Monthly Archives: April 2020

Syo is sixteen right now, and home from school with the pandemic. Which causes all kinds of angst and strain, although she’s pretty happy not to have to get up in the morning.

It’s also meant we get to spend a bit more time together, now that she’s not at extracurricular activities every. Single. Day.

Anyway, a week or so into quarantine she presented me with the above image (and a few others) of a skirt she’d like to make.

Me being me, I instantly began scrolling through my pattern database picking out pattern options. No, she clarified. She wanted to draft the pattern from her own measurements.

So we did. I dug out the only hard-copy pattern drafting text I have, Suzy Furrer’s Building Patterns.

I confess I don’t love this book, maybe because I don’t find the diagrams terribly inspiring. I have preferred Metric Pattern Cutting or Patternmaking for Fashion Design. Syo hates working in inches, so I’m sure she would’ve preferred Metric Pattern Cutting as well. But I don’t own those ones (I should really fix that) and the library isn’t accessible so we went with Furrer. There were some things I liked—the skirt draft was a nice, self-contained module, and there were clear charts to mark down your measurements, and tables to walk you through all the necessary calculations.

What I didn’t like as much was the draft itself—it uses a larger front piece than the back, so the side seams are thrown slightly to the back “to make the backside appear smaller” (Syo said, “why would you want your butt to look smaller?”), and takes the exact same amount of dart out of the front as the back, except that some of the back dart is shifted to a shaped centre-back seam, so the back darts actually end up smaller than the front. Given that it’s only in the last few years I’ve had a shape where ANY front dart was useful, and my athletic sixteen-year-old has a flatter tummy than I ever did, this didn’t thrill me. And while I liked the part where some of the rear dart shaping was taken up in a shaped back seam, for this particular design it would’ve made more sense to omit the CB seam—which we could’ve done but it would have been a bit more complicated than with a straight centre back seam. If the fabric she picked had been a plaid, we would have done it, but for this subtle diagonal we didn’t bother.

It was fun to discuss the features she wanted, and what would go into drafting them. How to draft facing and lining pieces, and adding ease to the lining. Which side would be best for the invisible zipper.

How to make the front of the skirt as short as she wanted while preserving the length in the back (you can maybe see how curved the back hem is… we probably should’ve spread the curve out better, but she’s happy so I’m going with it.

She’s more willing to unpick when she made an error or we changed our minds midstream than I am. When she hemmed the lining inside out, she went back and unpicked. I know for a fact I’ve never willingly hemmed a lining twice.

I’m really proud of how she did on the invisible zipper, given how they can be finicky and it’s a pretty hefty fabric. And also on sewing up the seams below the zipper so they ended tidily.

So yeah. My kid made a skirt. I provided guidance, some hands on but mostly just verbal while I juggled the twins. Pretty proud of both of us, frankly. I wonder if I could get her to sew something for me… 😂

I’ll want to remember this later.

The first full weekend in March, we went to Edmonton, Alberta, for a dance competition for Syo. It was our first out of province trip in six, almost seven years. The Covid-19 virus was on its way, but there were only a few cases in Edmonton at the time; we felt safe, and it was great to see some family we hadn’t seen in years. In hindsight, though, the huge dance competition would’ve been ripe for a super-spreader event; I kinda feel like we dodged a bullet.

We got home late Sunday night, March 8, and the first part of the week went as normal. We went to baby storytime with my mother on Thursday. We had plans to go to a luncheon (with talk on historical clothing) on the next Sunday the 15th. I was just starting to feel a bit uneasy about it. By Sunday, the luncheon was canceled, and I wasn’t feeling too sure about Syo going to school. By the end of the next week, school was canceled too. Both older kids got laid off from jobs that Thursday, the 19th.

In a lot of ways, we’re in the best possible position. I’m already on leave. Tyo has a second job that is based on online sales, so she still goes in to work there. Aside from having to cover the payments for the senior trip next year that Syo was trying to pay for with her very-very-very part time job, our income isn’t affected much. I was pretty paranoid about taking the twins out over the winter anyway, and except for baby storytime at the public library (which I did find stressful the first few times) we really only went out to doctors appointments and to see family. So our lifestyle hasn’t been affected nearly as much as most people. On the other hand, Tyo and Syo both were supposed to be getting on a plane to Australia yesterday, to go to my brother’s wedding.

Saskatchewan did a pretty good job of shutting down in time, if only because we’re a bit of a backwater and the virus reached us a little later. The numbers for the last couple of weeks have been pretty good, single digit new cases, people recovering faster than more people are getting sick. This is important because we don’t have a large population, and even ten or twenty new cases a day would overwhelm our hospitals soon enough. So the curve has been flattened, here. For now.

That doesn’t make us immune to a second wave, and there haven’t been any days without new cases. I’m not sure what “reopening” looks like. I’d like to be able to at least visit our family and closest friends, though. I’m most sad because I had hoped to spend a lot of time at my mom’s family farm this summer, since I’m on leave, but with this virus around we won’t want to put my 95-year-old grandmother at risk.

Despite the local curve being pretty flattened, we aren’t immune to social peer pressure. I sewed a mask yesterday—Syo took the twins out for a two hour walk (nap) yesterday and it was amazing! I spent most of the time sewing, tackling some mending and then the mask. Some of my friends from Fabricland are making them for sale.

I kinda draped the pattern on my face, but I still wound up taking a pleat to get the fit how I wanted. I used quilting cotton scraps and a dense upholstery flannel for the lining. I remembered (almost too late) to add a pocket for a nose wire. I made channels in the ends to insert elastic or ties through; I initially tried elastic but didn’t like the feel on my ears, and I feel much more comfortable and secure with the shoelace that’s currently there.

Quarantine is a good time to be a hoarder. I had a spool of wire in the box of jewelry-making supplies that I’ve had kicking around since I was a teenager. So I pulled some of that out and made a wire nose piece. It can slide out of the pocket for laundering. The end of wire I used was a bit manky to start, so it’s not pretty, but it still works fine.

So that’s the weird place we’re at in the world right now. At least cute babies make things a little better.