Trampled by Geese is a reminder to myself to look at the positive side of life and to endeavour to only write about things that inspire me rather than focus on what is negative in the world. Kirkegaard once wrote, “Being trampled by geese is a slow way of dying, but being eaten to death by envy and greed is even slower and more painful”.
What unexpected yarn has fallen into your life? Do you have a go-to project you love to make with found yarn or do you wait to see what the yarn says it wants to be?
About a year ago, I stumbled on some free yarn, leftovers from the now closed local mill. Talking to people who used to work there, this was part of calibrating the spinning machine, so it contains a lot of different fibres from a variety of farms. Most of them are less than a day's journey away.
So I made a thing. And I made a video about the thing. And the yarn. And deep thoughts about the yarn, fibreshed, and my personal textile history.
Hens are great layers. But even better are clothes layered on top of each other. It transforms a seasonal outfit into a multi-season extravaganza!
Winters on the farm are muddy, mucky, bloody, and occasionally snowy. I do a lot of laundry.
Come lambing season, I can do two or three loads of laundry a day.
So I want farm clothes that wash well, like cotton. Only the problem with cotton is that it's not very warm. It actually, what's the opposite of warm? A single layer of cotton is terrible for working outside in the winter because if the cotton gets wet, it chills the human and can cause health issues. So we could be forgiven for thinking that if a single layer does harm, a lot would do more.
Layering the clothes creates air gaps that allow the skin to breathe and provide insulation so I can stay outside longer to get things done. And since I often wear skirts or dresses when working on the farm, I can take my fall and spring cotton skirts and transform them into winter skirts by adding a petticoat or two underneath.
It's been difficult to work on my Albion Coat when the weather has been so warm. But the rains are trying to break through and it's now cool enough in the mornings to light the woodstove until the sun is high enough to heat the house.
So I'm spending that half an hour of coolness between the time I light the fire and my coffee is finished brewing and ... what's a good way to say "getting drunk" without it sounding like my coffee is boozing it up at 6am? Anyway, I'm spending that time working on my Duffle Coat.
The worst part so far was cutting up the paper for the PDF pattern. There is so much wasted paper in this pattern (and yes, I checked the measurement to make sure it was printing the right size). It's especially noticeable after working on that free PDF pattern for my cloak where I didn't have to cut up any pieces of paper. Here, I'll show the difference.
The pattern on the left is from the cloak, the one on the right is from the Albion Duffle Coat. Both are formatted to print on North American or Metric paper, and yet here we are. So much wasted space on the right one. I feel like they could have reduced the paper by almost a quarter by doing better with the margins.
Wow, I may have just jumped the shark here, but I did it. I made a cloak, entirely by hand, using traditional methods, from sheep to finished clothing!
Basically, I gave in to peer pressure and put my life on hold to make this cloak. It turned out amazing, but I still have a lot of work to do to finish it up. Something to keep me busy this winter.
I want to talk about the pattern because the video was long and I edited that bit out. Also I don't really feel qualified to assess a sewing pattern as a complete N00b!
Edititus Troglodytus: a subspecies of the Homo sapiens who dwells in dark grey caverns and worships glowing screens while moving around little boxes that look thus
Actually, there is a pretty good reason. I wanted to understand how circle cloaks work so I made some tiny mockups. And since the only thing I have that resembles a doll are these chickens...
Don't ask me why... Okay, you can ask me why but I'll probably mumble "I don-no" and change the subject to "isn't that pretty yarn?"
For some reason, I am filled with the belief that my life will be infinitely better if I own a cloak.
(or possibly cape, I haven't figured this part out yet - I figure cloaks are longer but this might just be something I made up in my head)
So I'm going to drop all my other projects and make a cloak. By "make" I mean I'm going to go outside and ask my sheep for some wool then spin, weave, and sew a cloak.
But to make things even more challenging, I'm going to do it in a month. This month. The month of September, in this year, 2022.
Um... this sleep thing they keep talking about. That's optional, right?
I have no idea if I can do this. It's a lot more than I've ever attempted before. On top of that, I'm still on the mend from my surgery. This might not go well.
Full disclosure, I have some of the yarn spun already. Probably not enough to make much difference.
So it's going to be a challenge. Especially because I hope to also make some videos about this journey which makes everything take twice as long.
The duffle coat project advances. A decision has been made and after much humming and hawing, I decided to go with the Albion Coat sewing pattern. I chose this pattern because they gave away some great resources for free and it gave me confidence that I would be able to make a beautiful coat with their instructions.
Because I can never be easy on myself, I am going to sew a version of the longer coat, but unlined in keeping with the duffle coat of my past.
I've got a few other changes up my sleeve, but that's going to have to wait because this:
It's complicated, but basically last year, I didn't have a winter coat. Given that we had some record-breaking rainfall and cold, looking back... it might have been a mistake to try to deal with winter without a coat. I figure the rest of my clothing can last me well enough but for my health and wellbeing, I need a coat before winter gets here which means, I had best start sewing now.
Thinking back on all the coats I've owned in my life, one coat stands out in my memory more than all the others. I remember it with great fondness. It was a real duffle coat. Fawn coloured, I bought it used for a steal because of the cigarette burns (which I patched with strawberry patches so it looked cute and I could always tell my coat from the others). What I thought was really neat was the way the fabric was double-sided, but all one fabric. There was plaid on the inside but fulled fawn twill on the outside. Very thick cloth - almost too thick. No lining (so sometimes arms would be difficult to get in and out). Just a single layer of double-sided cloth.
It could almost be worn inside out coat if the buttons and pockets were in the right place. But alas, no.
I finally wore it out after over a decade of constant use.
Looking at my wardrobe goals, a Duffle Coat would fit with the Farmwear (good elemental protection, vintage look) and with the Scholarly Functional look. I love that it can do double duty.
I couldn't find the fawn fabric that I wanted, but I did find some pretty amazing fabric on sale at the local fabric shop. It's a wool nylon blend. Knowing this shop, it's probably vintage as they bought a huge amount of overstock of wool and wool blends over the decades and this has that vintage mothball smell. It would be fun to find out more about the history of this cloth.
The most frustrating thing about recovering is trying to find momentum. But I'm working on it, building a bit more each day. Finally got into a routine with making coffee and having an hour of craft time while listening to an audiobook or lo-fi girl each morning.
Mostly I'm working on my sewing, trying to make a block pattern. This is a map of my body that I can use to make my own sewing patterns. I need this because my body is now a massively different shape and it could open a huge world of possibilities to me - and save loads of money in that I don't need to buy new patterns each time I want to make something new.
Life is messy and stuff. Today is the first day I've turned my computer on after coming out of the hospital and very soon, I'll be heading back to bed for my second nap of the morning. Like I said, life is messy.
But it has given me lots of thinking and I want to leave my future self a note. Because THIS is an awesome opportunity to deliberately choose my new wardrobe. My shape has changed and I will need to buy or make new clothing, so why not see if I can find clothes I like.
As part of my sewing journey, I am learning how to make the most out of fabric. For this project, I used a technique called piecing which combines smaller pieces of cloth to create larger.
I adore this fabric, but it belonged to a pair of trousers that were way too small. I also needed a new jacket, so I deconstructed the trousers and combined the fabric with cabbage (cloth left over from sewing projects) to see if I could do it.
I read about this technique on Foundations Revealed which admittedly is the reason why I'm needing to be so frugal with my fabric and clothing budget. The paywall isn't ... well, ... (since then, I had to cancel my membership. I found I couldn't make the things I wanted to because all the money was going into this and I just wasn't sure I was getting out of it what I put in)
The pieces of fabric are sewn together, attempting to match the flow of the pattern as there isn't enough fabric to match the pattern seamlessly.
But you know what, it actually worked.
I lined it with some roughspun silk fabric from my cabbage stash. I probably should have done more to finish the edges, but it was an experiment and there were a lot of edges. I can see this being hand-wash only, wear into town, not mucking out the chickens kind of clothing.
The amount of water coming out of the box as it was handed to me, reminded me of scenes from a movie where they pull a treasure chest up from the bottom of the ocean.
I admit, I was worried.
As the history of this blog shows, I'm not a stranger to repairing these old machines - be it sewing, typewriter, or other long lost treasure. 'Though, I've never tackled something this decayed before.
It's been 10 years since I've last worked on a vintage or antique sewing machine. I actually sold most of my parts (keeping only a few prized machines for myself and some parts machines if they break) and moved on to repairing other things. I love working with sewing machines, but the truth is, there was very little interest in these beauties and almost no good resources online on how to fix them.
The few sewing machine posts I have on this blog, are some of my best-performing pages. The interest goes up every year and thanks to the ads on my site, I'm earning between 1 and 5 cents per week from them (not much, but every little bit counts). It's amazing how much more interest there is now than 10+ years ago when most of them were written.
A thing happened the other day and I brought home a sewing machine that would, to any sane brain, be considered well and truly beyond repair.
Guess what? oh, you guessed.
That's right, I'm going to see if I can repair it.
I know the worst thing to try to fix is a bad repair, so I'm taking this slow and doing my due diligence. I'm spending a lot of time with my friends duckduckgo and google to see what new information is out there and WOW! The interweb is flooded with advice on how to repair and restore vintage sewing machines.
Most of that advice is horrible! I know this because I've spent many hours repairing the kind of damage following that advice causes.
About 5 to 10% of what's on the internet in this area is good advice. About 50% of what is left is okay, but not going to give the long term life that one wants or cause unnecessary work (most common seems to be removing the shellac or "clear coat" because they mistake it for caked-on oil and grime). The rest of the advice, I'm not sure if it's well-meaning or written by people who want the value of their machine to go up by destroying the existing machines.... evil laughter.
So the ratio is about the same but the quantity to shift through is so much more.
Although I am loving how much of this is on youtube now. But restoration videos are one of my favourites. I wish I had a sound safe studio space where I could make some ASMR repair videos for you all, but alas, something to dream about in the future - living in the country is NOISY (tractors, cars, planes, roosters, geese, sheep... )
Anyway, I really like this guy, as he doesn't recommend things I know will damage the machine.
Some of you have probably already guessed what my new treasure is from the photos. For the rest of you, all will be revealed as I'm going to document this project on my youtube channel.
But evaluating the machine, I also notice that I'll need to spend quite a bit more money on this restoration than usual. It needs new paint, and paint stripper and... I don't even want to think about it yet. Some of this I can improvise. Some I cannot. On the whole, I would be very very lucky if the cost of materials to restore this were less than the final value of the machine. Also, I might keep it as a forever machine. I haven't decided yet.
It's important to me that every hobby be self-funding, so part of this project is looking for creative funding ideas. Youtube now gives me money for ads (at just under a dollar a day for all my videos, so you can guess how small that is per video). But I also don't turn on all the advertising features like commercials that show up in the middle of the video. I can see clicking all the boxes for these sewing machine videos to see if I can the machine to fund its own repair.
In the photos, some of this is rust, most of it is old grease and oil. It will be interesting to find out how much of each.
It is entirely possible I made this entire video so I could reference 3 seconds of a Dr Who episode.
I've been wanting a sewing bird since long before I knew how to sew. I'm frugal with my spending and antiques are far too expensive. The brass reproductions are pricy enough. But I put a price watch (camelcamelcamel.com is great for this) on my dream bird with the expectation it would never drop that low. But it did.
The sewing bird is designed to solve a major problem with hand stitching - back and hand pain. It is supposed to give more control of the needle and fabric. And having tools that inspire makes it easier to avoid procrastination.
Before I spent money on it, I decided to try an experiment. Could I make a tool that would do the job with random things found around the house?
SPOILER: Yes. Yes, I can.
So here you go. My adventures hand stitching, making a mocking bird, and finding out if a reproduction Sewing bird really works.
I hope you enjoy it.
There are a lot of things I could do better, I know. But this video marks yet another big step towards making the videos I want to make for you. There is a lot more focus on storytelling as well as - what I hope is - informative and useful information.
If you like this sort of thing and want to see more of it, here are some things you can do to support me on my creative journey.
Given how bad my arthritis is getting, I would think I would give up sewing by hand, but I find I do it more and more. My sewing machine is actually tucked away for a while but I'm still working on a few projects like a sleep shirt and new skirt.
I've been thinking about why I hand sew so much these days.
It's not because it's fast. It's not because it's easy. It's certainly not because it's painless. I'm not very good at it and my stitches are still uneven.
These are also the factors that keep me coming back.
Arthritis - the doctors say keep moving those hands as therapy.
Easy/not good at it - I love learning and perfecting new skills.
Slow - that's a bonus. I took a mindfulness class about the same time I started sewing by hand and I found out a lot of the things we learned in that class are easily applied to hand sewing (And making tea, and lots of other things). But I find I like the slower pace as it increases the value of the finished item in my mind. It encourages me to maintain and repair it for a longer life.
Sometimes I think maybe it isn't as slow. I spend a few moments here and a few moments before bed and before I know it the top is finished. Whereas with the sewing machine, I need dedicated time and I can't always find that in my day.
Sustainability/preparation - something I can do if I ever lose my sewing machine or other adverse events happen.
And portability. It's nice to have something to do in those empty moments while out and about somewhere.
If you like this sort of thing and want to see more of it, here are some things you can do to support me on my creative journey.
I've always been a bit time blind, but lately, it's gotten a lot worse. I've been musing on what to do about that.
Many years ago, I had a job where we had to be on time within 10 seconds of the schedule. We had all the responsibility for making certain everything was on time and absolutely no control over the factors that caused things to be late. That kind of disconnect is demoralizing.
Not long after leaving that job, I stopped wearing a watch.
Now that I live on the farm, wearing a watch on my wrist is a fast way to destroy a watch.
Besides, the chickens don't care what fiction the watch tells us. The day begins as it gets light, and ends as it darkens. That means in the summer, my day ends at about 11pm and on Christmas Day it very seldom lasts beyond half-past two in the afternoon.
It happened there was a doctors appointment the day after Daylight Savings ended. And of course, the confusion;
"I thought you changed that clock."
"No, I thought you... any idea what the actual time is?"
Yep. The same old conversation.
I've been thinking of wearing a watch again. But a wristwatch is out. I'm resisting getting one of those smartphones. That leaves a fob watch (pocket watch).
I dug out my old fobwatch which is a cheap mechanical watch in a lovely umeboshi case that never kept the time. Now I remember I took it apart at the start of the year to find out why it was broken and if I could move noon to the 9 Oclock position. I figured out how it was broken, but I didn't have the skills to make it unbroken... and I ended up making it much worse.
My first choice would be to fix this watch. I really like this case, but I haven't been able to find replacement watch guts for it. I wish the only horologist wasn't all the way downtown as I only go there once every five years to get my drivers' licence renewed.
The second choice is to find a new mechanical (one I wind up every day as batteries only last a couple of weeks on me) watch I can love. I haven't found one in my price range yet. I will just have to wait until the time is right.
But there's also the issue of pockets.
Perhaps if I add watch pockets to all of my skirts, by the time I finish, the perfect watch will appear?
To that end, I found this awesome video on historical methods of putting watch pockets on skirts!
It's given me some good ideas I want to try.
I really like the information in her videos. The sound is a bit difficult, but the captions help.
If you like this sort of thing and want to see more of it, here are some things you can do to support me on my creative journey.
I don't know if it's just me, but I find fabric shopping one of the most frustrating things in my life.
That and washing the dishes.
I know enough about sewing to put together clothes. I know enough about fabric to weave it. But I don't know enough about either to put the two things together. If I did, I would probably buy my fabric online so there could be more money left over for more fabric buying. The thing is, I don't even know where to start, so there's a lot of trial and error going on.
This week I went to the Big-Box-Fabric store (not the real name) and under the glaring lights, I try to find something that isn't made for quilting or made from a petrochemical. I like natural fibres. It's probably not the best place to look for this, but it's nearest to where I was going that day.
Perhaps some cotton twill fabric, like jeans, would make a nice winter skirt. But wow, that's expensive. So I settled on some wool-cotton blend that was almost half the price for some reason. The occasional kemp hair in the fabric might have something to do with it - it's that kind of thing that gives wool a bad name, so scratchy!
Isn't it pretty?
The red cloth is a lightweight cotton sheet I got at the Salvation Army. Organic cotton next to the skin - very happy!
flat felling seams by hand - not an arthritus friendly activity
I'm not happy about the washing instructions on the wool blend (dry clean only isn't in my vocabulary), so I ignored them and ran the yardage through the washing machine on a gentle cycle last night. It came out okay. No obvious shrinking or puckering. Mostly cotton and already well fulled, that's what I expected. Although next time I should do a sample first.
Time to try a new technique I saw on Bernadette Banner's videos (she's the skinny one with the happy voice that does a lot of Victorian and Edwardian sewing - and my hero).
Bernadette calls it 'flatlining' which seems to be to sew the lining and the outer layer together as if they are one cloth. That doesn't seem to hard, although I wish I could find more tutorials on why and when and how to do this. Perhaps it has a new name?
Or perhaps people don't do this anymore?
Since I'm not matching patterns, I should be able to get two skirts out of this. I don't know if I'll have enough left over for this project. It's probably better if I don't.
Hoping to get at least two warm skirts for this fall. Not sure how well this will work for farming, so I need to keep looking out for another easy to wash cotton twill or the like. Does anyone know an affordable (preferably Canadian so I don't have to pay customs) source for this kind of cloth?
ps. Sorry about the poor lighting in the photo. It's winter and the sun probably won't be showing herself much until spring. I need to get my winter lights up into the workroom.
If you like this sort of thing and want to see more of it, here are some things you can do to support me on my creative journey.
This last year I've been learning a lot about sewing.
It turns out it takes less time and money to sew my own clothes than it does to try to find something that fits both my style and body. But sewing means I can make what I want to wear and make it fit.
I do my sewing on my Antique Singer 127 (which is now about 105 years old!). It's such a kind machine and forgiving.
One of my favourite feet is the narrow hemmer foot. It's a bit tricky to use until you figure out that the fabric edge lines up with the edge of the foot before folding over. Hard to explain, so I made a video:
If you like this sort of thing and want to see more of it, here are some things you can do to support me on my youtube journey.
