Everyone Hail to the Pumpkin Song

Happy Halloween!!!  This has been a quiet holiday for us.  No costumes (unless you count my cat-ear headband) and no parties (my Halloween-obsessed friend R is trying to sell her condo so no annual house of horrors).  However, we have engaged in some festive (and when compared to R's, boring) decorations.

We've also done up our porch for the trick-or-treaters with a variety of pumpkin artwork.  Here are our makeover candidates.

As if our kitchen wasn't orange enough already.

Here's Mr. flyskim designing his masterpiece.

The puking pumpkin was not my idea.  We can blame that on Mr. flyskim.  I carved the pumpkin on the ground looking horrified.  Because I really am, a little. 

 And here we have my haunted house pumpkin (thank you Martha).

We'll light them all up tonight, lock up the cats and hand out candy by the fistfuls.  I'm hoping the weather holds. Few things are worse than trick-or-treating in a rain storm.  Anyway, I hope you all have a wonderfully spooky Halloween.  I just need to put a second sleeve on Vogue 1193 and hem the skirt and sleeves.  I have great hopes of wearing my new dress to work Tuesday, so look for the post.

The Hungry Skeleton

 

 Last night, Mr. flyskim and I had our annual Halloween dinner at La Calaca Comelona in Southeast Portland.  This is, hands down, my favorite restaurant in Portland, and we don't eat here as often as I'd like.  This is the one exception I make to my boycott of spicy food, and I've never had a bad meal here.  From the moles to the enchiladas Morelianas (regional to Morelia, chicken and potato based and like no other enchilada you've ever eaten) to the chile relleno, everything is fresh and wonderfully made.  (Can you tell I'm not a food critic?  No descriptive abilities whatsoever.)  The old menu used to warn you that you were about to enjoy authentic regional Mexican cuisine (southern and central) and that you would not find burritos on the menu.  The restaurant is filled with pictures of Frida Kahlo and Day of the Dead images.

La Calaca Comelona means "The Hungry Skeleton" and, according to the restaurant's website, it "celebrates the traditional spirit of the dead that playfully makes its way into Mexican culture."  So, perfect for this time of year.  There is also an annual Day of the Dead Dinner on November 2nd with a fixed menu.  We've never attended, but I hear it's a blast.

Mr. flyskim would not let me take a picture of my meal (Levanta Muertos or Wake the Dead, a yummy combination of chicken, mushrooms, green peppers, onions, black beans and rice), so here's a picture of Salma Hayek as Frida Kahlo. 

What Were the Judges Smoking?!?

Because it had to be some pretty good shit.

MONDO WAS ROBBED!!!

I'm a veteran watcher of competitive reality television, and I don't expect a show's judges to agree with me even a part of the time.  (Ask me how many times I've correctly predicted the outcome of America's Next Top Model.  Twice.)  But I always hope that the decision will at least have some basis in logic (high expectations for what is essentially a game show, I know).  But nothing can explain this except for drugs.  I mean, how else can you justify handing a large cash fashion design prize to someone who created what was, when it came right down to it, high-end Chicos wear?  I know that a lot of women love Chicos (T, I'm looking at you when I say this.  And, oh yes.  Hi Mom!), but not me.  

These were not wearable, on-trend clothes.  I for one have no desire to wear granny panties, boxy jackets and pleated pants, and if this is truly where fashion is going, thank God I sew.  Project Runway and Lifetime?  I wash my hands of you.  Marie Claire?  You are dead to me.

Let me say right up front that I love my job.  Really.  It's interesting and involving.  I have great co-workers.  It gives me someplace to dress up for otherwise I would live in jeans, and it pays me.  For doing something I really like.  So it always surprises me that I get so excited when I have a few days off.

Starting this morning, I am officially on vacation for the rest of the week, and Mr. flyskim is off work starting tomorrow.  We don't have anything planned other than pumpkin carving, a little baking and watching scary movies.  I'm going to be hard at work on Lady Grey (I'm just starting to pad-stitch the hair canvas onto the second front collar) and hope to have the shell put together by the end of the weekend.

I've also been fitting Vogue 1193, and I should have a progress report in the next couple of days.  I'm kind of at a loss about how to alter the skirt because of the pleating (blast you multi-sized patterns that break at size 12), so I'm pretty much winging it. 

And lastly, I'm working on two skirts for my sister-in-law as a birthday gift.  Yes, her birthday was months ago, but she hasn't called it in until just recently.  Muslin fitting on Sunday.  Must be ready.

And as we head into fall and winter, I'll leave you with my greatest hope for this La Nina year.  Our street knee-deep in snow.  Okay, maybe only ankle-deep from the look of it, but I remember we had to walk in the street because it was packed down, unlike the unshoveled sidewalks.  I took these pictures in December 2008 while walking to the local dive bar with Mr. flyskim for lunchtime gin and tonics and greasy burgers.  That was a good day, and I hope to have another like it this year.

If At First You Don't Succeed . . .

Your cat will eventually have to take matters into her own paws.  Or she would if she had opposable thumbs.  So, Lady Grey.  I'm still on the front.  I would be making significantly more progress, but I've had to redo everything at least three times.  At this rate, the left front is going to be ragged before I've even started on the right.  That's when Pip decided that someone better learn how to tailor, and she's been hard at work studying Tailoring:  The Classic Guide to Sewing the Perfect Jacket from cover to cover. 

I think she needs more light.  Wouldn't want her to strain her eyes and ruin her night vision.

In order to avoid my problem with my seams being too stiff and supported and thereby turning my coat into a geometric shape, Pip has determined that I need to do a combination of sew-in and fusible interfacing and that I need to fuse the whole front and then apply hair canvas to the collar only.  So, I'm plugging away.  I didn't fuse the whole front at first and figured the hair canvas would provide enough support, but I forgot that the girlie spent a little time this weekend tenderizing it for me, so I have to undo the pad stitching that I've managed, fuse the rest of the collar and give it another go.

So, I'm off to rip the front apart.  Again.  I hope to have this all worked out by tomorrow, so that I can move on to the right front before the left front gets too spoiled from all of the attention.

Panic Is Really Just a Challenge

So, I hate buttonholes.  This is probably because on my machine, you need to constantly adjust the stitch length to get the buttonhole even, requiring multiple samples prior to sewing with the risk of still getting it all wrong in the end.  So, needless to say, after putting in so much time fitting my Lady Grey, the last thing I wanted to do was mess it all with wonky buttonholes.  Enter the bound buttonhole.  While this would have to be done pretty much first thing on the garment, I would be able to avoid a temperamental sewing machine and trying to duplicate all the layers (fashion fabric, hair canvas, interlining and lining) that tailoring requires in order to test the buttonhole multiple times.  The catch?  Never done one before, and I'm not the neatest finisher.  But I decided to give it a go with the aid of some scrap fabric and Gertie's excellent tutorial.

Here's my sample attempt.  I didn't feel like changing the thread that was in the machine from putting together my muslin, so I just went with the red.  It went pretty well but for the glaring exception of doing the final stitching on the outside of the garment, resulting in a messy, uneven box of stitching showing on the front of the sample.  However, the button fit throughout beautifully.  I rechecked the tutorial and figured out what I was doing wrong.  Now. I probably should have made another sample, but I didn't want to.  Lazy and wanted something that looked like actual sewing NOW!!!  Here's the finished buttonhole on the actual front piece.  And my pretty, glass button.

Please forgive the cat hair.  It's par for the course when you've got a cat sitting on your project as you're taking the picture.

And here she is doing her quality inspection of the uneven basting of the hair canvas to the side front.

I had to redo this multiple times.  I'm working with a really smooth fabric, and it seemed that no matter how few threads I picked up when basting down the hair canvas, I had puckering on the right side of the fabric.  By the end, I only picked up a single thread on each stitch, and my basting stitches are seriously close together because of it.  This is the point where I gave up and decided that it had to be good enough because there was still puckering on the front, and I couldn't pick up fewer threads.  There's just nothing less than one.

I later found out the trick was to iron the pieces after the basting was completed.  Completely cleared up the problem.  So, now I'm ready to attach the hair canvas to the front piece and shape the collar.  However, I first have to get another yard of hair canvas because I didn't get quite enough the first time and get 3/8-inch twill tape.  I should have followed my gut and got the twill tape in every width the store had, but no.  I actually thought about it and chose logically and couldn't have been more wrong.  I'm sure I'll find a use for my two yards of 1-inch twill tape sometime in the future.  I don't anticipate this taking particularly long now that I've figured out the secret to getting rid of the puckering.