One Row At A Time

 I spent some of yesterday stitching and cutting and stitching some more.  That's all quilting is, right?  Cutting apart perfectly good fabric just to sew it back together.  In any case, the 24 star blocks got another row each:

Just one more row to go, and then I can move on to the "X" blocks!  That said, I doubt I'll get very much done on it (if any) today or tomorrow.  Today I have homework to do for my writing class, and grocery shopping, and attempting to write for that chapter I have due out on Friday.  And tomorrow is daytime quilt guild followed by the evening being taken up by said writing class.

I did, however, squeeze in one more book for January!  When we hit up Half Price Books earlier this month, they had five Barbara Hambly books on the shelves, and she's an author I've had recommended by several reputable SFF voices on the internet.  So I grabbed Dragonsbane (341pp), and... well, I'm not ashamed to say I stayed up way too late reading it.  Book was gripping!  I need to read the rest of what I have of hers, and then arrange to procure more.  So that brings me to 10 books and 4433 pages read for January.  Completely separate from the fanfiction reading, of course.

And now back to editing for my classmates.

2023, Go!

Ugh.  Back from the vanishing act again!

We spent December in the UK with Wonderful Husband's family, which was lovely on so many levels!  But it did mean that not much sewing got done.  Well.  I took a few baggies of 2" squares with, and borrowed a sewing machine for a couple of sessions, so I'm up to 150 of the 210 strips I need for a project.  But mainly it meant that I still haven't finished Squiddle and Niecelet's Christmas quilts!  And Family Christmas 2.0 happened this last Saturday.  So I need to get cracking!

At the local quilt show in October, Squiddle saw this quilt and fell in love with it:

It was even titled "Reds for [Squiddle's real name]", so clearly it was meant to be!  I plotted it out bigger (bed sized) and started work.  Here's how far I've gotten:

So clearly more work has to be done!

Things I did get accomplished while in the UK, however, was starting to read books again!  I took five with me, and finished all of them.  They were: The Lightning Thief (375pp), The Sea of Monsters (279pp), and The Titan's Curse (312pp), all by Rick Riordan; A Deadly Education (313pp) by Naomi Novik; and A Brightness Long Ago (416pp) by Guy Gavriel Kay.  The Rick Riordan books were written for middle schoolers, and so are like potato chips: easy and fast to read.  A Deadly Education took a while for me to get into it, between the main character's hostility and the world-building, but I'm looking forward to reading its two sequels.  And Guy Gavriel Kay's books are always dense reading but well worth it.  They're also referential to other books in the series, and make me want to reread them.  After getting home, I immediately started the next book in the series, which I think helped.

Which brings me to January's reading.  Thus far it consists of: All the Seas of the World (496pp) by Guy Gavriel Kay, the direct sequel to the above; Nick and Charlie (153pp) by Alice Oseman; Torn (436pp) by Rowena Miller; and The Battle of the Labyrinth (361pp), The Last Olympian (381pp), The Lost Hero (553pp), The Son of Neptune (513pp), The Mark of Athena (574pp), and The House of Hades (583pp + 42pp short story), all by Rick Riordan.  Yes, I'm reading my way through the entire Percy Jackson oeuvre.  The only reason I'm paused is because I'm still waiting for the next book to arrive in the mail.  Regardless, nine books (4092pp) in one month seems pretty decent to me.  And, I need to purchase the two sequels to Torn, now that I've finally gotten through it.  I started trying to read it during the height of the pandemic, but I just didn't have the headspace to explore new worlds at that point; now I do, and I thoroughly enjoyed it.  (Thank you, Morag!)

Back!

Ugh, sorry for disappearing!  I got distracted by doing a story for Whumptober.  Whumptober being a series of story prompts for the month of October wherein the point is to hurt your characters.  The list is here.  But rather than doing 31 individual stories, I opted to stitch them all together into one big story, written in September, to post daily in October.  I tried to write 500 words for each prompt (some got a good deal longer).  Wonderful Husband has commented "For a Whumptober story, there's not much whump in this."  Which, well, yeah.  31 days of pain ain't it.  My current fandom is Tales of Arcadia (which consists of the Netflix series Trollhunters, 3Below, and Wizards).  The story can be read here if anyone's interested.

Beyond that, I've finally got my quilting mojo back!  I finished the second picnic quilt, quilted and bound a wallhanging (still working on hand-sewing the hanging sleeve on), and started work on Jazzy's Christmas quilt.  No pictures of the first two yet, but here's the third:

He requested black, white, and red, and when I asked him if he wanted triangles or stripes, he chose triangles.  As of writing, I've got the top four rows sewn together.

Quilters By The Bay, one of the guilds I belong to, had our annual Sewing Room Sale on October 1st.  I got a few things, then, at the end of the day, rather than let the five bins of scraps get dropped at Goodwill, I hauled them home.  After sorting them, they actually fit into four bins.  And I'm working on a plan to do a charity quilt block of the month challenge, sort of like the block of the month I used to run for the Orange County Quilt Guild.  Except that instead of drawing winners, the blocks will all go to the guild's charity quilt endeavors.  And the material for the blocks will all come from the scrap bins.  If the plan works, win!  And in the meantime, I've been given free run to "liberate" things I might want from the bins, so some of the fabric in Jazzy's quilt, yes, did come from those scraps.

I also joined another guild, the Gig Harbor Quilters.  Which brings me up to three guilds right now!  I hadn't joined them before because they meet during the day, but, well, now that both boys are in school full-time....

I like the group, I really do.  It's friendly and vibrant and active.  And their quilt show was this last weekend, so Douglas and I took the boys.  Squiddle dragged us to see a quilt and declared it was the exact one he wanted for Christmas.  A red Single Irish Chain quilt with cream chains and cream stars in the alternate blocks.  That's doable!  And, amusingly, the name of the quilt included his name.  So, clearly, karma at work. ^_^

Anatomy of an Outfit: Picnic Set

So!  Today in vintage Barbie clothes, we have... half an outfit.  The Picnic Set from 1961!

The bundle of clothes I purchased did not include the jeans.  (Nor, for any of the outfits, the accessories.)  But I had another pair of Barbie jeans to hand, so this is my approximation.  All that I got was the blouse:

Which, for the record, isn't actually a blouse!  I'm not sure exactly what one should call this, in fact.  A leotard?  A bodysuit?  Overall, it really is an excellent way of making sure a doll's blouse stays tucked in, so I'm going to have to see if any of my patterns has something similar that I can adapt for non-knit fabrics.

It has some gathering into the two-piece yoke on the back.  The folded-over collar is a separate finished piece.

And a snap hidden under that single button on the front.  As you can see, only one side of it is actually bodysuit-ish.  The front facings are simply folded over and their interior edges finished by topstitching.

The interior of the yoke.  The facing is free-floating, and folds down like so:

And, finally, the hem is simply folded over and topstitched down, as are the armholes.  The side seam is unfinished.

Simplicity 5785

Another day, another doll dress.  I'm not too happy with this one.

Pictured here on Morticia, my Model Muse body type.  Because she was one of only two dolls this would fit, the other being Petite.  And the bodice was too big on Petite - the neckline hunched up toward her chin.  So this dress is Morticia's, I guess.

(She's named Morticia because she was wearing a Halloween dress when I bought her, and because between her expression and blood-red lips and nails, I'm 100% sure she's killed someone.)

This dress is pattern E, illustrated up in the upper left corner of the pattern cover.  (This pattern is still available, apparently, and still under the same pattern number)  I opted not to do the "belt" on it simply because I didn't have any black ribbon to hand.

Fitting-wise, the problem is that the dress simply won't close on any of my other dolls.  They're either too broad around the waist (Vintage and Bellybutton bodies) or around the ribcage (Twist'N'Turn bodies).  And the problem with it on Morticia, actually, is that it's loose in the bust.  So this pattern manages to fit precisely none of my Barbies well.

Construction-wise, I do not like the armscye.  It's very shallow; the side seam meets a "V" rather than a "U" shape.

Things I do like, however, very much include the skirt!  It is actually a true circle skirt, and does fit with the bodice like hand in glove.  No finagling or finessing of seam lengths; they're a perfect match.

If I make this dress again, I will be narrowing the shoulders, to try to make them proper sundress straps, and altering the armscye to make it less, hmm, argumentative to deal with.

Identity of a Doll

When I saw a listing on shopgoodwill for a "Porcelain Barbie," I thought they must mean a Silkstone Barbie, and, on a whim, put in the minimum bid.  The doll was pretty enough, after all, and I was curious.  And then I forgot about the auction until I got an e-mail telling me, surprise!  I'd won.

Well, now I have a doll that sure as heck feels like she's made out of porcelain.  Which is what Silkstone Barbies are supposed to be like, the internet informed me.  Except, when I was trying to ID her, by the color of her hair and eyes, by her earrings, by the style of her hair... I kept running into the road block of she's a smiling doll, while the Silkstones, with their heads allegedly modeled on the original, vintage Barbie's... well, to me they all look like they've just smelled something bad.

After running into roadblocks in several Google image searches, I finally took to eBay and did a search for "porcelain Barbie."  And there, a hundred and some auctions down, I found her.  Vintage 1996 Holiday Caroler Barbie!  She's been stripped of her dress and hat, and came to me in nothing but a lace-edged pair of drawers, but she's lovely, and, apparently, actually made of porcelain.  Since she's a caroler, I've decided to name her Noelle.

She's also about 3/4" taller than Solo!  Some of it in her swan-like neck, some of it in her leg length, since their torsos seem about the same.  Though she's just a touch broader in the chest; Solo's suburban Shopper dress doesn't zip quite closed on her.

Anatomy of a Dress: Garden Party

This one arrived as a mess.  Garden Party was the first garment that really needed stain remediation.

There was a huge blotch of... mildew? something?... right on the edge of the lace panel.  I soaked the dress in Retro Clean for a day, which got rid of the worst of it, followed by a spray of OxyClean Max Force and a vigorous hand washing in the sink with dish soap.  The stain isn't 100% gone... but maybe 90%?

It looks much better now, certainly!  (Also, weep for me: my stand has broken, making these pictures trickier because Barbies were not made to balance standing.)

And the back view.  This dress fastens with two snaps, one at the top of the overlap, the other at the waist.

Inside the gown, we see that the entire bodice is lined with a single piece of netting, including the darts, which are clipped open and pressed flat.

The skirt is narrower than the others we've seen, measuring 16.5" at the hem.

The five tiers of lace are sewn onto a backing of white muslin, which is hemmed just slightly wider than 1/8".  There are two lines of stitching down either side of the panel.  The first, presumably, was to catch down the lace edges so they didn't go all cattywampus during the second set of stitches, which attached the lace panel to the dress fabric.  Please note the rest of the skirt was hemmed later, and wider: the hem is 1/2" deep, with the foldover inside about 3/8" deep.  The edges of the lace panel are hidden inside the skirt hem.

The center back skirt seam is 1/2" wide, and the foldover-and-stitch-down hemming goes to just below where the tag is sewn on and the seam opens.  As you can see by the couple loose threads, the center back seam has started coming loose, so I'm going to take a needle and some white thread right now, and mend that.