Obsessed with Embellishment

My hero, Manolo the Shoeblogger has expanded his empire, and now has Teeny Manolo, a blog devoted to the joys of parenting.  At first I was more than skeptical, because I thought, “Oh great, another gooey valentine to childhood; just what the blogosphere needs” and I was fully expecting posts about scrapbooking and making your own baby food. Nothing could be further from the reality.

Finally we have a parenting blog written by sharp, funny and perceptive adults who have not entirely exchanged their pre-parent night clubbing, foreign film viewing, extreme sports playing, Jeep with no doors selves for video equipped mini vans, PTO meetings, school holiday party subcommittees and cold Saturday mornings on soccer fields.

And one of their best features is the Friday Caption Contest.

My twin daughters are on the edge of Teenhood, so bedroom redesigns are a top priority.  This is an easy solution:  they both picked out some fun fabric at Ikea, and I used it to make curtains for their closets.  The previous owner of our house installed folding closet doors with mirror fronts and a custom closet system.  The closet system is a keeper, but the mirror doors were too heavy and eventually fell apart, so we removed them.  The drapes are a better solution than new doors because the drapes enable access to the entire closet.

 The fabric was just split down the middle, the inner cut edges serged and turned under about 1/4 inch to keep preserve flower shape as much as possible (the fabric was the perfect width for the opening, and I didn’t want to buy double yardage just to add the traditional 1 inch double folded drapery side seam.)  The selvages were just turned under at the sides and the top & bottom hemmed.  A few washers were sewn into fabric pockets at the corners for extra weight at the bottom.  I did calculate a little extra yardage so a full flower could be centered.

The hardware is just a taut wire and simple clips.  If you don’t live near Ikea,  similiar hardware is available from Pottery Barn and  Smith+Noble.  Ikea has wonderful fabrics, but really you could use just about any home dec fabric (make sure it’s not too heavy if you use clip-on rings.)  You could even use a flat bed sheet (which may already be the perfect size and you won’t need to hem it!)

 Onto the the next one!

In the summer of 2006 we took a family vacation to Iceland.  This was the girls first trip outside of the US, and we stayed with friend in Reyjavik.  It’s an amazingly beautiful place, and just found some photos.

This photo was taken about 9:oopm; and it’s the view from our bedroom window at a farm that belongs to our hosts:

Enjoy!

Things have changed in workplace fashion since I entered the work force in 1980. Last week in a company-wide email our CEO noted that since we are a sponsor at big local trade show, and we will be hosting many visitors, she asked that everyone wear business casual to work this week.You’d think she was asking the women to wear corsets, and men to wear spats.  You would not believe the complaining!  Over business casual.  Oh Please.

But this does segue nicely into the latest edition of Fashion Tribes, the Office Edition:

Sports Nut - This is a young guy, on the overweight side, who broadcasts support for his team in any way he can. His wardrobe is almost exclusively Official Team Merchandise. On the few occasions when he is dressed up he wears a $400 Official Team Leather Jacket with a shirt and tie, which makes him look a stadium groundskeeper. Something tells me these are the guys I see on TV who paint their chubby bodies in team colors, and stand half-naked & braying in the stands. If my daughters ever bring home guys like this I will be horrified.

Baby Mama - This as a woman under 35 who is expecting her first baby. For any number of reasons she eschews maternity clothes, so as her pregnancy progresses we are treated to way more boob and belly than we really need to see. In her first two trimesters she sticks with a tight t-shirt smoothed over her popped out belly button and maybe wears stiletto heels with her pregnancy jeans until she can’t take it anymore, and by her last trimester she is so sick of wearing the same three sundresses she adds a shrunken cardigan that she can’t even begin to button.

Endless Summer - This is a woman who will wear flip flops in the office into November if she can. Often combined with Baby Mama. Ladies - the only people who can get away with extending the summer via wardrobe are shorts-wearing UPS guys who do it because it’s locker room contest to see who can hold out the longest. The “No White Shoes After Labor Day” law needs to be amended to include flip flops.

Guilty Quilty - This fashion choice just screams “middle aged female”: a woman in a quilted microfiber jacket in black, beige or red (but oddly never a good red.) She also has a quilted brown-blue-cream Vera Bradley paisley bag AND a faux Pierre Deux quilted bag. Stop the insanity!

Party In My Cube - Female version: clothing that is too tight, too low and too short. Favors stiletto t-straps with crazy patterned stockings. Reeks of clashing scented hair and body products. Male version: clothing that is too tight, too wrinkled, and too faded. Has not worn leather shoes since his prom. His cologne is all that beer from the night before, slowing oxidizing through his pores. Often combined with Sports Nut during playoffs.

The New Mullet - You know this guy: young, smirky, walks down the street holding a lit cigarette that he never really smokes (then why bother?) Always has the newest anything from Apple. Carries a messenger bag slung over the back of his right hip. Wears his hair pressed into a ridge along the top of his head. Dude, in 15 years you will so regret every photo ever taken of you with that hair.

Hipster Doofus - This look is becoming very common in certain industries: shaved head (due to being prematurely bald, that part is ok ), shirt is always worn out, and the lack of hair is made up for with robust facial hair (goatee or soul patch.) I have to be honest here - I can’t tell these guys apart! From 10 feet away you look more alike than Blue Man Group.

The Woman Warrior - Now here I have to turn my wrath on myself. The next time you may be in Boston take a quick look round and count how often within the space of ten minutes you see this uniform on working women: black or brown pants, boots, shirt/turtleneck/t-shirt, denim jacket. Go ahead, count ‘em - you’ll be amazed.  And one of them might be me!

I have convinced John that chickens are a good idea!

It pretty much came down to this: we have been thinking of getting a pet for DD1 - she desperately wants a dog, but we both work full time.   Plus, she and her twin DD2 are super busy kids four nights a week, so a puppy would be sadly neglected.  I’m also allergic to cats, so after giving it some thought and remembering that I have past experience raising baby pet birds, it seemed that chickens that will satisfy my gardening/sustainability instinct, her pet instinct, and big bonus - chickens live outside year round.  Plus we get those beautiful eggs. 

That works for me! 

John’s thrifty Scots heritage did kick in and he quickly nixed the Eglu ($800 avec chickens), so I had to do some internet searching on chicken coop plans.  One thing I quickly learned is that there are two schools of thought on coop design: people who scavange materials from virtually anything (a total no-go in my toney neighborhood) and people who aspire to the gentleman-farmer-high-end-solution (lovely but there are no prices quoted on that web site - what does that tell ‘ya?)

Here is the coop of my dreams:

Pretty yes?  This design has all the feaures required for healthy birds, the plans are not expensive, we can build it ourselves, and it’s wicked adorable to boot. I actually love the goofy window box, and if you watch the ebay video (scroll down) you’ll see a hen sitting inside the window!  I’m such a sucker…

 Next challenge: where to buy day old chicks.  The big mail order hatcheries sell every breed but they have minimum orders  - 25 chicks(!) - and the Boston metropolitan area is not exactly teeming with Agway stores….stay tuned.

Okay - here are my 5!

1. I was born in Atlantic City.  No - not under the Boardwalk!
2. The most interesting job I ever had was Circus Project Manager for the Boston run of the Big Apple Circus.
3. Denis Leary was a year ahead of me in college.  In addition to doing stand up comedy, he also wrote incredible poetry and I wish someone would ask him during an interview if he still writes it.
4. When I was 16 I won 1st place in the critical review category of National Scholastic Writing Awards. It was a review of the movie “Lenny” and because it was rated “R” my english teacher Agnes Cardoni took me to see it. The movie wasn’t playing in my backwater hometown so she actually drove me to Phildelphia and we stayed overnight with her sister so I could see it. I owe her a huge debt of gratitude for turning me into a good writer - and thank God the prize took care of having to write that dreaded college essay!
5. My other interest, after sewing, is origami.

Eenie, meeny, miney moe, catch a tiger by the toe - I tag Ann, Tany, Kelly, Erica and Lisette!

First off - Emmitt had a MUCH better posse - Roger Staubach, Troy Aikman - and who did Mario have? George Lopez. His Mom. Need I say more?

True, the are-they-or-are-they-not-dating back story was really compelling, but folks - they ARE dating - because we saw Mario’s Mom show up at a rehearsal, and Karina bestowed upon her that respectful peck-on-the-cheek required by the pack’s Alpha Female. Trust me, if Mrs. Lopez took that air kiss from Karina - she’s dating her son.

And Emmit, to his credit, won this thing because he used his NFL training to full advantage - not only did he win the World’s Ugliest Trophy, but now he gets to call up Jerry Rice tomorrow morning and say “Pay UP, Brother!” ( I didn’t think it was possible to for any trophy to be uglier than the Stanley Cup, or *gack* the Indy 500 Trophy, whose minature bas-relief heads of the previous winners scare the daylights out of me. )

But it was, in short - a totally satisfying 16 weeks of reality TV. The real winner? Cheryl - two years in a row now. Time to renegotiate that contract baby!

I’ve noticed recently there’s been a backlash against machine embroidery and I can understand why. The start up costs are high for both a machine and materials, and once they get into it, sewers seem to be quickly get stuck in a design rut.

At the moment, there are hundreds of thousands of designs out there. A site like Embrodiery.com has more than I can even imagine. So how do you decide which one to use? I have a simple rule:

Embellishment Rule 2: Avoid the “Motif” look

You’ve all seen these - a design embroidered smack in the middle of a sweatshirt. The design is totally self contained, it stands alone, and it often can’t be manipulated or varied in even a simple way (flipped, rotated, repeated, mirror image)

However, the delightful baby sweater dress above (from the winter 2006 Hanna Anderson catalog) perfectly sums up a great machine embroidery design used creatively.

For example, If you used this design instead:

You would loose some impact in the final garment. This design is from Anita Goodesign, and while it’s a really nice holiday motif, it’s more suited to a non-garment project, such as dinner napkins or a table runner. If you tried to use on this on baby dress like the one above there’s not much you can do with it other than to flip it as a mirror image, and as such it’s not really meant to be used for a garment.

The Hanna baby sweater dress works for other reasons as well; the garment design is great to begin with, the color palette is narrow but effective, (there are only three colors; cream, dark red, and green), the cables on the sweater knit are the right scale to the embroidery, and the asymetrical embroidery is a prefect counterweight to the regularity of the cables.

You could make you own version of this dress pretty easily for a little one. The design shown at left is from Cactus Punch and it has a similar line and look to the design used on the Hanna dress. If you’re not a skilled hand or machine knitter (I’m neither), this dress could be sewn from sweater knit yardage, or Malden Mills shearling polar fleece.

I was cleaning out my sewing room today, and found some doll house sewing acessories - so naturally Tim had to wear them.

He looks quite dapper, and rather bespoke, wouldn’t you say?

I love all types of embellishment - embroidery (hand and machine - yes I like machine embroidery), beading, lace, trim, ribbons, tassels, buttons - you name it. But I must be honest, when it comes to embellishment, I have pretty strong opinions about what works and what doesn’t. For the most part 99.9% of what I see as embellishment and/or “art-to-wear” is absolute dreck, and with the exception of a few well-documented historical needlework forms, such as samplers and stumpwork, nothing makes me cringe more than kitschy hand embroidery framed and hung on a wall as Art with a capital “A”.

For me, embellishment and needlework is meant for clothing and useful household objects. Coco Chanel once said that the garment always comes first, then the embellishment, and I agree.

So I’ll show you how I approach embellishment from this perspective. Over the years, I’ve seen plenty of bad embellishment on sewing blogs and web sites, but I’ll use two of my own projects as examples because we can can rip them to shreds and no feelings will be hurt. Both of these projects used exactly the same embellishment technique, and virtually the same color palette, beads and materials, but I think you’ll agree that one works, and one doesn’t. Here’s why:

Rule 1: The Pattern Comes First

Plopping an embellishment technique onto a project, that is, just using the garment as a blank canvas, really never works, and that’s the main problem with this jacket:

This is a Kenneth King technique that had I wanted to try for quite some time, and I actually made that decision prior to deciding what pattern to use. Big mistake. Consequently, this Marcy Tilton pattern (Vogue 7907) is totally unsuitable because I discovered the beading is so heavy that it weighs more than the very unstructured jacket, and the quasi-Asian design of the style has no relationship to the organic, elaborate beading. The overall effect? Weird.

However, on the second attempt at this technique, I used a pattern that, by design, has a built in “canvas” - a front placket. This is Simplicity 4142 and even though the knit I used is very lightweight, the centered aspect of the placket could still accept the heavy wool felt backing needed for all of this beading and rattail cord.

Also, from a design perspective, this embellishment makes sense because the design of the pattern provides a proper showcase for the technique. This is exactly the problem with the beading on the lapels of the Vogue jacket - the embellishment just sits there, on it’s own, and it has no design relationship to any feature of the jacket, even though the color palette is in the correct range.

So the lesson here is to really look at your intended embellishment, and see if it relates in a logical way to the rest of the garment, as opposed to just “sitting there.” I posted a tutorial on the making of this placket a while back, and you go here for Part I, and here for Part II.

In a future post I’ll cover machine embroidery designs, which have been getting a bad rap lately, and I’ll share with you how I evaluate a design before I use it.