Finished: Colette Patterns' Meringue Skirt

I finally finished the Meringue Skirt! The muslin took way longer than the actual skirt took. Partially, I think, because I already knew what I was doing the second time, and I wasn't really procrastinating as much on it as I was with the muslin. I'm still trying to figure out what exactly I was afraid of with the muslin.

I know that half of the fun of finished projects is seeing them modeled, but...

I don't have a full length mirror to take selfies in, and I feel really narcissistic asking my husband to take pictures of me.

Alterations: I hacked off two inches in the length because I'm a petite, and I wanted the skirt to fall just above my knees, not below. Overall, I'm happy with the skirt and I wore it right away on a walk around the neighborhood with my husband. I am looking forward to pairing it with a butter yellow top that I have to bring out the yellow in the skirt, but that top is in the wash right now. :)

I should have taken in the waist a couple inches as well, but since I'm really new to this, I didn't feel confident in making that kind of an alteration. So instead of it sitting on my waist like it should, it comes down around my hips, which suits me just fine because that's where I wear my pants. Being a petite, high waisted things on me make me look shorter in the torso. I feel like Urkel. This means that those two inches I took out in the length pretty much mean nothing. In the models, the skirt falls a couple inches above the knee. On me, the bottom of the scallops hit just below my knee. But at least it's not that awkward few-inches-below-the-knee length that looks like it's supposed to be mid-shin but it's not...like it would have been had I not taken out the length.

To me, this skirt looks way bigger than what it is, but honestly, I know I have some body issues. I weigh more than I would like, and my shapes are not where I want them to be, but in my head, my body image is slimmer than what I really am.

The next pattern in the book is the Pastille dress, but if I'm really this big, and I google the dress and see others of my body type that have made it, I'm not happy with the results. I bought a really nice fabric, and I don't want to "waste" it on making something that I'm not going to love, all because I'm bigger than I would like to be.

For the record, this is not me being unhappy with the social standard of what I should look like vs what I really do. This is me being unhappy with the way I look because I know how I have looked in the past...and I want that back. I was a healthy size 4 (off the rack) at one point. I still jiggled in places, so fear not, I was not anorexic. Bacon cheese fries are far too delicious for that. Now, I'm a size 10. I can get into a size 8 pair of petite skinny jeans (I tried this past weekend) and they fit, but they don't make me feel comfortable with myself, and I know that if I were to have sat down in them, I'd have that doughnut tummy going on.

So for now, I'm going to stick to sewing skirts and keep working on my body until it's more where I want it to be. Shopping is great for pulling out your imperfections, especially in ready to wear. Every time I go shopping and am really honest with how clothing falls on me, I get really depressed. This time though, I knew what it was going to be like going into the "experience" and I feel that I'm coming at the issue from a much more mentally healthy standpoint.

I'm almost 100% sure that I have sewing to thank for that. Sewing sizes run much larger than ready to wear. I cut the skirt pattern from a size 14 based on my largest measurement, which is my hips (thanks to two children).

So my whole thing about sewing the entire Colette Patterns book will have to wait. I'm incredibly unfit and lose my breath easily. So while I build up to that, and slim down in the process, skirts it is! ... and loose dresses because Myrtle looks pretty amazing, even on the bigger model!

Shut up, Mom. You know why.

Weekend Project

Pulling all of your money out of your account (except what you need to cover your bills) can do amazing things for avoiding over draft fees. :) I'm not sure what it is lately, but it seems like we're being charged different amounts when we go to places, like instead of it being the 25.80 that we were told, when the charge hits our account, it's for 32 or something like that. Or we were double charged, like our cards were swiped twice for the same transaction. Get enough of those, and then you get over draft fees...which have never made any sense to me. You're going to charge me $25-50 for not having money in my account. Think about that. There's no money there, so why are you taking more money that is not there? And for stuff that isn't even our fault!

We found too, that the double charges and over charges were always coming from the same place, and trust me, it's just easier to let it go than to fight this place. So in order to stop this from happening, my husband and I decided that we're going to take the harder road and pay cash for everything except our bills and important things that having a paper trail would be helpful for (like sending an important piece of mail certified with delivery confirmation; receipt plus bank statement showing it was paid for equals 'CYA' method).

I'd heard about this budgeting system where you use a bunch of envelopes for your different spending categories, so we tried that too. We found that we were always out of money at the end of the pay period when according to our budget we shouldn't have been, and when we reviewed our bank statement, we couldn't find out why, other than going to McDonald's a few too many times.

Instead of carrying around a bunch of envelopes, which frankly, just made me feel like the idiot that doesn't know what a wallet is for, I decided that I was going to make my own wallet. It's not the best wallet in the world, and there are certainly changes that I would make to it if I were to make it again but I love having all the little zipper pockets. We don't use them all for budget categories, but I have the feeling they will get used the more I use the wallet. Right now, my husband gets the gas money because he's the primary driver, and I get the food money, and the rest of the money goes in the "other" category. "Other" is pretty much code for the kid's need new shoes, my only pair of jeans died and I need another pair, Mom found a great deal on a used twin bed frame and mattress, Mom and Bug need more fabric to raise their Sewing level to 150, and so on. I have a feeling one of those unused pockets is going to be delegated to a "craft" budget.

It took me all day Sunday to make this. There was a lot of measuring and cutting, but aside from the 'outside' fabric, I'm pretty pleased to say that everything came from items that I already had in my stash, and I love how "put together" the whole thing looks. It may not have been the best style choice to use the blue thread for the detail stitching, but I'm happy with it. That's the same thread that I'm going to be using on my first dress...whenever I can get around to stop procrastinating on the Meringue skirt muslin.

Sewing is Addictive!

Oh my gosh, it's seriously been almost a month since I wrote a post, not counting moving the crochet dish cloth pattern here from wherever it got lost on the internet. I didn't write, because at the time, I had really nothing to write about, and I don't want to have a bunch of filler posts just because writing-a-post day has sprouted up.

I've been sewing a lot, and my knitting has been suffering for it. I really, really love the thrill of having a project done in a day. Making clothes for my daughter totally fulfills that. She's got two new skirts to prove it.

I've almost finished the muslin for the Meringue skirt from The Colette Sewing Handbook book. I got to the part about putting in the zipper, and kind of freaked out. I've sewn in one zipper before, and it was into a makeup bag that I was making for my daughter to put her pretend make up and brushes in. It didn't turn out. Well, the zipper was okay, I think, but there was a misunderstanding of the instructions, or the instructions were written badly for a "beginner" audience.

The first skirt that I made for my daughter was a circle skirt style. I botched up putting on the 1.5 inch elastic waistband a little bit, but you can't really tell. She absolutely loves it. I added some tulle underneath to give it some poof and a bit of modesty, but since she's a wild little thing, she still needs to wear shorts under it.

Super Duper Easy Dishcloth

Crochet Pattern

Hook Size: 5mm; H
Yarn suggested: Lily Sugar'n Cream
Yarn Weight: Worsted/Aran
Gauge: Not important

Ch: 20
R1: sc in every ch; ch2 turn
R2-9: dc in every stitch, ch2 turn
R10: dc in every stitch, pull tail through last stitch until you have a loop as long as you'd like leaving enough extra yarn for the knot, then tighten. Take the loop and knot it, making sure the knot is snug against the dish cloth, then break yarn close to, but not right up against the knot.

Makes approximately one 6in x 6in dish cloth. To make it bigger chain extra stitches and measure, then repeat row 2 until length is the same as width.

I get roughly 3 dish clothes from one ball of Lily Sugar'n Cream. You may get more or less depending on the size of your dish cloths.

Work in Progress Wednesday

Yesterday, my internet was down all day. It really sucked. Like, really, really sucked. I never realized how bored I get when I don't have the internet. There's NOTHING on TV during the day, I can't access my design files because I store them in the cloud, most of my patterns are stored on Dropbox and the ones that aren't I printed out right after I learned how to knit and purl, so they don't even interest or challenge me, the house is as clean as it can get with 3 cats, a dog, and wood floors, and so on.

So, the day that started out as a Work in Progress Wednesday...

...quickly turned into Finished Object Wednesday, even though I'd intended for it to be done on Friday because Alliteration.

Now that that's done, I'm back to working on Whippoorwill.

I will beat this project!! I WILL!

I've only started, ripped out, and restarted three times now. I'm actually, currently un-knitting a few rows. I don't know what the heck I'm doing, but my stitch counts are always off. If it was like one or two, fine I'll throw a couple make ones in there and keep going. But we're talking like 50-90 stitches off.

I'm employing lifelines. I shouldn't have to employ lifelines.  The majority of the pattern is:

k2, yo, k1tbl, k to last 2 sts, yo, k2
k2, yo, p to last 2 sts, yob, k2

WHAT IS SO HARD ABOUT THAT SEQUENCE THAT IS ALWAYS LEAVING MY STITCH COUNTS OFF?!

Sigh.

Part of me feels like I should be doing something for Nerd Wars, but since this is my first tourney, I have NO clue what I'm doing, so I'm going to wing it!

Edit to add: The finished object is Squish and is a free project on Ravelry. This is the second time that I made this pattern, and I did modify it some.