Next knitting project

While I agonize about what to do with the front edges of the cardigan, I've started one pair of the sort of socks I've been meaning to get to before winter's over.

These are dark brown Sandnes Garn Perfect wool/nylon at around 6 stitches to the inch, so a medium weight for a sock in my opinion (though I have to say, it seems relatively difficult to find sock yarns in sport weight or thicker).

The stitch pattern will come from Gemma in Anna Zilboorg's Socks for Sandals and Clogs, but the overall structure and method will be based on Cat Bordhi's New Pathways for Sock Knitters, my favorite sock knitting book. These are cast right on, with no grafting and no ridge in the toe. I do find her socks default to having rather high arches compared to most, but she gives instructions for customizing that, along with many other things. To summarize my attitude about the book: it's a bit different from common sock knitting methods, so it isn't the easiest way to familiarize yourself with those in order to use other people's patterns and know instantly what you're looking at... but having done both, I find myself reworking other patterns to function more like Bordhi's.  (Zilboorg's are a whole other story — they have features, like removable soles, that I haven't dared try yet.)

A couple of style advice books from the library

Recently I've been looking at this kind of book, mainly since the local library has a big selection on the subject. Two I've read recently:

Closet Confidential: Style Secrets Learned the Hard Way. It's written by a Portland blogger. To me, the influence of the author's age group and geographical location seems pretty obvious — there's at least a whole page on how to decide whether a T-shirt is sufficiently ironic, for example. Not that that means none of the advice will work outside hipster enclaves. I think this book is most helpful for suggesting what can successfully be worn together and which items might be particularly useful to have (or not).

Oh No She Didn't: The Top 100 Style Mistakes Women Make and How to Avoid Them, by one of the hosts of TLC's What Not to Wear. This one's pretty heavy on the how-not-to-look-like-part-of-an-outgroup aspect of fashion; that's almost its whole point, and it can be snarky to the point of offensiveness. If you don't want to see that, skip it. Aside from that, you can glean some useful general advice on fit and on what tends to make an outfit either extreme or boring.

On the one hand, I'm glad I was able to get these from the library, without expanding my already-excessive book collection. This particular type of book will inevitably become dated after a while, and I felt that some of the information in each of them was pretty obvious. What I did like about both, though, is that they don't necessarily lead to the sort of all-or-nothing thinking you can get into with fashion magazines: they aren't pushing trends that clearly won't work on anyone but supermodels, or luxury products that almost nobody can reasonably consider buying. The authors are each witty in their own way; I think this is suited to the genre, since it isn't generally a life-or-death subject. Both gave me some ideas to consider as I replace parts of my wardrobe.

A four-language fashion dictionary

I found the Langenscheidt Schiele & Schön Praxiswörterbuch Textil und Mode a while ago. While I haven't read through all of it, I would say it's more oriented toward visible design elements of clothing than it is toward construction techniques or fabrics. Interfacing, interlining, canvas, and hair canvas are nowhere to be found, for example. Maybe they are in the longer version or the app (see below).

About two-thirds of the book has English words or expressions followed by definitions, then the German, French, and Italian versions with their respective definitions; looking up by the other languages is a two-step process (you're referred to the number of the English version).

Some of the terms strike me as very odd, like "ear bandeau" for what I'd probably call an earwarmer or headband. As a whole the dictionary's probably meant to be UK English first and foremost, with American versions of things only given afterward, so that might explain some of that (though nothing else is mentioned for "ear bandeau" and I have no idea whether that is a normal British term).

For me, probably the most useful aspect of it is the Italian, where I know almost nothing. It can be useful for reading La Mia Boutique magazines.

The book is apparently a shorter version of an illustrated fashion dictionary which I have not seen and which seems to have been replaced by a "Garment & Fashion Dictionary" app. That might be the most cost-effective way to get it in many parts of the world, if you have the requisite iThing to run it on.

Pocket placement on Simplicity 1540

I'm working on placing the pockets on this coat. (Well, I also took in the side seams, but I think I'm going to have to reverse at least some of that. It had been bigger than necessary in the hips, but it had a nice slight flare that's now lacking, and I think it looks kind of sad-sack without it.)

On the right of the photo, the pockets are just a touch below where the pattern intends them to be: the upper edge is meant to be in line with the top of the lowest button. This felt excessively high. I can see why they did it, though. Views C and D are much shorter; this is where the pocket would have to be for it not to extend into (or past!) the hem. On a short jacket, you do what you have to do.

I didn't notice anyone complaining about the placement on Patternreview, but then nobody made the coat in this length.

To place the pocket on the left of the photo, I put a coat with reasonably-placed pockets on my form, and marked with pins on the form the top and bottom of the hand entry (these were near-vertical welt pockets, so not entirely comparable, but I had to make do) as well as the bottom of the pocket bag. The bottom of this patch pocket is about where the bottom of the RTW pocket bag was. It feels much better. I'm not sure which version I think looks better, but I'm going to go with something more like the one on the left; I think the one on the right will just feel too awkward, unnecessarily so given that the coat is long enough to support a lower placement. This does mean I have to lengthen the princess darts for sure.

On a side note, I've been reading Passformfehler, which has possibly some of the best coverage of balance issues (in fitting) that I've seen. I might go into more detail on that later, but this is just to say I think part of the reason things don't hang right on my dress form could be that it has a very flat upper back/very little shoulder blade shape. Not that I'm about to pad it out right before I move, but it'll be something to consider.

Still more fitting, and knitting

OK, I've sewn the shawl collar onto the neck of my Schnittquelle Malmedy, and also rethought the back alteration. I'm still flailing about changing too many things at once, probably, but here's how it is at the moment:

• I took the side seams back to normal from the waist up (so no inch of width taken out anymore).
• I ripped the back raglan seams and adjusted them so that the sleeve is eased slightly onto the back below the notch (with the back pushed down a little so it's sewn closer to the cut edge, which, since it's concave, is shorter), and the back onto the sleeve above. The reason for this is that I think the overall back waist length was actually about right; it's just the armhole that's possibly too long. (Maybe I need my back armholes even shorter than I thought? I think I may have had the same problem in my fitting shell muslin; I should have another look. As I recall, Müller & Sohn have you dart a certain amount out of the back armhole, but there probably was a range, and maybe I should've taken out more.) With the fullness in the very upper back steam-shrunk out, it looks pretty good so far; I might just need to fiddle with the lower part of the armhole a little more.
• I let out a lot of the front waist dart intake, since that's really not where I have a waist anyway. I'm committed to that dart placement and length now, since I've gone ahead and sliced them open.
• I lengthened the tops of the back waist darts, although this might not have been necessary; they might just need an overall reshaping.

What was very helpful in all of this was the chart in Jan Minott's book on fitting commercial patterns. I should have looked at it sooner. It shows a whole lot of balance and other issues that don't seem to come up in many other books.

Meanwhile, on the Neue Mode shirt, I've ripped the outsides of the shoulder seams, but that's about as far as I've got.

Finally, I started swatching the lace pattern on the sleeves of this sweater. So far it seems like it might be straightforward enough to actually look like something in the yarn I'm trying to use.

Wool crepe

Today I cut Butterick 3421 from some stashed black wool crepe. (I've recently been trying to avoid buying more black because I don't think it's my best color — dark brown, gray, and almost any other dark color would be better —but this was a sunk cost, and I may have a use for it in any case.)

Before I cut, I looked in some of my books to make sure it really could be cut two-way ("without nap" and so forth). I was surprised to see all the contradictory information: Shaeffer says not to have wool crepe preshrunk at all (at least in my old edition of the book), Parker says to have the drycleaner do it with little or no steam, Betzina says to have it preshrunk (by the drycleaner or in the washing machine) or it will shrink a whole size; the first two say to use as little steam as possible while pressing, while Betzina says to "steam iron".

Be that as it may, I'd previously ironed the whole piece with as much steam as my iron would produce (admittedly not much) and observed no ill effects. Maybe it's because it's so dark; it's also probably a pretty coarse weave, as far as crepe goes. I could see seam imprints as being something that could happen with this fabric, so I will be careful in that regard.

Fitting shell type 1: Müller/Hofenbitzer

I could use a new set of fitting shells. Last time (2007) I started with a Butterick fitting shell pattern which, in the size I used at the time, probably started off too big in the upper torso, and I was never convinced that I'd got the armholes, shoulders, and upper back quite right. They are now just too big overall and probably don't fit my posture anymore either. Likewise, I drafted trousers using the Minott method, but they are also now too big, and I'm not sure I placed the waist at its real height in that draft.

So I've been looking through these. (I should mention, the Armstrong was in this stack just for completeness because it does very briefly mention taking measurements from a real human, but that isn't anywhere near being the focus of that book. The duct-taped book is a used copy of Jan Minott's Fitting Commercial Patterns.)

What I spend the big bucks on.

In theory I'd like to have drafts from several or all of them to compare to each other. Really, I might be obsessed enough to try it. But for now I'm working on the one in Müller & Sohn's Kleider und Blusen.

I almost started with Guido Hofenbitzer's Maßschnitte und Passform (new late last year) instead. Both of these books create similar styles of basic patterns (with no waist seam to start, unlike the usual American style). They cover certain figure/posture variations and how you can draft a basic pattern differently from the start to address them.

M&P seems less densely written; for one thing, I think it tends to use less of the sentence-structure variation that can make German harder for a non-native speaker (such as myself) to read. It also covers trousers in the same volume, as well as a bigger selection of possible figure variations. This is where I ran into trouble: you have to compare your balance of front and back measurements to an ideal. Then, by using these comparisons and observing the person being measured, you decide what variations (or combinations thereof) are causing the differences from the ideal, and by what amounts different areas will need to be adjusted. I played around with these calculations for quite a while, but eventually felt like I was wandering off into the weeds; in any case, I didn't think I should necessarily trust my measurement set that far in the first place. So I decided to go back to K&B, just get a first draft done and see how well it worked. I hope to come back to M&P later and maybe at least reverse-engineer how my fit issues would have been classified.