family, I think to myself that the solution to many problems is deceptively obvious. We are chasing the wrong things, asking ourselves the wrong questions. It is not, "Can we have it all?" -- with "all" being some kind of undefined marker that shall forever be moved upwards out of reach just a little bit with each new blessing. We should ask instead, "Do we have enough?"

I highly recommend reading it. I have it bookmarked and go back to it when I need a reminder that my life is not too terrible (and in fact is often pretty great). Maybe we can have it all — just maybe not all at once. So the regularly scheduled date nights and Pinterest-perfect decor will just have to wait a while. (Of course, the question still remains: Whither the articles on whether men can have it all? But that's a question for another day.)

I also need to thank Rachel of My Messings for nominating me for the One Lovely Blog Award! I've never been nominated for one of these inter-blogger pat-on-the-back awards, so I really appreciate the shout-out. The idea is to pass it on, showing your appreciation for others. Hopefully my picks haven't already participated in this particular award...if they have, I won't be offended if they neglect to pass it on. We can't do it all, after all!

The rules for the One Lovely Blog Award are as follows:

• Thank the person who nominated you and link back to him/her in your post. 
• Share 7 things about yourself.

• Nominate 15 bloggers you admire. (That's a lot, isn't it?!)

• Leave a comment on each of these blogs letting them know they’ve been nominated.

The seven things appear to be wide open, so here goes:

• I always check out people's butts‚ but not because I'm into asses. I'm obsessed with pocket placement and fit, and am always evaluating what is the best cut/design to trick the eye into believing you have the perfect posterior. 

• I swallow very loudly (according to my husband). Especially when I gulp water in the middle of the night. 

• I was a deckhand one summer during university.

• I've lived in the U.S. for 5 1/2 years, but stubbornly still spell it cheque and pronounce niche so it rhymes with quiche.

•  I yell at cars that cut me off when I'm crossing the street with my kid, so now at age 4 she acts like Dustin Hoffman in Midnight Cowboy. I feel a little bad about that. But people need to know how unsafely they're driving! (OK, I am unrepentant, clearly).

• I'm a savant when it comes to Where's Waldo. Also, spelling and grammar errors just jump off the page at me. These two things must be related somehow.

•  I regret never learning an instrument, and hope one day I can take up drums or piano or something else totally impractical for a New Yorker.

So here are my 15 (again, that seems like a lot, right? The chance of these 15 already receiving this award are pretty high, probably). Is it against the spirit of this award to feel bad about asking them to take on the task of posting seven things and collating a list of their 15 faves? I'm a little sensitive to tasking others with one more thing because I often feel like if someone asks one more thing of me, I may just lose it. So my apologies to Rachel, but I'm going to give these ladies and gents the chance to bask in my praise without having to do anything in return:  

Another Sewing Scientist 

All Dressed Up and Nowhere to Go

A Place in the Cloud

Balls to the Wall, Y'all

Four Square Walls

Julia Bobbin

Dixie DIY

Emily Kate

Liza Jane Sews

Male Pattern Boldness

Makes the Things

Oonaballoona

Sew Queer

True Bias

With the Crickets

I love them all. If you haven't checked them out yet and have the time, please do.

P.S. Best thing about yesterday: Barack Obama was re-elected! The election is over and we can go back to worrying about other things. Worst thing: I fell asleep before the acceptance speech, and missed seeing Michelle Obama in what I'm sure was a very lovely dress.

I Will Follow You...Follow You Wherever You May Gooooooo

Hey friends and readers,

The past two weeks I've really been enjoying getting to know my online sewing friends again after a summer-long hiatus on blogging and reading. Seeing your finished projects always opens my eyes to possibilities and patterns I hadn't considered. For example, without you people, I wouldn't know about all these amazing indie pattern company — Victory, Salme, Figgy's, among them. Nor would I know about where to buy cool knit fabrics online (Girlcharlee.com; thank you Lisa G.!)

I read and appreciate all of my readers' comments. And I try to follow all of your blogs in return, when I can find them. So if you have a blog and I'm not yet following it, please let me know in the comments section. I comment as often as I can (though every other time I try to comment on a Wordpress blog, I have to change my password because I can never remember it! Modern day problems...).

Thanks for reading and making,

Suzanne

Jeans Sew-along at Male Pattern Baldness

I just love reading Peter's posts over at Male Pattern Baldness, the world's most popular men's sewing blog. That's right. A man's sewing blog. (Though he does a lot of sewing for his "cousin" Cathy, a sweet and sassy alter-ego who favours old-Hollywood-inspired cocktail dresses.) Peter is a great writer and a prolific sewer. A while back I stood idly by as he hosted a men's shirt sew-along, but as fate would have it I will be drafting and sewing jeans just as he hosts his next sew-along: jeans.

So my plan is to participate in this fortuitously scheduled sew-along. I'm not actually sure what that entails, but I'm hoping his posts will save me some of the researching I had to do in sewing my trousers.

A Little Love

Burdastyle.com featured my latest project on the site's front page! This makes me so happy because I look to that site for so much inspiration. (Cue my Sally Field impersonation here).

At Least They're Modest...

Just so you know, if you Google "preteen dress sewing pattern" all you get is a bunch of sites hawking "modest" (read: ugly) vintage patterns favoured by FLDS members. Seriously, I found 10 sites with titles like "Kathy's Modest Sewing Patterns Page" and "Modest Clothing! Sew your own modest dresses, women's clothing." (Exclamation mark theirs).

Why Google "preteen dress sewing pattern"? I've signed on to sew two flower girl dresses for a wedding in the fall — one for my almost-three-year-old and another for a preteen who will actually be more of a junior bridesmaid. So tonight I've been searching the far reaches of the Internet for every preteen dress sewing pattern out there. There aren't many. But the good news is there is a truck-load of wackadoodle patterns out there and I dragged them all onto my desktop for you.

Take Neue Mode, for example. I'd never heard of the European pattern-maker, but apparently the company has a corner on the racially insensitive costuming market. I'm pretty sure little Madison would get sent home from school for dressing up like a .....what? Don't make me say it, Neue Mode. OK: A Chinaman. Or an Oriental. The yellow shirt? Overkill.
 
Or you could offend someone a little closer to home:

 And all it takes to turn Priest Chic into Kasbah Kool is some sandals, Raybans and a Kirpan in your belt.

Though it could be worse. Your kid could inadvertantly dress up like a key-karrying Klansman:

Or a "back massager." That's what this little fella on the left looks like to me. What do you think?

No, seriously. What the hell is that thing?

Snoozer Loser Fabric!

 Just before we went away for the weekend to Wisconsin for a wedding (alliteration unintentional, I swear), I received my bundle of Snoozer Loser fabric that I won through Burdastyle.com. It's a grey cotton printed with a large repeating pattern of owls on branches and ...I don't know, what are those? They look a little like Thunderbirds, or some other design you might see in traditional folk art from New Mexico, right? Interesting. One part "put a bird on it"/ one part screenprint Sante Fe.
Anyway, the challenge now is to figure out what I want to make with this. I'm thinking of working this menswear-style shirt I made into a short-sleeved shirt dress pattern. That would be great for spring in NYC. I could wear it with capri-length leggings and flats, then on its own with sandals once things warm up a bit here. Any other ideas? I haven't measured, but there is at least two yards, maybe three, so there's enough for any type of garment I might make. Here it is up close:

I WON something!!

I religiously enter all of the contests over at Burdastyle.com because I love free stuff but almost never get any of it because, you know, unless you're Charlie Sheen, winning can be hard to do.

But not this time! I just found out via Twitter that I won a selection of printed cottons from Snoozer Loser. According to Burdastyle: "Sonia Tay launched New York-based Snoozer Loser back in 2005 out of an art collective of the same name. She takes an environmentally conscious approach to fashion by hand-printing materials with eco-friendly pigments, using vintage overstock fabrics, and producing her lines on a made-to-order basis."

Anyway, I'll post pics when my fabrics arrive and then it's time to figure out what to make with it! Yay! It pays to enter contests.

How cool is this?

Nobody every comments on my blog (except you, Lizzi) so I often feel like no one is reading it. But then there's this:

How awesome is that? Lucy in the Max costume I designed and sewed, and a link to my pattern and tutorial on a Korean sewing blog. Thanks for reading and linking, guys! P.S. I can't tell what it says...but I'm hoping it's about how cute it is? Anyone know Korean?