Save the Date: August 17th

All systems are go for another Montreal Meet-up on in honour of CarmencitaB's visit!  

So far we are a small group of ~6 people and eagerly awaiting an RSVP from a few more.  If you're on the fence about joining a group of strangers, let me tell you that I have never had a bad meetup.  My first one was in NYC, and I have to admit to asking myself on the bus ride down, "What the hell am I doing?  I'm going to another country to spend the day with strangers!  They could all be weird / unfriendly / racists / thieves or something!"  

Yeah right. 

Do these look like intimidating faces??

NYC 2011

NYC 2011

NYC 2011

Montreal 2013

Toronto 2013

Montreal with Debbie 2013

Tampa 2013

Tampa 2013

(well, those kids look a little shifty.  Oh wait, they're mine.)

I am technologically illiterate, so I haven't made a button, but Shannon has kindly offered to make one if she manages to find the time from her myriad other responsibilities.  She made some!  I'm just going to stick one here as an image that you can grab - I'll turn it into a button when I'm not at work (oops!) 

• meet us at El Chalateco at 520 rue Beaubien E. on August 17th from 12noon onwards.  It is an Ecuadorian place with mamma-style food (lots of dietary options for those annoying people like me with food allergies), cold drinks and AC.  Although being Montreal, we could either be 40C or 15C and rainy.  Meh. 
• Eat and drink and share your unloved patterns / notions / fabric that you want to dump on someone else, if you so desire.  Participation is definitely not mandatory, but usually the patterns you find fugly are sought after by someone else.  No judgement. 
• Whenever we are full, we'll roll ourselves over to rue St. Hubert and head north for a bit of shopping.  There is apparently a street fair during that weekend, but we're not sure if that means deals or just that everyone is moving their inventory out to the sidewalk.  We'll see.
• If we feel like it, we can always stop off for some liquid adult refreshment along the way.  Let's leave it flexible depending on people's schedules / energy level / weather. 

Please leave a comment below with your contact info and I'll add you to the list.  Also, please re-blog to spread the word and feel free to steal any photos.  

Hope to see you there!

Another Montreal Meet-up?

CarmencitaB is coming to Quebec in August, and I'm itching for another Montreal Meet-up.  Who's in?

We could meet either August 17th or August 24th.  Let's hope for a good day so we can shop / swap / laze around outside somewhere with fruity drinks and fondle our fabrics. I'll message those whose emails I know / twitter / FB / etc. and for anyone else in the Montreal area, please don't be shy!  We'd love to see you and we don't bite!  

(Well, we bite threads when we can't find our snippers.) 

 Perhaps we can do a bit of this.....

....and a bit of this.....

...and a bit of this....

Leave a comment below about which day would work for you, and your blog / email / twitter / some way to contact you.  See you then!

A Sew Weekly Reunion!

If you read this blog, you surely know about The Sew Weekly:  I participated in 2011 as part of the weekly sewing circle and then was a contributor in 2012.  I managed to participate in 35/52 weeks last year, believe it or not.  That's a lot of sewing. 

And then it stopped.

Mena didn't continue the project, and although the site is still up as of today, there hasn't been any change since January 2nd:

So imagine my surprise when I saw an email pop up from Adey very late last night, inviting me to participate in the first Sew Weekly Reunion!  You can read the whole story over there, but basically we are going to do a one-off challenge, announced on August 1st and posted by September 1st.  Come on and grab a badge and participate; everyone is invited this time around!

 

(Hmmmmm....I wonder what the challenge will be? I'm hoping for an "Imitation is the Sincerest Form of Flattery" rather than a colour challenge.  Sometimes I didn't have the colour needed for a challenge and I don't want to have to go fabric shopping when I have a storage shelf full.) 

The simplest of projects

Me Made May 2013 made me realize a few things:

1.  I need more knits because that's what I cheated with on weekends
2.  I need more basic bottoms, especially solids to match my print tops
3.  I need more fitted pieces because I've lost some inches in my hips and waist, and some things I made in 2010-2012 are too big.

Enter The Easiest Project of The Year: a pull-on ponte skirt.  This was leftover from a long ago project, back before I knew how to estimate yardage requirements and just bought 3m of anything I liked. I'm sure you've been there too!  I thank my ignorant past self for leaving me with lots of 1m pieces with which to experiment.

Here are a few headless photos courtesy of my 4 year old daughter, taken after a long day in the lab, so I'm looking a bit wrinkled and have managed to tear a hole in my tights.  Classy.

 

I was going to put together a few illustrations on how I did this, but it was so easy that I can just explain it.  First, take these measurements:

Divide the waist and hip measurements by 4.  Don't add any seam allowance to the sides because you want zero or perhaps slightly negative ease.  Add 5cm to the top and bottom for turning hems.  Draw a shape like this on the fold of your ponte:

(You should probably smooth out that hip angle there.  Unless you are shaped like that.  No judgement.)

Serge up the sides so you have a tapered tube.  Fold over the top and bottom hems and stitch with a stretch or cover stitch.  Wear.  Look awesome.  Make a few more from your leftovers.  Look awesomer. 

Montreal Meet-up (way overdue)

The First Montreal Meet-up took place on May 25th, and despite the cold and rain, we managed to still have a great time.  (did you expect anything less of a sewists' meet-up?)

Monserrat, Julie, me, Heather Lou, Catherine, Suzie and Shannon

Not only did I get to finally meet Heather Lou after what seems like years of blog communication, but also Shannon, whose *other* blog about lactivism I was reading years ago and never made the connection until the day before we met!  Monserrat (on the far left) and I have a standing lunch date whenever I am downtown working at Biochemistry, because she just so happens to be another sewing scientist on that campus. (what is it with sewing scientists?!?)  Julie, it turns out lives just down the road from me, and although Catherine lives on the south shore, we had a lot to talk about and I'm sure it won't be our last visit. Suzie is relatively new to Montreal, and has a brand new blog that you should check out too! 

And no, I did not leave empty handed:  I grabbed this Burda Classics and a few envelope patterns....

Yes, I know that one of them is a maternity pattern.  No, I don't ever plan on being pregnant again.

....and got a graphic shirting weight cotton in white, turquoise and black.  Me Made May showed me that I need more patterned tops, so this should fit the bill.  Shannon bought the same fabric, so we'll have to do a compare/contrast when we've both made it up! I also bought this fake batik for a home deco project, but that's too boring to blog about, so you'll probably never see it again.
 
We are planning another meetup for the summer, which takes me to my next item.....

I'm putting her avatar here because you'll probably recognize it from blog comments.  And because it's super awesome.

Carmen Bouchard of CarmencitaB is planning a late summer trip to Montreal and was wondering if we could get our shit together again while she's in town.  She didn't actually use those words, since she is so much classier than I, but that was the gist of the conversation we had on Twitter the other day.  More to come once times and dates are closer, but if you follow her, you'll want to get in on that action!  Let me know if you'd be down for a meet-up.

Do not assume that my lack of blogging means lack of activity

In fact, it's just the opposite:  I've been doing so many more IRL things than usual that it's getting in the way of my online life...IFL?  (in fake life?) 

I had a mega update post drafted in which I tried to cover everything that's been going on for the last two months, but then I realized that it would make sense to break up all the info into a few posts.  That way, I hopefully won't forget anything important or exhaust you with reading 1000000000 words at a go!  

Starting back in May:

Debbie J. from Sew Debbie, who I met at the Toronto meet-up back in February, was in Montreal for work for a few days, and we managed to have a somewhat hectic dinner together on the 13th.  I wore my red cotton pattern-less leggings and Debbie wore a charmeuse Pendrell that made me want to dig out my copy again and give it another try.  My one and only Pendrell was a quickly made muslin from an old pillowcase, which I've worn a few times, but it isn't quite right.  Time to work on the fit again.

 

I say hectic dinner because I had to bring my kids along, and had to rush back home before bedtime.  They were fairly well behaved, and we even managed to get a few complete sentences out between kid crises.  Then my daughter crawled under the table and took about 1000 close-up shots of Debbie's tights! 

 

(Luckily she's a mom too, and knows the kind of things that come with the territory.)

The next day, I flew to Tampa on a business trip, and while I was there, I managed to meet up with Myra from Simple Inspirations and Andrea from Satin Bird Designs.  They found me through the Map the Sewintists project, which just makes my day!  I'm so glad that people are using it to find each other, despite all the bugs that I haven't been tech savvy enough to solve!  

Here are a few quick iPhone photos that I grabbed from them because I was stupid and forgot to bring my camera:

Although this is MMMay, I was cheating and wore a RTW maxi dress...but I did make the necklace.  You can't really see it in this photo, so you'll have to take my word for it!

You can't really see in this photo either, but Myra is wearing a beautifully made twist front jersey top, which Andrea and I both admired.

We had a great Mexican dinner at Miguel's, let Andrea give us stuff without bringing anything in return (d'oh!), and talked the night away.  Here I was thinking it would be great to spend the night with some non-scientists, but it turns out that (without giving away their personal information), they have both worked in scientific fields and we ended up talking about diet and immunology, travel (me being able to fill them in on a lot of information about Cuba, since they can't travel there), kids, grandkids....oh, and or course sewing!  It always amazes me how interesting and friendly every single sewintist I've met has turned out to be.  

We are the coolest bunch, aren't we?

BTW, for anyone else living in or visiting Florida, there is a new FB group (Florida Fashion Sewists) that are trying to arrange a get-together sometime soon.

OK, that's enough for today.  I'll post about my second Me Made May experience next time I get an hour or two on my computer.

Montreal Meet-up!

I came back from my business trip to Tampa to find an invitation from Shannon @The Finished Garment for a meet-up this Saturday.   Woohoo!  Just the thing I need to carry me through a cold and grey Montreal work week.

If you'd like to spend the day shopping, drinking, eating, talking, shopping, drinking, and talking some more with the coolest group of sewintists in La Belle Province, then get yourself over to Shannon's blog and leave her a message.  Then meet us at rue St. Hubert on Saturday and prepare for some fun! 



View Larger Map

See you there!