Sewing Under the Influence (of hormones and humidity)

 I won't miss this week when it's over. Let's just say that. I'm not sure what it was that put me over, but a confluence of annoying factors just overwhelmed me this week: -the tail end of a brutal allergy season/the end of school semester/sudden heat and humidity for which I was not prepared/the homicidal rage I experience in summer when douchebags on motorbikes swarm my neighborhood all night long. Pair all that with an admittedly hormonal funk, and you get this:

What? No! Ew. Terrible.

 Fugly, right? I was trying to improve upon the bow-print dress I was sewing from a vintage McCall's pattern. I thought a navy yoke would look better. But the colour was off. Then scrapping this, I made it even worse:

Blargh!

At this point, I had to put down the pins and walk away. So I watched an episode of Glee, in which New Directions writes original songs for nationals in New York. A terrible idea. But I enjoyed it immensely because my husband watched it with me and his commentary on Glee is the best. He should host a web series called "Ryan Watches Glee," or "Glee With Ryan." Trademark.

Today is a new day. And after some relaxing in the park with friends and kids, I made this while my kid napped, using the original yoke and navy cotton, which doesn't look so off when paired with the print in this way.

Better?

This week's Unfinished Project

This unfinished dress is hanging out on my dressform this week while I sew a dozen carriers for my Etsy store. If you didn't already know it, I make cute little carriers for kids to carry around their dolls in. My shop is almost empty because I had put it on the back burner while busy with patternmaking homework this semester. 

Last night my two-year-old helped me assemble the straps. Toddlers are such hard workers. They really like manual labour. (That's my defense when the child labour laws people come calling. Also: I'm not paying her, so it's not really work, is it?)

My sweatshop/sewing table today

As for the dress-in-progress, I'm going to rip off the yoke because I think it looks silly the way the print doesn't match up. Instead I'm going to either make a peachy pink yoke, or navy blue. I may cut both and see what works best. I'm also going to have to cut a lining for this. Then if I'm feeling it, I'll make another dress exactly the same but with the yoke made from the bows print fabric, and the main dress cut in pink. Or navy. Still can't decide. Maybe I'll put it up to a vote. This is America, after all.

This is what a mom looks like

 Do you ever find yourself saying something that, once you think about it (10 seconds later), realize goes against all sorts of things you believe in? I felt that way the other day when I asked my husband: "Does this shirt make me look like a mom?"

To his credit, he said something along the lines of, "You are a mom, so yes. But isn't that offensive to moms to imply they are unattractive or frumpy, or whatever it is you are suggesting?"

That is exactly what I was suggesting, which is stupid because most of the moms I know look and dress exactly as they did pre-baby. Also: do you ever hear "You look like a dad in that" with the level of negativity associated with looking like a mom? Maybe if he's wearing socks with sandals, or has tucked his T-shirt into his shorts. Or has a cellphone clipped to his belt. OK, it works. No double-standard here.

I think what we're saying when we ask whether we look like a mom is: "Do I look like my mom?"

And the answer to that question, for me, will always be: hell, no. (It's OK: my mom doesn't know about the Internet yet, so she won't ever have to be offended by that).

It is possible though my mom would wear this shirt (pictured above and below, in close-up). It was my final project for "Misses' Sportswear" patternmaking class at FIT. I don't get to choose the style. I had to recreate it from a sketch. And I fucking nailed it.  I got an A. (Despite the fact that I didn't do a great job matching up my plaid on the pockets:)

 

 But it's a patternmaking class, not a sewing class. My pattern for this shirt, which looks like any other menswear-style button-up from the Gap or Old Navy, has 17 pieces. Seventeen! A lot of sewing goes into making a shirt like this.  So don't your mom shirts for granted, ladies. Those kids in Vietnam worked hard sewing them.

Finally: I blame this classic SNL commercial for my self-loathing:

The original cast of "16 and Pregnant"

 One of the cutest things I even heard watching a red carpet special (those hours-long pre-Oscar/Emmys/Grammys fashion fests hosted by malnourished E! hosts) was Jenna Fischer (from the Office) describing her dress. She said it had an "umpire" waist, which even my husband knew was wrong. So delightfully wrong. The kind of awesome wrong that makes you picture a baseball ump calling an out while sporting a high-waisted gown.

I love me an umpire waist. I think mostly because I am lazy and sucking in my gut for too long makes me want to go home and lie down. Of course, umpire waists are the standard in maternity wear, which may be why a classmate of mine asked me last semester whether I was pregnant (I was/am not). I was tired that night so my posture was poor, but also: I was wearing an empire-waisted top. Ladies, you haven't lived until someone has asked you if you're pregnant and you're not (though I would rather be me than the woman doing the asking at that moment. She was, understandably very embarassed).

All that said, I'm taking a break from drafting my own patterns for the time being to sew a summer frock from this vintage McCall's pattern pictured above. It is a maternity pattern, but it's from the '70s, back when ladies rocked demure little bumps because all the smoking and drinking kept their babies' birth rates low (or was that the '60s?), so I'm hoping the gathering in the front isn't too pronounced. I may have some altering to do.


Since it's already 8 million degrees in New York City, I'm making it sleeveless. With this navy cotton printed with bows:

 

What do you think? Are empire-waists for pregnant ladies? And will you ask me whether I am with child should you see me walking down the block in this?

Love Thy Gummy Smile

Whenever I'm worried or stressed out about something, I like to ask myself the following to put it in perspective: Is this a First World Problem? And by that I mean, how does this problem compare to the issues faced by women in Afghanistan, or Sudan, or on a reservation in Canada? For example:

• "My kid wakes me up at 6 a.m. but I want to sleep until 7 a.m.!" You're not getting up at 6 a.m. to go work in a factory for 14 hours while your 3-year-old chainsmokes and runs the drillpress beside you, so consider yourself lucky, princess.
• "We live in a one-bedroom apartment with a kid, and sometimes I just really wish I had my own space!" So go outside, dummy. In many parts of the world, your parents, their parents, and probably 4 or 5 in-laws would be living with you too.
• "Our apartment doesn't get enough quality daylight to keep plants alive!" Well, unless your family needs to eat those plants to survive, you should shut the hell up and go cook the asparagus rotting in your crisper right now.
• "Nobody follows my blog!" In some villages, a "blog" is something you pray the Medicins Sans Frontieres doc removes before you are of marriageable age.
•  "The stores are all sold out of OB Tampons!" What? You don't have other options? It's not like you have to rip up old towels for makeshift pads and be stoned in the streets for daring be near a man while menstruating. 

So unless my anxiety is related to paying our rent (a survival issue), my daughter's safety (again, a survival issue), or being attacked by a schizophrenic crackhead on the subway, the answer I usually give myself is "Just get over yourself."

And, I believe, the very definition of First World Problem is cankles.  If you are worried about your fat ankles, I hope you realize what a luxury it is to have that part of your brain whose job it is to worry about important, life-threatening things free to worry about a stupid, made-up body issue. At least you have ankles.

I don't care about my cankles. Mostly because I am not convinced anyone else ever looks at anybody's ankles, except for the starving magazine editors who invented them. And only then because they're hungry and jealous that I get to eat. HOWEVER, the one feature I have always had the luxury to obsess about is my gummy smile. Of course, as a kid I didn't know I should obsess over it, until all those school picture photographers told me to smile with my lips closed.

You know how people say things like "Growing up Korean, I never saw any women like me in the media." Or "Our culture is lacking in positive portrayals of lesbian lawyers." Well, I can honestly say that I have never seen a famous person with a gummy smile like mine. It's a bit anomalous, I admit. I've only known a few other people who had the degree of gum exposure that I do.

Think about it: if you're gap-toothed, you have Letterman and Madonna to look up to. Jug ears? There's no better role model than Barack Obama. Unibrow: Frida Kahlo (or Bert). But who do gummy-smiled people have? I searched the Google box:

One-hit-wonder Jon Heder

Jazz singer (and fellow Vancouver Islander) Diana Krall

   As I searched for the very few celebs who have been noted to have gummy smiles, I quickly learned something. There are things you can do to eliminate your gummy smile. (I had always thought my gummy smile was my cross to bear for otherwise being so awesome.) But apparently the lovely Jennifer Garner used to have a gummy smile, but then she had it fixed:

 

"Gummy smile correction treatment"? Are you kidding me? I'm hiding the Internet from my kid until she's 30 (by then, the Internet will be implanted in our brains and I won't be able to keep the sad fact that people have their gums lasered off from her any longer). Looking at this (totally made up!) analysis of gummy smiles, I'd say I have "advanced gummy smile" but not "severe gummy smile." Probably some lip injections and a little Botox in my upper lip to keep it from lifting when I grin would keep me from needing a "gingevectomy."

First. World. Freaking. Problem. Children in North Korea are eating weeds because they have no food, and you're going to spend thousands of dollars on making your teeth appear bigger? What are the aliens going to think when they come to earth and find that adults on one side of the planet are lasering their perfectly healthy gumlines just as children on the other side of the planet are losing their teeth due to malnutrition.

That is not the world I want to live in. I want to live in a world where this girl here can smile as big as she wants for her school pictures.

Gummy and beautiful

Love thy gummy smile. And cankles. Save that part of your brain for worrying about something important. Like why aren't more people following my blog.