2011 In Review -- Part 5: Gifts

I'm not quite sure why I've had such a mental block on writing this post, but I've started it several times, only to leave it unfinished.  So here it is the end of April and I still haven't wrapped up my 2011 year in review posts.  Part of the delay is that my health is suddenly once again requiring nearly every waking moment of my time (I'm assembling a new team of doctors, oh joy), but part of it is good old fashioned procrastination.  But at this point it's keeping me from writing other blog posts, keeping me from getting productive sewing done, and more or less blocking up all the creative pipes.  So let's crank this puppy out.

On the topic at hand, I probably don't do as much gift sewing as I should, but there are a couple of reasons for that.  First off, I have this strangely strong desire to avoid giving any sort of "Becky Home Ecky" (in the immortal words of Michael Kors) style gifts.  I hold the gifts I make to an even higher standard than I hold my clothing and costumes to, especially because once the gift is given, I'll likely never have it on my sewing table again, so it needs to be free of any sort of issues that would require repair or adjustment.  I want the giftee to like the gift, find it beautiful, and be able to put it to real use.  If a gift doesn't meet any of those criteria, chances are I won't give it.

The second reason I don't do as much gift sewing as maybe I should is that I am pretty selfish with my sewing time, in all honesty.  Even simple projects can take way too long to finish, between my illness and all the other demands on my time.  I always have a long, long list of sewing I want to do for myself -- I counted off the top of my head, and there are at least twenty-eight different pieces on my To Sew list right now, almost all of which I could put immediately into regular use, and some of those are actually urgently needed.  My sewing can't seem to keep pace with my designs, so I have to prioritize, and if the gift doesn't meet the above three criteria (beautiful, useful, and liked), I scrap the idea and figure out a better gift for the giftee.

And third, December is my biggest gift giving month, between Christmas, MB's birthday, and my mom's birthday in early January.  Everything else tends to be crazy that time of year too, cutting down on my sewing time, and I worry about having to find an emergency last-minute gift if I'm not able to finish the handmade gift in time.  To say nothing of the fact that my health tends to be worse once cold-and-flu season starts.  All of that adds up to: I'm pretty picky about what gift sewing I do.

So with that said, I actually made three handcrafted gifts in 2011, two for my mom and one for my sister Jezunya, all given at Christmas.  In both cases I had to guess at what each of them would want for Christmas, but the gifts seem to have been well-received.

The first gift I sewed for my mom was a set of rice warming pillows, inspired by this tutorial (and using this one for additional tips).  Rice pillows are little pillows full of rice (as the name implies, lol) that you stick in the microwave for a few seconds, and then use like a hot water bottle or a heating pad.  The rice retains heat better than water does, and obviously they're more portable than a heating pad, and the weight of the rice can be an added bonus too.  They're great for sore muscles, cold hands and feet, and general relaxation.

For my mom's set, I started with basic muslin fabric for the inner pillow, and then used classic unbleached linen to make a washable pillowcase.  I was aiming for rustic chic with the whole thing, playing up the handmade quality rather than trying to make it look store-bought.  I decided to make three pillows: one large pillow for sore neck muscles, and two very small pillows that can be heated up and put inside a pair of mittens, boots, etc.

For the largest pillow, I started with a piece of muslin about 60cm x 24cm.  I folded this in half width-wise (so now 60cm x 12cm) and seamed up the sides and the folded edge with a short stitch-length, leaving the long cut edge open.  I then flipped this inside out and sewed those same edges again in a French seam sort of way, to make sure the seams won't bust open over time, and the rice won't find a way to wiggle out.  I then split the pillow into five sections, each about 12cm wide, by sewing seams from the cut edge to the folded edge, back-stitching liberally, again to keep the rice from escaping.  Splitting the pillow into five sections also keeps the rice from all shifting to one end of the pillow.

With the pillow divided into five subsections, I folded both of the unsewn top edges under and sewed small sections down, leaving an inch or so unsewn in each of the five sections.  For the filling, I used a mix of rice and dried lavender, with a bit of lavender oil thrown in for good measure.  I whipped up a quick funnel from a piece of paper, and slowly fed the rice mixture into each of the five sections, a quarter cup at a time, until each section was about 75% full.  Then I pinned the open edges closed and sewed the whole thing up, going over the seams a couple of times to make sure the rice stays put.  The smaller pillows were a similar process, but each had only one 12x12cm section.

With the pillows done, I turned to the exterior pillow case -- the idea being that if the pillow gets dirty, the case can be washed when the main pillow part itself can't.  I used pre-washed, unbleached linen for the cases, using this tutorial to make pillow cases that open at the back, like European pillow shams.  I knew I also wanted to have writing of some sort on the exterior pillow case, to dress up the wide open expanse of unadorned linen.  I went through a bunch of quote sites looking for just the right quote for my mom, but in the end I went with one of my own devising:

I did the stamp work before sewing the pillow pieces together, using an alphabet set of stamps I found at JoAnn's (possibly this one) and some brown fabric paint.  I drew lines with a wash-off fabric pencil, but otherwise just free-handed the stamp placement, to play up the home-made quality.  I also embroidered a pair of lavender stocks at the bottom of the larger pillow case, using embroidery thread and a by-the-seat-of-my-pants style of hand embroidery, lol.  Once the stamping and embroidery was done, I sewed the pillow cases together following the tutorial linked above, put the rice pillows in their cases, and called it done.  They smelled soooo good too, and felt so nice when warmed up, that I decided I needed to make myself one too, after the holidays were over.

The second part of the gift for my mom was a footrest like the one I made for myself and wrote about in my last post.  My mom is a bit taller than I am and keeps her desk chair slightly lower (according to covert measurements taken by Jezunya during her Thanksgiving visit, anyway), so I made the footrest for her a bit shorter, out of two foam pads instead of three like mine is.  I used a garnet red (Mom's favorite color) velvet-ish upholstery fabric for the exterior, and a matching garnet red fleece for the inside pocket.  Using what I'd learned making my own footrest, it all went together pretty quickly, with fewer mistakes.  Unfortunately I only have one rather blurry picture of my mom opening it on Christmas morning, looking slightly confused:

But I am told the footrest has made the move to my parents' new house, and sits proudly under Mom's desk.  I included a heating pad with it too, since Mom's feet get at least as cold as mine do, and as she's a middle school teacher, she spends a lot of time at that desk grading papers and the like.  I need to follow up with her and make sure it's being as useful and liked as I hoped, heh.

The third and final gift project was a skirt for Jez -- a surprise, of course, so one I didn't post about on Twitter, unlike most of my sewing, since Jez would undoubtedly have seen it there if I had mentioned it.  As I was nearing the eighth anniversary of when my joint pain and instability started up, my younger sister was just starting her own saga with joint pain -- a fact that has us both now looking towards genetic causes, as this seems to run in our family, with each of our other four sibling experiencing it to some level or another -- and while I was giving up pants altogether last fall, Jez was just starting to transition her non-Army uniform (she's active service currently) clothing towards more joint-friendly pieces.  To this end, she mentioned that she would love a full, fluffy skirt, maybe a bit bohemian, maybe in blues or greens.  She mentioned this as offhandedly as anyone can in the run up to gift giving, but I took the hint and the wheels started turning in my head.

I had a skirt in my closet that was just taking up space, that instantly sprang to mind.  It's a floor-length, tiered, gathered skirt made of 13 yards of unbleached muslin, that I made a few years ago when I was taking lessons in American Tribal Style Belly Dance.  It's wonderfully fluffy, and at $2/yard, it wasn't too expensive to make (though once again, I really, really need to get a gathering foot).  The bottom tier is 26 yards long, using the selvage edge of the fabric, to avoid hemming.  In addition to wearing it to ATS classes and performances, it also made an appearance as the base layer in my sea nymph ren faire outfit from a couple of years ago:

But 13 yards of anything is huge.  Way too big to take to DragonCon, too big to store well in my closet, too big to do much of anything with, except wear for fluffy long skirt occasions.  When I had to stop dancing because of my joints, the skirt just sat in my closet, taking up too much space.  So when Jess said she wanted a fluffy, knee-length, tiered skirt, my brain went ah ha!

After giving it a good washing, the first thing I did was cut the skirt in half width wise, resulting in two tiered half-skirts that each had a 13-yard-long bottom tier.  I set one half aside (still under my sewing table as I type this) and focused on the other half.  I pulled out another (much less fluffy) gathered tiered skirt I made years ago and used that as a template to shorten the half skirt to knee-length.  I wanted the previous floor-skimming tier to end just below knee-length, so I measured up from the bottom, cutting off the top tier to make the skirt shorter, and angling the waist so it's slightly higher in back than in front.  I then sewed the cut edges to each other, and turned under a bit at the top to form an elastic casing, resulting in a knee-length, fluffy, off-white skirt.

This is where it got fun.  I've experimented with dyeing fabrics off and on the last few years, and I really love it.  I love being able to personalize the color of a fabric in addition to sewing it.  For this project I wanted to experiment with ombré dyeing, using two colors, going from lighter at the top to darker at the hem.  Using liquid Rit Dye in Teal and Navy Blue, I started by dyeing the whole skirt teal in my washing machine, then slowly added Navy Blue to the mix, pulling the skirt out of the washing machine little by little.

I rigged up a bit of rope over my washing machine, and strung the skirt up by string and safety pins.  The whole thing went really well, considering, but I did run into one snag: If the water doesn't stay hot enough (as in a washing machine standing open for an hour or more), Navy Blue dye tends to go more purple.  So the first pass at the skirt ended up with teal at the top, fading to dark purple at the bottom, and the two together looked a bit... odd.  So back to JoAnn's for more dye, this time in green, to give the whole skirt a more blue-green tint.  This worked out much better, and turned the darkest color to a more evergreen blue.

After dyeing it, I ran the skirt through the washer and dryer and then tried it on.  And almost didn't want to take it off.  It's fluffy, spiny, girly, and all around wonderful, and I had to remind myself that 1. I love Jez and she deserves a great skirt as a present; and 2. I still have the other half of the original skirt left over to make myself one.  Those two things were the only reasons I was able to talk myself into giving this as a gift instead of keeping it for myself, lol.  But Jez seemed to like it:

I really do need to make the second half into a wearable skirt for myself.  Jez and I are very much BFFs (in addition to being full-blooded sisters, each other's editors and beta readers, and now joint-pain-twins), and I love the idea of half a skirt for each of us, like those Best Friend necklaces I remember from my childhood.  And thankfully 13 yards is more than enough to make two super fluffy skirts.  Here's another shot of Jez's skirt, with the colors a bit blown out to show the detail:

If I were sewing this from scratch, I probably wouldn't have made the tiers nearly that tall, but for a re-purposed skirt, I am crazy proud of it.  Jez seems to love it too, and will randomly tell me that she's wearing it on the weekend, with cowboy boots or cute wedges or whatever.  Having worn the skirt for even just a few minutes, I'm very envious.

But the other half is still sitting under my sewing table, so the only question I have now is: What color should I dye my half?  Blues?  Greens?  Blue-green to match Jez's?  Something totally different?  Ombré or not?  What do you guys think?

Next up: what I've been working on so far in 2012, what I'm dying to sew, and costume planning for DragonCon!

2011 In Review -- Part 4: Disability Aids and Home Decor

Getting back on track with my 2011 In Review series, next up is home decor and disability aids.  I should start out by saying that I don't do a lot of home decor sewing.  It's always been one of those things that I can do, when I need to, but I don't get a lot of joy out of it.  Unlike clothing and costuming, home decor feels (to me) both restrictive and boring.  Restrictive in that decor is what your house wears every day -- most people don't change throw pillows or slip covers or curtains as often as they change outfits -- and in that I share my house with my husband and my cat, so I have to take their needs and desires into account too.  (MB's opinion on what clothing looks good on me gets a lot of weight, but I ultimately decide; Kitty Pryde, on the other hand, doesn't really get a vote.)  And boring in that much of home decor sewing is straight lines and easy shapes, with no challenging fit to tackle.

So between 2000 and 2010, I sewed one pair of throw pillows for our sofa, and nothing else that could even loosely be termed home decor.  2011 didn't bring a sudden burst of home decor sewing inspiration, but as we headed into the second half of the year, inspiration of another sort struck.  I somehow got it into my head that I would participate in National Novel Writing Month, also known as NaNoWriMo.  Not just participate, but finish, which involves writing at least 50,000 words of an original work of fiction within the 30 days of November.  Now I've done some writing before, both technical and fiction writing for various games I've worked on (and others I can't mention), as well as fanfiction and some original poetry, but I tend to be a pretty slow, perfectionist writer.  I have a couple of outlines for novels that I've been kicking around for a few years, but have never taken the time to tackle.  My logic last fall was that participating in NaNo, forcing myself to devote all of November to writing 50,000 words, would help break me of my perfectionist habits and just get something down on the page.  All good in theory.

I do this to myself from time to time, in all sorts of areas.  I'll set up some ridiculous goal and loudly proclaim that I am going to meet it.  But at its root, it always seems to come down to "If I can accomplish X, then it'll mean that I'm not really chronically ill, that my illness doesn't dictate that much of my life."  In the past it's been jobs, social activities, dance classes, travel, and probably more I've forgotten about.  In the fall of 2011, it was writing a novel.  I would push through the pain and write a novel, and thus prove that my illness can't stop me from doing anything.

Yeah, that didn't work out so much.  After psyching myself up, prepping my work space (which is what this post is about, promise), developing my characters, outlining my plot, etc etc -- I crashed hard on November 2nd.  So it goes.

But in the months and weeks leading up to NaNoWriMo, I focused on prepping my work space to best allow me to put in the hours I knew it would take to write a 50,000 word novel.  I tend to live at my computer, between writing, blogging, reading blogs, playing video games, and once upon a time making video games.  My knees and hips are my most pain-ridden joints, and there's a certain point of the day, each and every day, where I can't sit in my desk chair anymore, no matter how many prescription painkillers I load up on.  The idea started to form in my head that I could sew things that would extend the hours I'm able to comfortably sit at the computer.

My work space, such as it is, consists of a computer desk and chair in the center of the large open main room of MB and my condo, about equidistant from the tv and my sewing area, and framed by our couch on one side, MB's matching desk on another, and the front entry way on the third side.  Most days, it looks like this:

Only usually without flowers -- MB got me those for Valentine's Day, and I'll happily sacrifice surface space for flowers any day.

Being the short, hypermobile person that I am, my desk chair is always set to the highest possible height, to keep my arms at the correct height for keyboard use -- which leaves my feet uncomfortably far from the floor.  Before last fall, I'd developed a bad habit of crossing my ankles and resting my toes on the roller stand of my desk chair, or alternately folding one leg under me and keeping the other foot on the roller stand, simply because my feet couldn't reach the floor on their own (you short ladies will know what I'm talking about -- nothing in this world is made for someone 5'2", I swear).  This, of course, did very bad things to my already painful and hypermobile hips and knees.

My feet are also perpetually, unceasingly cold, to the point that it doesn't matter how many pairs of socks I wear (I'm wearing two pairs right now, one of them SmartWool, and a pair of legwarmers besides -- and it's 68° outside, I have a fire in the hearth beside MB's desk, and my feet are still cold).  It's gotten so bad in recent years that the only way to keep my feet from aching with cold is to put a heating pad directly on them.  So an idea started to percolate for something I could sew that would give me a better place to rest my feet while sitting in my desk chair, and potentially keep my feet warm.

I started with a set of 15"x17"x2" high density foam cushions I found at JoAnn's.  I bought three, brought them home and tucked them under my desk, and was happy to find that the combined 6" height was the perfect elevation for my feet and the 15"x17" surface area was just a bit bigger than the heating pad I usually use for my feet.  Based on the measurements of the foam, I sketched out some very basic plans:

MB suggested I just stack the three layers of foam and call it done, but I knew I could do better.  I pulled out the leftover home decor fabric I had used for the throw pillows from where it had languished at the bottom of my stash for a good five years.  I didn't have a ton of it, so I also pulled out some spare muslin.  Starting with the side of my foam cube that would be against the ground, I cut out a piece of muslin 40cm x 45cm (15"x17" plus a 1cm seam allowance on each side -- I switched to using cm in my sewing while making my steampunk Tinkerbell corset, and I've never gone back; inches are just too imprecise for me).  To that I added a 40x45cm piece of non-slip pad, cut from a too-big pad currently folded up under an area rug by our tv.  I ran a quick machine stitch around all four sides to keep the muslin and the non-slip pad together.

(Pardon the pile o' pink in the background there -- that's a UFO that I hope to finish this year.)

Next, I cut 45x17cm rectangles from the left-over throw pillow fabric, to cover the front and back edges of the cube.

I sewed those to the 45cm long sides of my non-slip bottom layer, drawing on the way we used to make paper cubes as kids.  I was worried I wouldn't have enough of the home decor fabric, so I cut the 40x17cm side pieces from muslin and sewed those rectangles onto the 40cm long sides of the non-slip layer.

For the top of the cube, I used bit of leftover black fleece from my stash -- once finished, this would form part of a fleece-lined pocket for my feet on the top of the footrest.  I cut out another 40x45cm rectangle from the fleece and sewed it to the free edge of what would eventually be the front of my footrest.

This is where it started getting a bit tricky, but thankfully my sewing machine cooperated and I was able to sew up each of the four corner seams, and then sew the top to the side panels, all while keeping it fairly flat.  Only once I started putting the foam pads in did it actually start looking like a cube.

I added some loose recycled fiber type stuffing (salvaged from an ugly-as-sin giant heavy pillow that I'd been using as a footrest before) on top of the three foam pads to give the footrest more of a pillowtop feel, then hand-sewed the fleece top layer to back side of the cube.

The next step was to make the top of the pocket where my feet would go.  I wanted this top piece to wrap around from the side, up over the top of the footrest, then down the other side, with enough room in the front for me to put my feet in, but closed in the back near where my toes would be -- in other words, a trapezoid shape roughly 80cm long in the front and 76cm long in the back, and 38cm wide.  I cut this shape once from the home decor fabric for the outside, and again from the black fleece fabric for the inside.  I sewed the 80cm edges together with the wrong sides facing each other, then flipped it right side out and topstitched it, so the front edge would be nicely finished.  Then I set about hand-sewing this outer pocket piece to the cube.

And quickly realized that the pocket top wouldn't completely cover the white muslin I had used on the sides of the cubes.  Thankfully I had enough home decor fabric left over (way more than I thought I would have, in fact) that I was able to cut a couple of smaller rectangles to cover the muslin that showed on the sides.  Rather than take the whole cube apart to re-do these seams, I just turned the edges under and hand-sewed the rectangles directly onto the muslin.  If I had to do this project over again, I would definitely do this part differently (and in fact did do it differently when I made a similar footrest as a gift for my mom, but I'll get to that in the next post).

With the muslin covered, I got back to hand-sewing the pocket top into place, first along the two outside edges, and then with an envelope fold in the back, to tuck it all down tight at the back edge while leaving the front edge open enough for my feet and ankles.

Once it was finished, I tucked my heating pad into the fleece-lined pocket and put the footrest under my desk, where it has lived ever since.  In fact, if you go back and look at my first shot of what my work space looks like today, you can just barely see it peeking out from under the desk.

It turned out to be exactly what I needed, and has significantly increased my comfort while sitting at my desk.  Now I can sit at the right height for keyboard use and still have my feet flat.  It's light enough that I can pick it up and move it without having to worry about consciously engaging my upper arm muscles to keep my elbow from subluxing (like I have to do when picking up groceries, books, and overgrown cats), but the non-slip pad on the bottom means that it won't move unless I want it to, even on our Pergo floors.  And a heating pad inside a fleece-lined pocket?  Best thing ever for cold feet.

While I was working on the footrest, I started evaluating what other parts of my desk set up were causing me pain.  I narrowed in on the shape of my chair's seat.  Now, there are a lot of things I like about my desk chair, including how high it goes and how high the arms are, which are perfect for resting my elbows on while I type.  But the center of the seat portion is weirdly curved inward, and as I started evaluating my work space, I realized that that inward curve was doing odd things to my hip joints -- it felt as though my tailbone was sitting significantly lower than my hip sockets were, putting strain on my hips and subluxing them by the end of any given night.

So while I had the salvaged loose batting out for the top of the footrest, I grabbed a big handful and plopped it down on my chair, then sat on it for a few days.  Any time part of my hips didn't feel supported, I'd grab any bits that had started migrating towards the edges and move them back to where I needed, and a couple of times added a bit more batting to the pile.  Over the course of a few days, a shape started to emerge from the batting pile, a circle roughly 37cm in diameter, with one flat edge where it meets the back of my chair.  Using the batting pile as a guide, I traced this shape onto more of the same black fleece I used for my footrest, mostly because it was soft and already out on my sewing table.

I folded the fabric in half along the flat side and cut two layers of fleece.  I machine sewed along the rounded edge, leaving a couple of inches open, then turned the whole thing right-side out.

Using the same couple of inches that I left open to turn the cushion (lower right in the above picture), I took the batting that had been living on my chair and stuffed it into the cushion form.  My plan was to hand-sew this area up once the cushion was stuffed, but I realized that I would probably want to add more batting to it at some point, so I safety-pinned it closed instead.  Three and a half months later, the safety-pin is still there, but I think it's just about time to add more batting.

It's not the prettiest thing ever, but it does what it needs to do, and it allows me to sit at my desk chair for longer stretches of time, and later into the evening, which is a good thing even when I'm not trying to write 50,000 words in 30 days.

After I finished the footrest and the seat cushion, I did some careful measuring and realized I had juuuust barely enough of the home decor fabric left over to re-cover the all-purpose bench that I use when sewing, playing the piano, doing my makeup, etc.  The bench originally had a black (faux?) leather covering, but as any cat owner knows, cats' primary goal in life seems to be perforating every bit of leather they come into contact with.  And this bench had been claimed by Kitty as what we call "The Princess Chair" -- if I'm ever not actively sitting in it, it's her little throne -- so it had more than its fair share of claw marks. 

I measured the bench and cut five sides of a cube as one piece (again drawing on those old paper cubes from childhood), sewed up the corners, and plopped the whole thing on top of the bench, with a little extra loose batting for good measure.  I attempted to staple the raw edges of the fabric to the underside of the bench, like I had seen in so many episodes of Trading Spaces back in the day, but I don't know if it was my materials, my stapler, or my technique, but it didn't quite work like I wanted it to.  Did you lead me astray, Vern? 

I may at some point try to get back under there with a needle and thread and hand-sew the top fabric to the crappy fabric covering the cardboard or whatever the lowest layer of the bench is made of.  But it's my sewing chair, and I don't do well with sewing either on the floor or standing up, so I keep putting it off.  But it's a vast improvement over the ripped and cracking pleather, and with the extra batting it's more comfortable now too.  MB keeps saying we should get at least one more of these, if not two, so I can stop carrying it from room to room depending on where I need seating.  Sounds like a great idea, but I'm all out of that home decor fabric now, so additional benches wouldn't match, sigh.

All told, I made two home decor pieces and modified a third.  The footrest and the seat cushion in particular really allow me to live with less pain, so I would consider those "disability aids", though the line between home decor and disability aid is pretty fine for me -- just as the line between "clothes that accommodate my illness" and disability aids is a pretty fine one.  Especially when it comes to home decor, if I'm going to take time to sew it, it's probably because I need it to fit my exacting specifications.  Otherwise it's just throw pillows, and the two I sewed in 2006 will hold me for quite awhile.

And as far as the novel that inspired all of this fix-up-my-work-space sewing?  I'm still planning on writing it, but I've come to my senses and realized that NaNoWriMo is probably out of reach for me.  And that's fine, I don't need to stick to anyone else's schedules.  But these characters still live in my brain, especially my heroine, who is in her own way a means of dealing with my illness.  I hope I get to introduce her to all of you someday.