I got mugged and then made a dress. It sucks of course

 So what did you do while the hurricane passed? We bought a few jugs of water, some batteries, and I sewed this navy dress from McCall's 1207:

But, blargh, it's not really working for me. The fit is all off, probably because it's a "Misses" pattern, and cut to fit someone much younger than me, with a fat back and a tiny waist and a butt that starts at the base of her spine. It's just weird. And kind of uncomfortable. It's all big in the back, yet I can't really raise my arms (and I really like high-fives, so that's an issue for me). And I just don't think I have it in me to make the appropriate changes.

It has been a rough week, and I don't know any other way to say it than this: I was mugged by a crackhead in a park a block from my home. He punched me in the face in front of my three-year-old daughter, and ran off with my bag. (This is what journalism types call "burying the lede"). The police caught him within a half-hour and he's in jail now. Naturally, he was out on parole (most men who punch ladies in the face in front of small children probably are). I had to drink milkshakes for days because my jaw hurt so bad. I have a purple moustache and goatee. And my three-year-old knows the meaning of the word "mugged" now. Worst. Week. Ever.

And then, of course, a couple days later, a Category Mindfuck Hurricane blew through New York. So the past seven days have been damn near apocalyptic for our family.  I thought staying in all day and sewing this dress would be therapeutic, but mostly it just frustrated me and reminded me why I started drafting my own patterns in the first place.

It looks cute on the dress form though (and isn't that print awesome?):

 

Except the booty is all off. In fact, I think my butt would have to be about six inches higher to look good in this. And if I lift my arms, it does very strange things. Maybe if I stand still with my back against the wall, I could get away with wearing it.

 It looks pretty terrible on me. It stinks actually. And there are too many issues in too many directions for me to bother with fixing it, I think. If I wasn't working on my last nerve, maybe. Perhaps a huge belt would cover up enough to make it better? I need a dress fairy to pay me a visit.

Anyway, now I don't think I'll use this pattern for the peacock-print dress I was planning. I'm just going to buy something at H&M. (There. I said it.) Also, I finished my pink pegboard (which you can see in the background of the above photos) the day before I was mugged. But in the week since we have decided to move out of this neighbourhood, which means all my hard work measuring, drilling and mounting is a total fucking waste because I will be taking this down again in a month. The police officers told me the park where I was attacked is not safe and I shouldn't go there, but the parks are the best thing about this 'hood (the crackheads are obviously the worst). We feel so stupid for not moving sooner: we see tiny ziploc bags littered on the ground within a block of our building (and yet an apartment in my building is on the market for $650,000! Only in New York City). So where does that leave us?

I don't know. I don't want to leave my home. I can't even handle anyone walking behind me. And now we're moving, which is a goddamn arduous task in New York City. Someone please tell me to take the bodice off this mess, take it in at center back, and just draft a new skirt. It's not so hard. Also, moving can't be that bad if I've done it 15 times in my adult life, right? 

People keep telling me, "Well, now you've been mugged, which means you can't be mugged again, so that's good!!" If only the universe worked that way -- with a non-transferrable hole-punch card for the all the bad things that could possibly happen to you.

Am I taking out my anger over this assault on my dress? Maybe a little. But what else can I do?

Sewing Space Revamp

What do you do when you're facing a bunch of deadlines and feeling overwhelmed by the demands of work and family? Do you remodel your sewing room with a simple complicated woodworking project? Me too! (OMG, we are so much alike).

OK, so "sewing room" may be a bit of a misnomer in my case. My sewing room is more like a "sewing area," which also happens to be a foyer/busy thoroughfare in my one-bedroom apartment that I share with two other people (one of whom NEVER cleans up after herself). In clear view from almost every corner of our apartment, it sucks when it's in disarray, which it has been lately because I have so much on the go. You can see how it needed some work ("Before" photos are legally required to be shot with a flash, so they look extra ugly):

Blargh!

That's an eyesore, right? No wonder Burdastyle.com didn't feature any photos of my sewing space in their Q&A with me. 

Since I switch back and forth between sewing and patternmaking, I need to have lots of different tools close at hand. A proper pegboard seemed to be the best solution. And anyway, how hard could it be? I picked up a pre-cut piece at a hardware store nearby, plus a couple four-foot-long pieces of 2-inch by 1-inch pieces of wood. Plus screws. And drywall anchors. Then more screws. Of course all of these items required separate trips to the hardware store, because I am an idiot. Then I put my staff to work painting the pegboard a nice retro Pepto Bismol pink:

 Then I measured and marked holes on the wall above my drafting table, and then drilled and hammered in eight drywall anchors because this apartment does not seem to have studs. (There must be five layers of drywall atop each other, and if someone were to remove them all, we would get another 50 square feet out of this place. Fucking New York apartments.) Then I screwed the pieces of wood frame in place, like so:

Then, finally, I screwed the pink pegboard to the frame, et voila!! (OK, so a bit more was done before the "et voila" stage, but you don't need to hear about the hours spent tossing and organizing notions and tools.)

 I'm still waiting for my pegboard hooks to arrive (I ordered them via Amazon because it's hard to find them at our tiny hardware stores in Upper Manhattan), but you get the idea. All those tools, curves and rulers you can see on my drafting table will soon be displayed on high within easy reach. Here's another view:

Beautiful!

 I even managed to re-use three dowels I had on hand from the tents I made for my kid's camping themed birthday party. Check out my handy bias tape & trimming holder I made by putting a screw in each end of the dowel and hanging it on hooks off my pegboard (I wound the bias tape, elastic and trimmings on cut sections of toilet paper tubes):


Then I had a major brainwave, and used another two dowels to create a big spool for my pattern paper. It's so far hanging off the bottom of the pegboard in a makeshift kind of way, but at least it gets the paper up off the dusty floor, and makes it super easy to access:
 

It's a little Macgyvered in places, but I'm still super proud of it. I didn't spend much money ($7 on the pegboard, $5 on the hooks, $5 on the wood, and a few bucks on screws), but improved my sewing space dramatically. Hopefully it will streamline things for me, and help me sew and draft more efficiently.

Chevron-striped jersey dress...and a great day out in NYC

This kid is always stealing my spotlight

I'm not one to wax poetic on New York City, but sometimes you just gotta love living here. Not only do we have the greatest fabric stores, with amazing cheap finds like this super-soft, vintage-looking, orangey-coral-reddish striped jersey I picked up at Chic on 39th Street last weekend during the First Annual Male Pattern Boldness Day (I'm hoping if I say it's an annual event enough times, that will make it so), but we also have so many great places to wear the cute little dresses we sew up from said finds. Like the NY Water Taxi terminal on Pier 11 (pictured directly above), and the solar-powered carousel at South Street Seaport (pictured below), just two of our stops today on an epic family jaunt around the city.

Lucy rode the rooster, the

 It was a lovely summer day in NYC, so we did something we'd been meaning to do for a while now: took the free water taxi to IKEA in Red Hook, Brooklyn. It was a super fun ride, and Lucy shrieked with glee every time we hit waves. We had a cheap lunch at IKEA (kids eat FREE), Lucy played with all the toys, and we picked up a couple household items we needed. Plus Ryan snapped a few pics of me in the jersey dress I made this week:

The front

The back

Then we rode back to Manhattan, where we'd promised Lucy she could ride the carousel. We made it in time for the last ride of the day. Phew. That thing was fast. I felt dizzy by the end. The trials of parenting.

An all-white carousel is the perfect place to model a bright red dress, right?

Following that, we went to the nearby Imagination Playground, but not before snapping off a couple more pics near the docks.  I draped the bodice for this dress on my dressform, then made a pattern, and sewed the whole thing on my serger. I didn't overthink the skirt: it's just two rectangles sewn together and gathered. But it turned out beautifully. I blind-hemmed the skirt with my serger too, and I just love the bounce to this fabric. It moves beautifully. I don't think it looks like a jersey dress, but it's so comfortable, and held up really well to a full day out in NYC. Note the chevron stripes created by cutting the bodice on the bias:

I'm from an island. What can I say, I love boats.

Real models don't smile, do they?

Our kid is such a fucking champ. She can spend a full 12 hours out exploring the city, and she never loses her shit. At 8 p.m. she was happily enjoying a peanut-butter bagel at the 92nd Street Y in Tribeca (we walked ALL the way there; I just mapped it and it was 2.66 miles/4.3 kilometres). That kind of stamina is going to serve her well one day. I don't know if we deserve any credit for that, but if someone's handing out medals, I wouldn't turn it down. That was our day. How was yours?

The Perfect Fit Bombshell Dress as Consolation

Try to remember that correlation is not causation, especially if your name rhymes with Thirsty Boss and you are reading this (come to think of it, "Thirsty Boss" would be a good nickname for my best friend. Am I first person to think of this? Probably not. She does like her liquor.) But today was the deadline to pay tuition for the fall semester at FIT and I had to let it pass me by and de-register for the Patternmaking for Coats and Jackets class I was hoping to take. It just wasn't in the budget this semester, for several reasons (Eating, being one. Shelter, another). In addition, I will be heading to Nicaragua this winter for a wedding on Little Corn Island off the coast of Nicaragua in the Caribbean!

Thirsty Boss is getting married, and the minute her now-fiance told me he was going to propose, I started writing my speech in my head (note to self: start writing it down before you hit your head and lose the first draft). Luckily for me, flying to Nicaragua from NYC is much cheaper than from the West Coast, like most of their family and friends, though the title "MATRON of honour" is not very fitting, is it? This is the very first picture that comes up when you do a Google image search for "matron":

This was not the look I was hoping for. Thirsty Boss says I can wear whatever I want (and in fact they are planning for everyone to swim directly after the vows on the beach), so I was thinking a good way to both console myself for not taking my class at FIT AND make something befitting a Caribbean island wedding would be to sign up for Gertie's Perfect Fit Bombshell Dress online course. (Dare I admit to being inspired by Oonabaloona two days in a row?) Her version of this dress is THE bomb, so how could I not. I wouldn't have thought of using this pattern if it wasn't for her stunning example. I like it so much more in a bold print like hers. Ok, let's just do this. (I'm not trying to Single White Female you, Oona):

Shazaam!

 Anyway, the bombshell dress online class is only $30, including the cost of the pattern. And it looks like I will learn a great deal in sewing this hot little number. Also, if I don't go for a print, maybe I could do an overlay of silk chiffon, something like this J. Crew dress:

So use the Bombshell dress bodice as the foundation for something a little softer looking. Of course, none of this can happen until I finish sewing this:

And sew this dress:

 

From this fabric

For another wedding we have this fall in Kansas City. So sorry FIT, my dance card is full.

Not a bribe, it's an incentive (or what I made with my Male Pattern Boldness Day impulse buy!)

I'm a terrible procrastinator and when I have a crapload of work on my plate (real, paid writing work, that is). I have to fight my instincts to let it all slide until the night before by setting daily quotas and giving myself incentives to finish. Iced coffee is a big one. I say to myself: "Self, if you finish this story, you can have an iced coffee before tackling the next one." (To which I reply, "You're a stingy little bitch, self.")

Also, the prospect of watching an episode of Glee Project or Project Runway (hey, it's summer -- so reality TV is my only option) is another proverbial carrot on a stick for me.

And, of course, rewarding myself with some sewing time, which I did yesterday after it mercifully rained all day long (record rainfall in NYC; something like 8 inches!). Not only was I able to meet all three deadlines for today, I also made the pattern for and sewed this little bodice from the cotton jersey I bought on Male Pattern Boldness Day! (Plus, praise be to Mother Nature for the rain, because it kept the Dominican Day festivities in check this year, and we weren't up all night listening to partying).

Front bodice

Inspired by the following two garments, I draped the pattern for this baby in minutes and then sewed it up last night using the stripey coral-orange cotton jersey I found at Chic Fabrics on 39th Street for just $5/yard. The jersey is very thin, so I lined it with a white jersey I had on in my stash, which had the effect of making the subtle stripes a little bolder, plus it looks like piping around the neckline. Happy accident! I love the chevron shape created by cutting the striped jersey on the bias, like this amazing maillot I first saw on Burdastyle

By daughterfish.com

And this super cute dress by Oonabaloona, whose style and blog I just love:

 

 A close-up of my chevron:

Love it!

And the back