Of course this gives me no end of joy, since I haven’t had a FB account for nearly six months. I can only imagine someone’s created a fan page for me and my blog, and judging by the geographical origin of the visits I am pretty sure I know who my benefactor and President of my fan club is.
(Yes Love, I can see you. In fact, I can see a bit more than you can. Remember this next time).

So make yourself at home and leave a comment – I’d like to do my best to make your visit an entertaining one!

Anyway, after coming across this I cannot look at my tracing wheels the same way again. Especially the double ones. I am posting this so I don’t have to suffer alone.

I have also acquired a tablet, meaning that I only switch my laptop on once a week or so. This is not a bad thing, since it’s showing all of its 4.75 years of age.
I love my Nexus, but I am still useless with a touch screen, so typing (tapping?) long posts is a massive job, and any kind of cropping or editing of images is unlikely to happen on it.

This week, as 30th April slowly burned into evening and night, I wondered whether I could pull off the challenge, and quickly realised that I have made plenty of things that I simply haven’t blogged. So I thought I’d give this a chance and see where it gets me. Here it goes:

‘I, Stef of StefPulls, sign up as a participant of Me-Made-May ’13. I endeavour to wear at least one me-made garment each day when I am leaving the house for the duration of May 2013′

You see, I love Sundays. Vegging out, slobbing around, moving the duvet to the sofa and watching films back to back for the duration. Of course that’s when I leave my bedroom.
This time last year even that was a challenge, especially after managing at 15-ish mile run on Saturdays.
This didn’t start with my running obsession, indeed it is a pleasure that I have cultivated since childhood. As a heathen who is the spawn of heathens, we had no Holy Day at any point in the week, and although Sunday lunch was sacred, there was still a lot of slobbing around.
No one is going to snog me, kiss me or smell me. So I’ll slob. Deal with it.

So knowing how unlikely I am to make a pair of slob/sweat pants before next weekend (unlikely), I had to adapt my pledge to suit my lifestyle. On to Part One:

Maroon l/s Simplicity 7451, H&M (mini)skirt, Peacocks leggings, gingham shoes by Converse.	Unblogged black pencil skirt from the ever-useful Marmalade Kiss tutorial, Karen Millen-esque Simplicity 7451, Googly Eyes because my own were closed in the picture. This is the kind of cake I enjoy making, which is just as well since I have to wear this sort of thing to work.
Unblogged Simplicity 7451 I lenghtened to tunic length, usual leggings. Boots from a shop in Rome in 2010.	Unblogged Breton-style mutation of Simplicity 7451, usual miniskirt and leggings.

L-R: Maroon l/s, refashioned jumper, poly knits s/s spots.

This week I made a long-sleeved V-neck one from some maroon poly knit that was in the stash. I know it looks purple, but it really isn’t.
It has a centre back seam like almost everything I make these days, because I don’t like wasting fabric.
There is a 3in band folded in half at the wrists and a 4in one at the hem, with a much narrower one at the neck. Bias tape from the pile of bias tape at the shoulders and black thread everywhere, since I had a bad case of CBA.
This took two very distracted evenings to put together. I wore it on Thursday for a very long day at work and was very pleased with it.
It’s the right length and the right fit, no bunching or riding up. I love long-sleeved tee but they never fit like this one does.

On Friday I raided the charity shop (more on this later) and picked up a men’s red jumper which I made into another Simplicity 7451, this time taking advantage of the existing ribbing. This took half a morning and the finish isn’t great but I am still going to wear it, and I can always replace the band if I can’t live with (I usually can).

I wore my new red top to go see Sam Raimi’s Oz The Great and Powerful, which I really enjoyed. When it comes to “Disney gives money to a director I love to make something inspired by a classic” I am still smarting from *that* Tim Burton’s Alice In Wonderland (eurgh), but this is very good. Aside from maybe James Franco liking himself to an extent not seen since the golden days of Clark Gable, but that’s his problem and not the film.
I also love Michelle Williams, who is a lot more talented than just being Heath Ledger’s ex or somebody who used to be in (double eurgh) Dawson’s Creek. She gets to wear some amazing costumes in this, and so do Rachel Weisz and Mila Kunis.

Finally, today I just finished another short-sleeved one out of some polyknit.
I managed to squeeze sleeve and bands out of a tiny squeezy metre of fabric. I had to do a lot of joining and was quite gutted when I realised I had overlooked a relatively big scrap that would have saved me most of the joining. Still, this took just three very leisurely hours, with plenty of breaks for tea and Easter egg:

Not bad for a 37-year old pattern that cost me ten Bob.

Back to The Great British Sewing Bee. Best of luck to all involved, but my telly will be firmly switched off. Which is the state it’s always in, unless I am recording films to watch without adverts, or I am in the lounge and can’t reach the radio in the kitchen. Or I need a dose of Kevin Eldon.
Here are my reasons:

1. That baking show did ever so well. Just not with me.
Readers outside the UK might have missed out on The Great British Bake-Off, the true predecessor to the Sewing Bee. It was a baking competition for non-professionals that gripped the British TV-viewing public.
It didn’t grip me, because it wasn’t a film, it wasn’t on the radio and it didn’t feature Kevin Eldon.
I had to take notice of it because all of sudden everyone at work *had to* bring baked goodies in. Especially the people who never knew there was an oven in their kitchen, even though they bought the place years ago and even spent money on that British middle-class staple, “a new kitchen”.
Plenty of charity bake-offs where organised, with the perpetrators telling everyone that they could bring in store-bought baked goodies if they wanted to – the modern CofE approach to making someone do something.
The people who already knew how to bake and decorate (a whole other source of snark which I’ll leave untapped for today) brought in some amazing things. The people who didn’t know how to bake brought in some terrible things and didn’t get any constructive feedback, because this is the office charity bake-off and not an evening class. The people who brought in store-bought goodies have asked to remain unnamed.
Cookery programs on television are always wrong. They turn one of life’s basic skills (you don’t eat, you die) into an on-going competition and patronise the people who don’t have time to marinade their goujons or spend an hour on each meal. And those are the people who probably need the most help in order to eat healthier, cheaper meals. I am waiting to see what new-fangled patronising snobbery this programme will add to sewing.

2. Sewing is not baking.
Sounds obvious? I’ll expand. Baking shows have turned people’s attention to that neglected corner of their kitchen – the oven! It was there all along, in fact I am pretty sure they noticed before, possibly the last time they put a pizza in it.
But when was the last time you moved into a house with a sewing machine?
Dear Sewing Bee producers, what went on in your head when you thought sewing would work as well as baking on tv? Where are these mythical dwellings and where do I apply to live in one? Do you have a separate list for overlockers?
I have no problem with more exposure for sewing, but the public will be exposed to a skill that requires equipment that is expensive when it’s lightweight and cheap when vintage and all metal and very clunky – ask me how I know.
Good vintage sewing machines are already unreachable on eBay, and this program is likely to merely sell a boat-load of cheapo, sweatshop-made plastic machines that will never get serviced or repaired because “they were too cheap anyway”.
When you are a beginner, it’s hard to tell whether you are doing something right if your equipment is below par. There’s nothing worse.

3. Claudia Winkleman.
It’s not really about her. I am trying to think of a media personality that would make me watch a programme I couldn’t otherwise be interested in. I guess Ms Toksvig would do. But until then, the tell will stay switched off, unless it’s Ewan McGregor night.

Any flies in the soothing ointment that is my love for charity shops have already been decribed in this post from December 2012 on “So, Zo… What do you know?”. With one important exception. Zo writes:

I am convinced that all those lovely volunteer late-middle-aged women have collectively received thousands of donated vintage sewing patterns, maybe had a laugh with their colleagues about how their old mum used to sew all her clothes, and then systematically binned them all like some horrendous vintage sewing pattern holocaust.

Well, guess what: us poor, dumb Notherners, with our ferrets, cheap house prices, horrendous brand-new Media City, scary accents, windy weather and flat caps, we have one up on the South for once.

Forgive my anecdotal numbers, but 3 out of 9 charity shops here in M33 have sewing patterns, and pretty much all nine of them have knitting patterns and /or knitting gear.

But there are deadly bugs in this greener grass of the North. And to show you just how deadly, I would like to introduce some evidence.

Ladies and gentlemen, members of the jury, I give you Exhibit A: McCall’s 5374.
So Nineties it hurts, but lovely darts and plenty of scope for good things:

“It’s all about me!” said Maroon Girl.

Exhibit B is Vogue 8205, a 2006 pattern:

“It’s not pigeon poo on my head! It was the price sticker, I swear!”, “Who’s the Prime Minister, Ms White Jacket?”

Now, dear readers, I’d like to point out that the McCall’s pattern had been cut and there were missing pieces, unimportant piece like sleeves and stuff (who needs those?), while the Vogue was complete and still in factory folds.
So, which one was priced at the equivalent of USD 2.25? And which one was a mere USD .75?

Why, of course. The cut and incomplete one was the more expensive one, and the perfect one was cheap.

The expensive pattern was from the expensive charity shop, the one that starts with O and ends in xfam, so I wasn’t entirely surprised.
But what made the experience more irritating is that the same charity shop currently boasts in their window a “Wedding dress made with donated garments by out volunteers”.
I couldn’t bear to take a picture of it, and I’m sure a lot of work went into putting together half of a black (yup) vest and some white net curtains. I suspect it’s the work of the teenage girls who often volunteer in there.

So, there are people in this shop who think they are handy at refashioning, they might even (I hope) know a spool from a bobbin, and yet does anyone think of looking into the pattern envelopes and pricing the patterns accordingly? No way.

I am not saying the people from the shop where I found the cheap pattern have a clue about sewing patterns, but they have a more realistic approach to pricing everything they sell, something that both Oxfam and (heaven help us) BHF here in Sale could benefit from.
On the subject of Charity Shop Fashion, someone I know loves those shop windows as much as I do, here.

The rant is meant to introduce this pattern, which set me back the princely sum of USD .30 a few months ago:

This is Simplicity 7451 from 1976, “Misses’ Jiffy wrap skirt and tops (tops sized from stretch knits only”. New, this would have set you back 60p in 1976, which is apparently GBP 2.88/ USD 4.33 in today’s money, a rather decent price for a very basic pattern with a dearth of variations.
The envelope is tatty and ripped in piaces, but all the pieces are there and whilst they have been cut that’s not a big deal for a single-size pattern.

I have no interest in making the skirt, since gathers don’t flatter me and when you’re clumsy as I am anything around your backside that’s fastened with a knot is purely asking for trouble, as I know from experience.

I do like the top though, and I often wish I had more knit top with sleeves. The RTW ones are always in a fabric that’s too thick to be flattering, or too short for my waist, or fitted for someone who doesn’t have a waist / hip ratio of .73, which is Excellent according to the BBC Health website but an utter bee-atch when you are trying to buy clothes in the UK, the land of waist-less women.

I hate to sound snarky, but having grown up in the Mediterranean the shape of clothes here -which I find reflects the shape of a lot of female bodies- is a matter of unending fascination and frustation for me.

Anyway, enough of this Op-Ed column of a post and on to some more ugly pictures. Forgive the halo, it’s probably my Spirit Guide telling me not to use this fabric again. He’s a 17th-Century Scottish Sailor called Shaun MacNoShit:

The Facts

Fabric: Black knit, had it for ages, loose enough to preserve my modesty but too loose for the machine to handle, even with a ballpoint needle. The needle just misses the bobbin thread, which gave me a huge fright on Wednesday night, meaning I was cleaning the shuttle race until 11PM. Fun times! The machine is fine with other fabrics, so at least there was no damage.
I also remembered that it wasn’t the first time I had this issue with this type of fabrics, so I’ll simply stay away in the future.
For this reason, the least said about the hem the better. I could have put another strip of the blue on it but I knew by then I wasn’t going to wear this enough to justify it. Sometimes even I know when to fold, even if that’s usually two hours after the smart people who do not fancy an hour on a camp bed under tinfoil and on a drip.
Pattern: Simplicity 7451. The pattern is size “Medium 12-14 Miss”, which is “87 (34) to 92 (36)” waist measurement and calls for something with about 25% stretch, meaning it would be huge on anyone who made this according to their measurements. Massive. Ginormous. Twice sesquipedalian.
Proof? My knit has about 10% stretch, so I used 1cm seam allowances instead of 1.5cm, and added a whole 2 centimetres at the fold for both front and back. It fits me perfectly all the way to the waist and I need to take the sides beneath my waist because there was no need to add anything. So there.
I also added an inch to the length, but then I alway do that.
Year: 1976.
Notions: Black thread, bias tape for the shoulders, leftovers from the Life of Pi dress.
And the insides? The insides? Are you joking? I could barely do The Outsides without the fabric giving me a coronary. No chance.
Hours: 30 minutes to trace and alter the pattern, 4 hours of cutting and sewing, 30 minutes to repeatedly take apart and reassemble the shuttle race, another hour of assorted swearing at my choice of fabric. Six hours in total.
First worn: Yesterday for work, tucked into my only RTW denim skirt. It looks lovely.
Wear again? I think so. I actually quite like this. I’m a forgiving soul.
Make again? Yes, in a knit that’s easier to work with. I have so much trouble buying t-shirts that this thing and I could be BFFs.
Total cost: A fiver for the fabric last year and 20p for the pattern. GBP 5.20, which is about USD 7.80. Not bad for something I will wear again.

I must now log off, dear readers, and head out because it’ Saturday and that means there’s gay men who must pour me drinks and I hate to disappoint them. Toodle pip!

But sometimes finished is fugly:

I know it looks alright from there, even cute, but this is utterly fugly, and if I was a cat -let alone a baby- I’d know better than to have a snooze on this.

There aren’t two squares the same size, there are bunches at the back, the sides are wonky and the stitching is horrendous.

But in fairness, this time last year I would never have imagined I’d be attempting something like this, let alone finishing it.
In fact, old me would have left this as a UFO and binned it in a few years’ time, when packing for the next house move.
Extant me ploughed through this to the finish knowing full well it wouldn’t be good enough.
It’s my good old Sewing The Void dilemma – when do you give up?
Too soon? Too late? Ten minutes from base camp?

I am very grateful for the encouragement everyone has given this (my work colleagues have a PhD in feigning interest and I love them for it), in particular to the person who described it as “a successful prototype”.

For now I am working on something simple while still cleaning the machine, since I had the great idea to put fleece at the back of this, and fleece is 85% fluff and 15% lint. Still, it worked well with my normal Teflon presser foot.

This quilt isn’t going anywhere, and once I have my mojo back I’ll decide what to do next.

Last weekend the sun was out and I just had my bike back from service so I took it for a long ride and Saturday and another one on Sunday and by Sunday night I knew I was unwell and yesterday morning as the tram approached my office I realised I had made a big mistake leaving the house since I could barely stand.
After the whole post-marathon saga last year I promised myself to stop this nonsense of going to work when I am feeling sick and today I am vegetating at home and trying to stay well away from any cutting tools since my head is feeling very woozy and I am having a nosebleed-tastic time.

But enough of me falling apart in a non-emotional way (for once!) and on to the business of announcing giveaway winners:

1. Style 3294, the skirt pattern, goes to Laurie at SewExhausted!.

2. The Simplicity retro pattern goes to Nessa at NessaHux!

3. And the Burda Classics magazine goes to Abby at Sew Get Dressed! Go over and read her post about gender norms. Over here she’s preaching to the choir, but I did share the frustration.

Winners have been notified and I will be going to the Post Office this Saturday, hopefully also laden with a certain quilting project that I cannot wait to see the back of I am sure will delight and surprise its recipients!

I am off to lie down now since the caffeine in my last dose of meds is wearing off and I barely have the strength to complain. No really, I don’t!

(*) One of my favourite words. “Stubbornly defiant”. No idea why I like it so much. Oh no Siree.