Hemmed pants!

These are my feet:



They are sticking out of a pair of new jeans that I just hemmed myself on my new sewing machine!

I am short, so I need to hem everything. My mom taught me how to hem pants by hand, but hand-sewing is labour intensive so I usually just threw a new pair of pants into my drawer and waited until the next time I visited my parents' house (where I would beg my mom to hem them for me). This has gone on since I left home in 2000. I am totally accustomed to buying pants and then not being able to wear them for three months.

So it is very exciting to report that I just hemmed a pair of jeans in under an hour. I bought them yesterday, hemmed them today, and am now wearing new pants like a normal person. Woo hoo!

Incidentally, I used to just fold up my jeans until I noticed that I looked exactly like the cover of the classic children's book Harriet the Spy:



Same red hoodie and everything.

Pink and Green Swatches

Swatches for some light spring cardigans:



The pink is a soft, slippery 50% acrylic-bamboo blend, Micro Bamboo Spray by Schachenmayr. The dye is sprayed onto the yarn after it's spun, giving it an interesting mottled colour. I picked up a bunch of it at the big Dressew sale for (as ever) $1.99/ball. I think I see a candy-pink Featherweight Cardigan in my future.

The green is a soft, slightly overspun merino, Filatura Di Crosa Zara Solid. It's for the Puff-Sleeved Feminine Cardigan by Stephanie Japel that I have been threatening to make for months. (I didn't have a 4mm needle! It's not my fault!). I LOVE the colour. Hopefully all this pink and green will break my out of my year-long teal streak (I made three teal cardigans in one year!)

And close-ups of some hats I made from Rowan Cashsoft Chunky (and a bit of blue Rowan Lurex Shimmer). The green hat looks kind of ratty in this photo! I assure you that it's nice in real life. I'll get some more photos up once I get someone to photograph me. Probably my friend Dave, because he airbrushes pictures of his friends without being asked, which some people might find offensive but I appreciate (though I try not to think of him hovering over blown-up images of my flawed skin in Photoshop).

Where was I? Hats:



The yarn came from the Dressew sale and took under 1.5 balls each. The Lurex shimmer has a nice wet shine but it's kind of scratchy. The big button on the green hat came from Button Button, which is now my Mom's favourite place in Vancouver (though she seemed to find Dressew pretty exciting too).

Sewing setback

I started sewing an a-line skirt from Wendy Mullens' Sew U, only to discover that my zipper foot does not actually fit on my sewing machine. To do: find and buy new zipper foot. Admittedly, my early research does not look promising, since Kenmore has changed their foot style in the years since I bought my machine.

So I decided that I'd make a dress out of jersey in the meantime, because my jersey skirt went pretty well, and the '60s-inspired mini dress in Sew U: Home Stretch doesn't need a zipper. Then I discovered that my machine doesn't sew stretch very well. So I scrapped an entire cut-out dress. I could just tell that it wasn't going anywhere good. A few crooked seams on my wrap skirt didn't bug me, but puckery seams at the shoulders? Nooooooooo.

The fact is that my light-blue Kenmore Mini-Ultra just doesn't want to sew stretch fabrics. Which is too bad, because I really like jersey skirts and dresses. I'm not sure what to do with this. My mom has generously offered to buy me a new machine for my birthday. Are there non-serger machines that sew stretch well?

My ambitions are running up against both my skill level and equipment. It is very annoying.