Daryl's Blog

Oh wait, it isn’t mid-week yet…

I’ve totally lost track of days, which is a bit dangerous when I have these online classes tucked in here and there, my big fear is I will forget to log on…

The big news is, I finished my jacket.  The jacket from hell.  The hardest thing I’ve ever tried to sew.  Physically.  You have no idea…

I actually finished the jacket last weekend, but I didn’t want to add to my already lengthy post, the post  was perfect the way it was, and I wanted to save something for later on in the week.  I wore the jacket to recorder consort rehearsal on Sunday.  Everyone asked if I knit my hat.  I said, “no”, the hat was a refugee from a 1980’s craft fair.  I found it in the stash of mittens and gloves.  But I made the coat.  They all looked at me like I had three heads.  I get use to it.

I probably went through four packages of size 18 needles, a box of pins, and a half dozen hand sewing needles.  My fingers hurt, and my nails were pricked, skin bled, and shoulders hurt.  After awhile, I could no longer get the bulky jacket even near the machine, which shuddered when it saw me coming.  I resorted to sewing the last 25% completely by hand. With pliers.  But it was all worth it.  I love my jacket, it is warm, and comfortable.  I showed my girlfriend and she exclaimed, “You made that?  It is so current…”  (I’m not going to dwell on the ramifications of that statement, I know my friend is much more youthful and contemporary in the way she dresses, and I probably don’t spend a lot of energy on current trends, I prefer timeless, which will last much longer in my closet since I keep clothing for 20+ years…)

Anyway, I finished the coat, and I finished building a new PowerPoint presentation, all that takes enormous energy and a lot of computer time.  I decided to be kind to my machine and sew something quick and painless and make sure I didn’t ruin it, throw out the timing or bend the shank.  All is well, and my Janome 6600 seems happy and relieved.  This little evening top is a Butterick pattern 5147, and I made it from some novelty fabric remnant I picked up years ago from a Joann’s in Detroit.  So I’m guessing the fabric isn’t too current.  But I like the top anyway, perfect for holiday parties.  And I have a few to attend.

And so I started on my next big project, I mulled it over while I did endless hours of handsewing on my jacket.  I want to get something substantial on one of my looms, they have been idle too long and there is this exhibit coming up for Convergence, you know, the yardage exhibit…  No pressure.  Deadline is January.  Plenty of time…

So I thought I’d do a gradient warp, from a bunch of hand dyed rayon, silk, tencel, etc. skeins I dyed last year.  I’m thinking of mixing structures twill, plain weave, with some supplemental floats.  I’m trying not to plan too carefully, just see how this takes me, dangerous I know, but worth a shot.  The worst that can happen is I don’t like the end result, and I re-sley or re-thread or cut it into tote bags…

Before I can do anything though, I need to de-skein all those gorgeous skeins, into pull balls.  A slow process to be sure.  I’m sorely tempted to invest in an electric cone winder…

On a side note…  Thanks so much for all the wonderful supportive caring comments about my last post.  It was a special night, and it helped me solidify what a gift it was by writing about it.  I toss it out into the ether, and where it lands, is out of my hands.  When it comes back with so many lovely supportive comments, that is a gift that keeps on giving.  I follow a couple of blogs religiously, one is the Yarn Harlot.  I just like the way she writes.  Within about an hour of a post, there are a couple of hundred comments.  I almost never comment, I figure she has enough to read.  But maybe I should rethink that, since every comment I got made me smile and move through my day just a little bit lighter.  So thank you…

I’m still pinching myself, last night will go down as one of the best.

For many many reasons…

First, there was this opening at a gallery…

Not just any gallery you see, but first let me fill in some background…

I belong to the Textile Study Group of NY, I don’t often get into NYC to meetings, but whenever there are exhibits to enter, I try to be first in line.  You may remember my hard work last summer on three felted pieces for the 9x9x3 exhibit, which sadly I was not accepted to…

Meanwhile, there was another exhibit, that sounded interesting, and my work fit the format of the show, so I sent along my application and promptly put it out of my mind.  You see I rarely get into these types of venues, they don’t support garments, they are about pushing textiles and fibers past the boundaries, where fiber and the art world collide.  My small Woven Memory pieces are what I usually apply with, and that’s what I sent in for this exhibit.  It was the 35 anniversary celebration of the Textile Study Group of NY and they had procured a wonderful venue.  Which I didn’t pay much attention to…

The exhibit was is called Crossing Lines: The Many Faces of Fiber, and when I got an acceptance in the mail, my first thought was, well, if they accepted me, probably not many people applied or it isn’t that important of a show.  Seriously, I still get those insecurities as an artist, I know I make good garments, but the art thing still alludes me.  But I keep trying, and sending in those applications.

So after a really rainy dreary Wednesday, one where we broke the record for annual rainfall here in poor drowning NJ, I seriously debated whether I wanted to trek into NYC by myself, for this event.  My husband is in Saudi, and my daughter away at college, and they were both my top choice to go with me.  And my other choice is my friend/neighbor down the street who loves to accompany me on these jaunts.  She is thoughtful and sensitive and we have great dialogue when we go to events like this.  Sadly she was playing a gig at a local bar last night, and couldn’t accompany me into the city.  More about that later…

And so, armed with my directions and subway maps and my knitting, I headed off into the city, got there in record time, 30 minutes on an express bus from the mall, and hopped the E train, first to the east side to see the exhibit Fiber Futures: Japan’s Textile Pioneers at the Japan Society Gallery.  The show is only there until the 18th of December.  Totally worth the trip.  The textiles were innovative, as only the Japanese can do, and soaring, filling the space with air and light and movement, as only the Japanese can do.

There is a wonderful article from the director of the Japan Society gallery on the show in the current issue (Fall, 2011) of Shuttle, Spindle and Dyepot from the Handweavers Guild of America.

NYC has been installing new subway trains, and I had a lovely comfortable trip from the east side, down to the last stop on the E train, which is for the World Trade Center.

Sidebar…  I was last at this subway stop, the last week of August 2001, when my husband and I loaded the kids on the train for a NYC adventure.  We live a half hour outside the city, just over the river in Jersey, but like any good New Yorker, rarely take advantage of the tourist sites.  We decided for some reason, still unknown to me to this day, to take the kids in and see as much of the city as we could cram in a couple of days.  The weather was gorgeous, and we went on top of the World Trade Center, the view was amazing, we truly felt on top of the world, and we wandered around the area shooting all kinds of photos, and that was probably the last film shots I ever took, oddly enough in black and white, and though I can’t find the images or negatives, I found the contact sheet.

The twin towers were always an architectural anomaly, not very interesting, just very very tall.  But the Winter Garden, the glass enclosure entry way that faced the Hudson River, was one of the most beautiful man made spaces I’ve ever been in.  I shot lots of images of the outside and the inside.  Soaring palm trees reached the top of the glass arch.  I stood in awe for a long time…

Two weeks later of course, was September 11.  The Winter Garden was crushed in the wreckage, I pulled this photo from Wikipedia, taken by photographer Bri Rodriguez shortly after the towers fell.  As horrific as 9/11 was, I was heartbroken that such a spectacular man made space fell victim to the events of that day, and though I can’t really say why, I’ve not been back to the financial district of Manhattan since.  I don’t  like crowds, and it is largely a construction site, and I’ve had no reason to be down in the financial district.

Until last night…

I walked along the construction barricades, from the World Trade Center subway stop, along what I thought was Vesey Street, in the general direction where I thought the World Financial Center was.  Largely I just headed towards the river following all the people along the pedestrian walkways protecting them from all the construction debris.

I got to what I thought was the right building, and asked a guard where the gallery was.  He pointed and then explained about walking down this corridor, around to the left, all the way to the end, up the escalator by the Starbucks, etc.

I was growing weary and needed food and thought about what an out of the way confusing place this gallery is, and when I got to where he had explained, I couldn’t find the gallery anywhere.  Until I turned around the looked up.  OMG!

The gallery is in the second floor rotunda, soaring up into the atrium of this building, I could see the artworks hanging on the walls.  I went up the escalator and saw that the entrance to the gallery was closed off, which makes sense, since I was two hours early.  I grabbed a sandwich from Starbucks, and decided to walk outside.  I really didn’t know exactly where I was, I’m not good with directions, and I was blown away by the sunset over the Hudson and the walkway of trees with beautiful moving lights suspended from them.

And then I turned around.  I froze.  There in all its magnificent glory, was a completely restored Winter Garden.  I did a quick look on Wikipedia, and found out that the first structure restored after 9/11 was the Winter Garden.

 

…almost all the glass panes were blown out by the dust clouds triggered by the collapse of the Twin Towers, but was rebuilt during the first year of the Financial Center’s recovery. Reconstruction of the Winter Garden required 2,000 panes of glass, 60,000 square feet (5,400 m²) of marble flooring and stairs, and sixteen 40-foot (12 m) Washingtonia robusta palm trees at a cost of $50 million. Reopened on September 17, 2002, the Winter Garden was the first major structure to be completely restored following the attacks.”

And the gallery where my small insignificant art work hung, was attached to this glorious structure.  The palm trees soared, and though it was night, the space was spectacular, as beautiful as I remembered it, I took a couple of photos and  wandered back to the gallery doors to sign in and get my badge.

I floated through most of the evening.  I cannot tell you how beautiful the exhibit was, and how honored and humbled I am to have been included.  The work represented fiber as art and craft and social commentary and historical.  Boundaries were pushed, and  the variety and caliber of work was breathtaking.  And the space…

One of my favorite works was a floor sculpture that stretched along the wall of the rotunda, overlooking the atrium of the Financial Center Courtyard. This burlap and paper sculpture was called Cathartic Birth by Rachel C. Wright.  It represented a lot of what I felt about the evening.

I went slowly and carefully through the exhibit, chatting with so many of the artists I knew, and many I didn’t know.  I savored every minute of it.

 

The piece I submitted was one I did from a drawing I sketched on a napkin while I spent the endless vigil watching my mother in law, one of my oldest and dearest friends and fiber mentor, die at the age of 99.  I wanted to commit to memory every line of her face, capturing the grace of her lifeless body as she breathed her last breaths.  I carried that napkin around for a long time in my purse, until I decided that to preserve the napkin and therefore my memory of that grace, I should scan it into the computer.  That gave me the idea of printing the image on silk habotai, and stripping it and reweaving it back together, it was a very healing piece for me to weave, and is one of my favorite of all the pieces I have done in this technique.

Sidebar: I am offering an online class in this particular technique, called Weave a Memory, on Weavolution.com December 13th, next Tuesday, from 7-8:30 pm EST.

Anyway, I eventually wandered back to the subway stop, feeling like all was right with the world.  The Winter Garden was whole again, and life would go on.  My work was in probably the most gorgeous show I can ever hope to be a part of, and I came back on the bus with only one regret.  That my husband couldn’t be there with me to see it all.  He is of course in Saudi Arabia.  The show will continue through February 19th, 2012, so I’m hoping to go back with him to see the exhibit, open Tuesday – Sunday from 12:00- 4:00pm.

Back to my neighbor and her gig at the local bar…

I have a wonderful friend and confidant, we have know each other for almost 20 years.  We raised our kids together, and shared a street, our homes, holidays, our children, and our lives.  A media specialist by day, in the Newark public school district, she has embarked on a pretty grueling and impressive second life, that of a musician, playing local gigs, and some not so local, she has teamed up with another really talented musician and together they have formed the band Morning Door.  I’ve watched her blossom in this new role, she is so talented, and I’m so thrilled for her, when I realized her local gig was the same night as my opening I vowed to figure out a way to do both.

So I got off the bus at the mall, headed home in my car, going directly to the Sunset Bar and Grill at the little airport behind my house.  I met my son there, who said he would be happy to accompany me, like a date.  The bar was packed when I got there, and I found a stool behind the pillar, so my friend didn’t see me there until the break.  We chatted and when she returned to the stage to play, she called my son up to join her in a Leonard Cohen number, one of my favorites, Hallelujah, and my son stepped up to the mike and I thought I had died and gone to heaven.  The night couldn’t have gotten any better.  He belted his heart out, in beautiful harmony with my friend, they had rehearsed earlier that day, and again, my only regret was that his father wasn’t there with me.

Sigh, what a night…

 

I haven’t abandoned you dear readers.

It’s just that sometimes, there are priorities that get in the way, and that can be a really good thing.

My whole family was reunited for a brief holiday weekend (yeah, that one last week, Thanksgiving…)

My exuberant daughter was back from college with all her drama and laundry.

My son surfaced briefly from the hell well of black Friday retail blues (He works at Target, enough said…)

My husband came in from Saudi Arabia, and immediately set out to repair, fix, or replace much of what went wrong in his absence, before he leaves again to go back to Saudi on Sunday.

Three of us, (except my son who was chained to a fork-lift at Target for the long shopping extravaganza of a weekend) all set out for the Catskills, where my wonderful sister and her husband have a cabin.  Can I tell you how grateful I am that she and her husband are willing to share this lovely retreat, especially for holiday weekends?  This time last year my daughter was recovering from Wisdom Teeth Removal surgery, and my husband was recovering from a cat bite that caused brief hospitalization.  Nothing so dramatic this year.

Except the dog.  Animals have a way of showing their displeasure at being abandoned, and it is very clear that we all travel entirely too much.  We probably shouldn’t have a dog, and I swore when the last one died that we wouldn’t replace her, but you know how it goes, especially with a daughter who worked at a kennel for a number of years.  I’m surprised we don’t have more.

So when my husband and I went out shopping the day before Thanksgiving, the dog trotted up to my studio and lifted his leg on a pile of white yarn, sitting in the corner, waiting to be skeined.  Ewwww…

Thankfully I discovered it before we left for the cabin on Thanksgiving day.  I threw the yarn in the garage.  Most of Thanksgiving weekend I spent skeining the yarn so I could scour it with soda ash and Synthrapol.  I’m down to the last cone.  It would have all been skeined and washed anyway, but I wasn’t planning to spend my Thanksgiving salvaging yarn.

Note to self:  Keep studio door latched at all times…

Sunday my daughter returned to college.  🙁

Wednesday morning I woke to a series of texts, she was really really sick and her laptop broke.  After many phone calls and texts, and a trip to the walk in clinic on campus, it was determined that she had “acute pharyngitis, acute sinusitis, and an upper respiratory infection. They sent her home with a bag of soup broth, tea, honey, and salt along with antibiotics.”  And last night, she, and a couple of engineer geeks on her floor, performed surgery on her laptop, to remove all the accumulated pet hair that had clogged the fan causing the processor to overheat.  I heard on Facebook that the surgery was successful.

And my illustrious son, whom I adore, and has given me such grief over the years, decided to actually take my recommendation and start writing a blog of his own.  The point of this blog, was to practice writing.  It is his weakest skill.  I think he would love to one day return to college but he has to be able to pass English Comp 101.  So far that hasn’t happened.  There is no better way to get better at writing than to just write. (And reading a lot really helps as well…)  So he started a blog, called the Illustrious Illiterate.  And now he spends his time with a stream of consciousness and a keyboard, and we have all discovered that not only can he write, he is pretty good, and pretty funny, and he is learning how to make spell check his friend, and I’m learning way too many things I would rather not have known about my illustrious son.

So my husband and I went to Target yesterday, because on top of everything else, the toaster oven broke.  While we were there, we decided to replace the living room rugs that were, lets just say they were due…

We got home and rolled up the old ones, cleaned up the wood floors underneath and spread out the new ones, beautiful hand knotted wool, who knew, on sale, and four hours later the dog threw up on the brand new rugs.  Sigh…

I’ve spent most of this week cleaning.  Partly because the house needed it, (I’m talking deep cleaning her, like moving furniture) and partly because my wonderful dearest oldest friend Candiss Cole and her husband Rodger are due in this afternoon, to stay for the weekend while they do a craft fair in Morristown.  I don’t usually have the space to put them up, but with my daughter gone to college, I was able to rid her room of all the dog hair and debris and turn it into a serviceable guest room for two.  I can’t wait…

And my lovely shearling jacket.  My challenging lovely shearling jacket.  My rip your hair out challenging lovely shearling jacket.  I have to say, I’ve met my match.  And I’m not sure why that is.  Partly because I’m reinventing the wheel so to speak, and partly because the assembly directions in this pattern aren’t quite set up for what I’m doing here, and partly because I have all these wonderful distractions that are keeping me from actually focusing on the task at hand.  So I failed to think ahead and realize that I needed to engineer a hem and I had already chopped seam allowances off on the denim, and I had to redo much of what I had already done.  There are so many seams in this jacket.  After letting out the pattern, I had to reshape and rework many of the seams to get it to fit the way I really wanted, something I couldn’t have simulated in the muslin.  I had basted all the seams, but ripped out most of them to adjust the fit.  And the zipper.  I shortened the zipper forgetting I had lengthened the torso of the jacket.  Sigh…  I ripped that out four times as well…

It is turning out lovely and every time I try the bloody thing on, I decide I want to be buried in it, it is so warm and comfortable.  But my progress is slow and I feel like I’m going to spend all of December on this and I have so many other things I want/need to accomplish.  So I just take each day as it comes, and right now, I want to focus on my friend and her husband and my own husband who is rewiring the ethernet lines in the house, as I write…  He will leave on Sunday and I won’t see him again until right before Christmas…

Sigh…

I’m chugging along on the silk denim with shearling jacket, and I took a series of photos to illustrate how I’m piecing the shearling and then mounting the silk denim onto it, followed by how I stitch the seams. If you aren’t into sewing garments, this will not be an entertaining blog post, so you can just skip and wait for the next one. If you are interested in the construction process, I’ve made the images small, there are lots of them, just click for a larger view.

 

First I took each pattern section and laid the shearling scraps on top of the pattern, overlapping so the entire piece was covered with usable shearling. Then I cut through the two layers of shearling where they overlapped to get a clean butt joint. I secured these joints on the shearling side with magic tape so they wouldn’t shift. I cut the shearling just a little bigger than the edges of the pattern.

 

I flipped the shearling garment section over and taped the skin side of the shearling where the butt joints occurred.  Don’t forget to remove the tape from the shearling side before you stitch!  (I know this from personal experience.  Twice.  Don’t ask…)

I used a zig zag stitch on my machine to join the butt edges together.  I kept the skin side up, so the feed dogs wouldn’t drag on the leather skin, but the reason this worked so easily is I used my built in dual feed foot, part of the Janome Professional 6600 machine, and I can’t tell you how important that foot was in doing all this work.  The shearling sections glided through the machine effortlessly.  I also used a #18 needle.

Once the shearling is pieced, I take a sharp tool like an awl, and scratch the shearling at the butt joints so the pile comes up and fills the gap.  The seam isn’t invisible but I like the aesthetic and I’m thrilled that all these pieces are being used up.

With skin side up, I mount wrong sides together, the shearling and the silk denim, and carefully pin the perimeter with heavy duty quilter’s pins.  They are extra long and will pierce the shearling and hold it in place.  I make sure the shearling extends beyond the denim and that any tailor’s tacks are completely visible.

I carefully stitch the two layers together using a basting stitch on the machine.  Again, the built in dual feed foot is a joy.  Once anchored to the silk denim, I trim away any excess shearling, so the denim and the shearling are exactly the same size.  If there is a dart, I stitch it first in the denim, and then cut the dart out of the shearling and zig zag the dart edges together to create shape. This pattern had a dart at the back shoulder.

Now I pin the adjacent sections wrong sides together.  This takes tremendous strength to get the pins to hold the two layers without shifting.  I do my best, but know I’ll be pulling the pins and shifting and re-positioning all along the way as I actually stitch.

Now I fit that thick stack of stuff under the presser foot of my Janome machine, and again, I don’t think this would be possible on a machine that didn’t have an additional lift for the presser foot.  My machine foot lifts so high I can stick my hand under it, which is almost the size of this stack.

Using a long stitch, and a heavy needle (#18), I stitch the two layers together.  If there are any skipped stitches, I changed the needle.  You can imagine what a beating these needles are taking.  Once stitched, I trim the denim seam allowance close to the stitching.  That allows me to open out the shearling and reduce bulk.  I carefully trim each of the shearling seam allowances down to 3/8″ of an inch.

The final step is to stitch down the shearling seam allowances.  I select an appliqué stitch and adjust the stitch width and length to be a little longer and wider than the programmed defaults.  Again, with my magic dual feed foot, I carefully appliqué the shearling seam allowances down both sides of the seam.

So far I’m really happy with how this is coming together.  I will say though, that there may be better ways to do all of these steps, this is what seems to work for my equipment, my skill level, my intended outcome and my patience.  I figured all this out by sampling, since I know not what I’m doing, especially with shearling.  That’s the fun of it all for me, steering the ship into uncharted waters, there is always a way out, I just have to think a lot harder when I don’t know where I’m going.

Stay tuned…

 

 

 

Them’s fightin’ words…

I don’t do well with no deadline in sight.

I trade projects with no deadlines for ones that have deadlines, I sort of compare my life to a fireman holding a fire extinguisher, watching for brush fires.  It is fast paced and hectic, but I usually manage to extinguish fires rapidly, meeting deadlines with grace and a few missing hairs.

So now we come to my down time.  I’ve finished teaching on the road until the end of February.  I have online classes booked through January on Weavolution.com, many over the holiday break, but I only have to flip on my computer and pull up the presentation and begin.  You have no idea how appealing online teaching is over spending a day to pack and then a day to travel and doing the reverse on the way home.  The money is decent, but the stress takes its toll.

This is the time I’m suppose to use creatively, to make new work, jump in head first and knock out stuff at the speed of a Project Runway contestant.  Except I don’t work like that.  I go on fantastic journeys with my projects, because I don’t have concrete plans when I start out, I’m open to changing course, and seeing where the project takes me.  I have projects in mind that involved weaving, garment making both with handwoven and commercial fabrics, felting, and artworks.  It is hard to even know where to begin…

I have a long range to do list, and every time I glanced at it, I sort of got this sick feeling in the pit of my stomach, not because it was long or impossible, but because building a web site for my weaving guild has been at the top of that list for a couple of years now.  I can’t in all good conscience dive into the fun stuff and leave the guild hanging for yet another year.  So back at the end of September, I signed up for a class in Dreamweaver web design software at the local high school adult session.  I’ve used Dreamweaver, I’ve build three websites using Dreamweaver and I’ll be honest, it is a bear of a program.  It is one of those that you can’t live long enough to know all of its content, and since web design changes hourly, it wouldn’t matter if you could.  Since I don’t build websites for a living, I largely forget what to do, it isn’t intuitive, and I usually have to start all over again with fourteen manuals and assorted tutorials, starting from scratch.  I figured the adult school class would at least make the design of the guild’s site become a deadline instead of “no hurry, whenever”…

The class wasn’t helpful, the instructor was old school, been designing sites for years, from the Microsoft Front Page school of web design.  My first sites were using Front Page. That’s not what I was there to learn.  I wanted to know more about CSS, and Divs and Spry and all the Dreamweaver tools that make a site current and dynamic.  He really couldn’t help me there.  But I managed to pour over even more tutorials, subscribing to Lynda.com, and slowly building what I wanted for my guild.

I am extremely happy to say, the site is finished.  I uploaded all the pages and checked links and various browsers and hopefully all reads well.  I’ve sent a note to the membership for input, so far only two responses, both positive, but that’s OK, rather only a couple people actually take the time to read it over than having an entire membership full of opinions and changes…

Click here to view the site if you are interested.  In addition, the Favorite Links page has all sorts of links for handweavers, you might want to bookmark it for a one stop resource.  The page came from a guild program on just that subject, internet links that members used and thought others should know about…

So with a huge sigh of relief and much ceremony, I crossed that puppy off the list, and now I am free to start working on grand adventures that take me to wonderful places without getting on a plane.

If you were following my blog last spring, I talked about two projects using commercial fabric that I wanted to work on, I did finish one, but the other one has sat in a pile on the floor since February.  I actually thought it was longer than that, I sort of feel better knowing it was only February of this year that the seed started to germinate…

I’ve been sitting on this silk denim for awhile.  Like years.  Probably a couple decades.  I liked this Vogue pattern 1198, it is a Today’s Fit pattern from Sandra Betzina, still available, which is unusual, and one of the options is using shearling sewn in reverse.

Sidebar:  A couple of decades ago, someone gave me boxes of shearling scraps, I don’t even remember why, probably, “just get them out of the studio” sort of thing.  So they went into the attic along with a lot of other oddities, where I occasionally root around and come up with something I can use.  You don’t want to know what my attic looks like…  That’s not even on the list for organization.

Anyway, one of the colors of shearling scraps was a beautiful beige, with a dark khaki skin.  All of the scraps would have to be carefully pieced together, to work as whole cloth, but I’m game.  Probably a waste of my precious few months, but sort of mindless and that allows time to mull over where I want to go next…

I played around with possible ways to make the seam finish work, and what settings, feet, stitch to use on the machine.

And of course, I copied the pattern, based on the size chart, and tried on the initial draft by pinning the pattern pieces together.  It seemed really snug.  The pattern is semi fitted, and in fact, the finished bust circumference for the size I traced is only 40″ and I am 35″ around.  Should be enough ease for a semi fitted jacket but when I made it up in muslin (I didn’t actually use muslin, I used an old camo quilt fabric I bought when my son was into camo in the third grade, we have enough real camo around the house now since he is in the actual military.)

I found the top really snug, especially the armhole and sleeves, and they more than likely wouldn’t work with a shearling lining.  The jacket was way too shortwaisted for me, the pocket details were right up under the bust, a silly place for pockets.  And the hem flared out in an unattractive way.

So this morning, on a quiet Sunday, with no one home but me and the dog, and nothing on the calendar, I set about retracing the pattern to a larger size, and altering the back waist length and the flared hem.

Stay tuned…