Cimorene

Last Monday afternoon I got really enthusiastic and decided to start the better flannel bloomers I've been meaning to make on the sewing machine. The machine sort of hesitated, and I thought, it probably needs a little care. I saw a video recently about cleaning the dust out from around the bobbin and under the plate, so I followed the disassembly instructions in the manual and cleaned some dust out with a Q-tip and a makeup brush and then put it back.

I didn't put oil in, even though the instructions said to, because the bottle of sewing machine oil we have is like fifty years old and all yellowed and crusty (the plastic, not the oil), and to keep it from leaking I put it in a freezer bag and knotted it closed a few years ago and I didn't want to open it. I've never oiled a sewing machine before and I didn't really feel prepared to start.

But when I tried to start it again it just sort of froze up and failed to start! I went through the process I had followed in the manual and took it apart AGAIN exactly the same and put it back together again too, just to check I hadn't made a mistake in putting it back together, but yeah, no, the motor still just goes mmmmm and the gears won't turn.

So. Either it REALLY needs oil, or I did something wrong that I'm not smart enough to figure out. Because of the latter possibility I'm kind of afraid to try to oil it though, because that means taking it apart again through all the same steps! Other alternative is to have it serviced. I have to start by looking up Bernina service. It probably has to be driven to Kaarina, realistically. And normally I'd just be like how about I never get around to doing that because it sounds alarming. But right now I have a lot of projects that I want to do, and four cut out pieces of flannel on the table that... I'd really like to be able to wear?

It's been a slow conversion, but I think I want to only buy new clothing that's made by microbusinesses and small brands in the future. I can't really say 'in Finland', because the Finnish jeans brand that's converted me (Very Nice Jeans) manufactures their jeans in Estonia. That's still nearly local, though. It's even like half mutually comprehensible with Finnish.

Or to make it myself, maybe, some of it. I've been trying to find a secondhand linen short-sleeved blouse, mostly failing, and going into that frustration spiral where you think it can't be that hard to just make yourself. (There are some beautiful ones on Etsy from little shops in Lithuania and Ukraine, but none exactly what I had in mind.) (Knitting counts too, and I do intend to knit some cotton short sleeved shirts eventually, but woven linen is by far the best when it's hot.)

Also once again trying to find over the knee wool stockings, but I still can't find any Finnish shops besides Säihkysääri (sort of twinkletoes, lit. scintillating calves, which is a fantastic name for a hosiery store), and they are out of everything but navy and black. The only other option I can find is that I could order wool blend stockings directly from Trasparenze in Italy, apparently. For now I can make do with the one pair and some cotton ones with legwarmers, though.

So I have been trying to finish knitting a cardigan over the past week instead of doing any more sewing. Actually maybe I'm still only about 80% decided on making a skirt with that other length of wool? I've played around with the idea a lot but I haven't found any idea better than cutting the pinstripes (they're big sort of chalky broken stripes, not really pinstripes, but they're widely spaced on charcoal gray - so I feel like pinstripe conveys that image more than just saying striped? There might be a somewhat obsolete term that I just don't know) on the bias so that they create a chevron front and back, probably in a half circle rather than a full circle, but I'm not ENTIRELY sure that I want to do it, still. On the other hand, I am a bit eager to make another skirt because I feel like I learned a few things last time, and I want to see if my feeling that the next one would be easier and better is accurate.

Or we could go and try to buy some fabric more cheaply at the big warehouse store in the next town over, which is like a twenty minute drive, so a big expedition with the car. Buying exactly what you want in fabric might work very well online usually - with the exception of color matching - but linen and wool are expensive fabrics and I am not willing to make early, expensive projects out of them using things bought at full price. Will I make some cotton stuff in the meanwhile too? Sure! There is cotton in the stash for that. But it's too cold to actually wear a skirt made with any of the stuff in the stash right now.

Also the other vintage wool skirt I ordered got stuck in Helsinki and sent back to the sender because of 'lacking address information' which, needless to say, is not my fault, because none of the other packages I've bought from Etsy have had any trouble arriving from, you know, Poland, Ukraine, Ireland, Turkey, Germany, the Netherlands, France, or Latvia. And I didn't get any messages from the seller at that stage! Could just mean that the Finnish post didn't successfully contact them. But anyway, the skirt turned itself around and went back to sender there so my beautiful forest green wool skirt has not arrived. I'm very disappointed about that. So I only have my one pleated tartan skirt and the gathered heather gray one that I made. I still hope to get this one, though... fingers crossed. Meanwhile I wore a wool skirt (with my kinda inferior flannel bloomers and wool-blend stockings held up with cotton twill tape ribbon garters under the knee)(and also with my big snow boots and ice cleats) three days last week when the temperature was right around the freezing point because it's just much more comfortable and cozy both indoors and outdoors.

Anyway! The cardigan that I'm making, as I mentioned before, is a Guernsey or gansey cardigan. This refers to the British island, or rather to the traditional and characteristic style of knitted wool sweaters (pullover fishermen's sweaters) made there. The word has drifted around in meaning and is not only spelled the latter way (phoneticized) but also has (in certain places and times) been used to refer to sweaters or pullovers in general. The traditional Guernsey gansey can be read about here at Wikipedia - it has a fascinating history with early modern trading and royal charters and is still made there today. It can also be seen there in its most traditional form, a square dark navy blue wool pullover with the top half or so of the torso decorated with a textured pattern made entirely of knit and purl stitches, unlike the cable technique typical of the later Irish "Aran". The stitch patterns were originally passed down from mother to daughter, and it's the use of these motifs that is typically meant when people talk about guernsey or guernsey-style sweaters today. You can see a good closeup of the stitch motifs on the cover of this vintage book on Ravelry: The Complete Book of Traditional Guernsey and Jersey Knitting by Rae Compton (1985). I've included links to the pattern I'm using before, which, however, don't include really clear photos of the result anyway. My cardigan is made of a soft light alpaca with a muted heather dye, and so the stitch definition isn't very great and the pattern is a subtle effect. You need thicker or denser or more tightly spun yarn, knitted more tightly, or at least one of those attributes, to get crisp stitch definition. The result I'm getting is very beautiful though! And I've almost finished the body, which will be about half of the project.



Also here's Snookums helping and Tristana hindering (she needed my hands to pay attention to her instead of knitting).

I've been failing to get this petticoat finished basically all month, so I'm counting it as a major win now! Also I wore it to vote in the presidential election today (but only the first round) and we had a nice little walk so I can confirm that in spite of being cotton and not at all slippery, it works perfectly to keep the wool skirt from sticking to my knees.



As mentioned before, the reason this petticoat took so long is that it's tiered, and the reason it's tiered is because I was using an inherited sheet with a border of hand embroidery on one end. I wanted to use the embroidery fully, but there wasn't enough of it to be the bottom edge of a petticoat that would still have enough fullness for freedom of movement. So instead I used the full width of the sheet for the top tier of the petticoat here, hence wasting none of the embroidery, and made a second tier for the bottom. This second tier is also kinda why it took so long - I tried to make a hand-gathered ruffle and top stitch it on top, but I ended up with too many thicknesses of fabric because I wanted to be clever and save time by hemming the top edge before I gathered it so it could be, you know, decorative on the front. I unpicked all those stitches last weekend and instead measured, ironed, and pinned in place these little box pleats on Friday night, one every ten centimeters along the top of the bottom tier.

I still need to hand-finish the insides of the seams, but it's wearable now. Also you see some water soluble marker on the waistband that should wash out after it goes through the laundry. It's only wearable as a petticoat because of the twill tape closure you see there, but it's white anyway so it wouldn't be wearable as a standalone skirt without adding another white layer as lining. If I decide to do that at some point I can also change the closure to a zipper or button placket.

If I weren't using a really pretty piece of antique hand-embroidery on this petticoat, I would probably give up on it now and just start over making a plain one from a different old sheet.

I know all about the theory of making a tiered skirt, and making a ruffle, but unfortunately I found out after a lot of hand sewing that the ruffle was too thick for the machine to sew the way I was trying to attach it, with topstitching through a hand-gathered, rolled hem edge. So the yoke part is now exactly where it was last week, and I've now spent hours and hours unpicking stitches (basting, gathers, and hems) in order to attach the bottom tier differently, with pleats, which I'll have to measure and press tomorrow.

It got pretty warm today though (+2° C), so I should be okay in jeans again tomorrow. Jeans and snow boots, because the snow piles at, for instance, the end of our driveway are like three feet high, so it definitely won't have melted in one day.

My new laptop, Nenya, has been a great comfort in the last couple of weeks of sewing from inside a blanket cocoon, but it distresses me that she's still naked: the stickers I ordered for her apparently got lost in the mail and so they're sending a replacement.

I've spent a couple of evenings fixing up my sewing kit, which felt much more urgent to do after all the hand-sewing I had to do last week, so I ordered a bunch of craft felt to make a needle book. My sewing kit is in this silver cigarette case inherited from my MIL which belonged to her father and his father (you can see the dates of presentation and their initials - AE 2.VII. 1911 and CE 11.VII. 1945 - engraved inside in the third picture).




This needlebook is actually only two cover 'pages', but with three layers of felt at the bottom and two in the rest. I can put more pages in later if I want to, but I don't need to carry very many needles around.

I mentioned in my last post that my most recent sewing project, the wool skirt, required a bunch of hand sewing that I hadn't anticipated. On the minus side, that took FOREVER. On the plus side, the hand sewing was something I could do sitting in bed, swaddled in a duvet and a shawl with a hotpack and watching videos.

And regardless of both, I foresee doing more of this in future, for wool skirts if nothing else; but the sewing kit stays in my knitting bag anyway, for darning, pinning, weaving in ends, and attaching fasteners to knitted projects.

I just watched a mind-blowing video on Youtube where she showed magnified close-ups of several needles to demonstrate that their quality has deteriorated drastically with time and most cheap and widely available needles are now terrible quality. Apparently the best quality needles used to be made in England, but even some of these brands have outsourced production to China. Some high-quality needles are still made in England, France, and Japan, apparently, according to the professional, who is an American.

I went through our sewing table, which was inherited along with most of its contents from Wax's granny, but it also contains her mom's stash which also contains the remnants of her mother's mother's stash because Wax's mom didn't throw anything away pretty much. We went through the stashes last year (?) and sorted everything neatly into compartments in the table, but we didn't throw away any old needles. I found a bunch of extremely elderly envelopes of English needles in the original packaging from two brands. I have examined these and the widely-available Prym needles sold all over Finland now, which are made in Czechia, with the 10x loupe that I keep for fountain pen nib doctoring, and the antique Milward and Sons needles (apparently these were made in Redding) are visibly sharper. There's a packet of the Milward needles in size 10 sharp, which was what the professional recommended for hand sewing, and a packet with no size label but they're clearly a wee bit thicker so maybe they're 11s. The Prym needles are noticeably larger as well though, so the fact that they're less sharp may be on purpose. They seem to be smooth and evenly formed like the English needles, not unfiled and rough around the tip and the eye like the cheap needles in the video. I don't seem to have any Pryms in 10 sharp to compare right now - they seem to be more recently purchased and they're mostly tapestry needles and darning needles, which are not supposed to be as sharp as sharps.

Then she swerved and shocked me with closeups and strength tests on cotton and silk threads. I already prefer natural fiber threads, having been raised by my mother (who sewed way more than I do) with a strong dislike of polyester thread. And I knew that regular cotton thread is weaker, which is why my mom always kept around coat thread and the stronger stuff too. But watching her snap the thinner cotton threads and looking at the closeup showing how much smoother and more even the higher-gauge thread was in the cotton was a bit shocking. I didn't know there was anything harder to do in buying thread than finding the cotton in the first place, which is already quite a bit of work (and completely impossible in some shops!). I've also bought silk thread specifically to sew buttons before because I knew it was stronger, but now I learn the Güterman silk thread I've bought and which is literally the only silk thread I've ever seen for sale is extremely inferior silk thread. Sure enough, in the closeups, the thread is visibly rough and uneven and she showed it is weaker than her preferred silk threads too.

I'm off to research this, because I don't know if I can even find high quality silk and cotton thread to order from within the EU. I'm definitely not ordering them from another continent (there are some limits). Apparently the historical costumers and historical reproduction hand seamstresses use linen thread which they manually run through a block of beeswax to coat it, as this is the most historically accurate, and while I'm now quite curious about linen thread I'm fairly certain that manually running the thread through a block of beeswax is not something I'm ever going to be interested in doing. Apparently modern linen thread has to be waxed in this way because the modern linen is processed more harshly. The reason linen is so expensive is that its production can't be fully mechanized; I understand that it still relies on hand labor very similar to the methods that prepared it for spinning a few hundred years ago. I suppose there must have been some advancements nonetheless, and they must save time or labor while degrading the quality of the fiber (which is something that also happens to more processed wool). Sigh.

It's remained -14 today, though it was supposed to start warming up soon, so it will likely be cold tomorrow when I have to go back to work. It's been awful the past week, and strongly reinforced my desire (mentioned in a previous post) to make some wool fabrics from my late MIL's stash into long skirts, which I think will be warmer and more comfortable to wear to work when it's below freezing. On the other hand, it made me much slower to get started because I kept running back to the duvet, so I didn't get started with it until Friday.

Most of making this first wool skirt (the first time I've sewn with wool fabric and the first time I've made a full gathered skirt, though I have sewn plenty of other stuff, albeit mostly a long time ago) went pretty well.



The main thing is just that I ended up sewing a lot more by hand than I anticipated or intended: chronologically,

1. Hand-felling the two side seams ( Read more... )
2. Sewing the skirt into the waistband ( Read more... )
3. Hand-felling the bottom hem, which, to be fair, I did intend to do from the beginning. ( Read more... )
And finally, 4. Finishing all the raw pocket edges. This was just trying a method that actually is legit, but I messed it up the first time. ( Read more... )

I could do this whole project so much better if I could start over from the beginning, even though I'm quite pleased with the result as is.

And this project was almost zero waste! There ended up being only about three or four square inches of the fabric leftover. However, I definitely look forward to doing everything more efficiently, neatly, and sewing-machine-aidedly in future. Although if I try to make any more wool skirts there will probably still be some hand finishing. I'm not sure if I'm really going to make up the second piece of fabric, though, because I don't love it and there's SO much of it - I think enough for a whole suit for somebody? - that it seems a shame to take a chunk out of it for an uninspired skirt. I'm not sure how best to pass it on to a good home, though, so I guess we'll see.

The cigarette case we found that became my sewing kit is 9.5 cm tall. The one Wax already has is smaller, but fortunately her granny already used it for sewing so it already contains a pair of scissors small enough to fit, around 8 cm. Normally I would buy Fiskars scissors (or knives etc), but their smallest scissors are 10 cm, so I ended up getting some DMC-brand Hardanger scissors from one of my go-to Finnish yarn stores that also caters to embroiderers. (I did wonder why a French brand named scissors after a town in Norway, but it turns out it's a style of embroidery too).

Wax had found a storage box full of her mom's sewing stuff when she went through the library shelves; so we sorted through that, stocking the sewing kit with pins and needles, marveling at the ancient, tiny scraps of saved elastic and salvaged zippers and the like, and then while we were at it we went through the sewing table (inherited years earlier from her granny, still mostly stocked with granny's stuff), which folds out into five separate little drawers. One of the drawers is completely full of spools of thread, a good third of which date from before the spools were made of plastic. Some of the wooden spools are miniature, and they are adorable. We made little cardboard dividers and sorted them by color, wound up all the bits of elastic, sorted the buttons from the snaps and hooks and eyes. One of the top compartments is now full of needles, and it really is almost full. There are probably twenty opened cards of needles in there, if not more.

I was feeling inspired, so I googled and finally learned after over ten years why my pincushion is inferior! My mother had multiples of the store bought pin cushions, the tomato with a strawberry and the bigger sort of carousel with little dolls around the edges. Wax didn't have one when I moved here, so I made one - a crochet prinsesstårta - but it's never been satisfactory. Too squishy. Thanks to Google I know now that the traditional stuffings for a pincushion would be crushed walnut shells, or sand, or sawdust, or very fine steel wool wrapped in batting. Just polyester stuffing makes the whole thing too light and fluffy. On the other hand, I don't really know how to easily get hold of those other fillings, so my problem remains. (Store-bought sand can contain chemicals apparently, and that would've been easiest, although it requires extra care to stop it from leaking out the seams.) Her mom and granny apparently didn't use them, which is baffling.

So something I didn't realize before we bought my weighted duvet is that weighted duvets have special duvet covers with strings that tie through loops around the edges. Otherwise the weight of it makes it fall out of the cover, or twist up and lie in a lump if the cover closes completely with zips/buttons/snaps.

Well, that's fine, but I'm using it on the bed and I really don't want to use any duvet covers that aren't flannel right now. It's WAY too cold for that! I can't seem to find any that are already flannel for sale in Europe though, just a bunch of different plain cotton ones. I probably have to buy a regular flannel one and sew the ties into it myself if I want a flannel one.

And of course I can sew, and it's not THAT difficult, it's just - fiddly. Sewing simple things is still fiddly if you don't have a sewing station somewhere with the stuff set up and organized, like if you're living half-moved-in and half-renovated in a kiiiiiiiind of dump that's freezing cold all the time? That's another thing, it's probably too cold to use the sewing machine right now, but OTOH, both of my rice hot packs have now got worn spots the rice is falling out of and there's nowhere you can conveniently buy more of them, so I guess I've got to sew regardless.

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I was PLANNING a sewing machine spot with all my materials organized nearby in the library, but the library is now the work from home office and there's not room for craft stuff in there; and the dining room has plenty of space, but no working radiators.

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No, we haven't got the radiators fixed, for the simple reason that neither of us has the Stuff needed to start cold-calling plumbing & heating contractors straight from the yellow pages. I think my subconscious somehow thinks if I tough out the weeks of endless snow and minus temperatures a plumber will just magically show up without being called, like as a reward.

When I say freezing cold: the livingroom is usually about 15° C (59 F) and the kitchen is a steady 13° C (55 F), both sometimes dropping a few more degrees particularly in the morning. The upstairs bathroom with the heated floor is a little warmer, the downstairs bathroom a little colder because it has a terrible draft from the chimney; the livingroom can rise to normal house temp briefly when the potbelly wood stove is at a roaring blaze, but this is short-lived and means going through a LOT of fire wood, which we buy a bag at a time (we haven't had time to figure out the local suppliers or arrange delivery or buy it directly yet). There's a space heater by the livingroom sofa and another by Wax's desk chair that warm their immediate environs, so the sofa is okay when you're swaddled in three wool blankets, usually with a hot pack as well, but anything other than cooking in the kitchen is pretty awful. I did improve my quality of life by adding a second pair of wool socks and a second wool sweater under my big puffy wool sweater for inside.

Wax tells me this is still not as bad as the Irish farmhouse she lived in as a teen. It's WAY OUT THERE for Finland though.