Snowed-in Sewing

Twenty inches is a lot of snow, my friends.  I am at an age where snow is a nuisance, sadly.   My Flexible Flyer days are far, far behind me.

Shirts.  

I want to talk about men's shirts today.  I have two shirt projects in the pipeline.  The dog coats will have to wait till the new year along with every other thing on my old to-do list.  I have to follow my passion.

I don't remember how I stumbled onto the link of the very cool John Ashe Menswear website.  They have a store on the Lower East Side of Manhattan mixing classic men's styles with an urban hipster aesthetic.  They sell some lovely men's shirts and I was particularly drawn to this bib shirt.



David Coffin writes a bit about bib shirts in his book Shirtmaking. Most people associate them with tuxedo shirts or Victorian menswear.





Bib shirts are great for mixing vertical and horizontal stripes and that's what I intend to do with this striped shirting I bought many months ago, around the time I was making those harem pants.  It just sat (not unlike the harem pants, go figure).



I've already started to experiment with it.



Of course I also have this plaid flannel and I want to do something unusual with it too.  We are in flannel shirt season big time.  Brrrrr!



Luckily I have my new walking foot which I have hooked up to my 15-90 treadle, where I expect to do the bulk of my shirtmaking.  My 15-91 needs rewiring, and that's been delayed because the silver clutch release wheel is stuck to the black hand wheel and I need to use kerosene to work them apart.  I have a container of kerosene on the balcony but it's so cold we can't really open the windows and I don't want to asphyxiate from kerosene fumes.  I swear, I'm not looking for excuses: these two wheels have been stuck since I bought the machine many months ago and I just ignored it since I wasn't using it to wind bobbins so I didn't need to release the wheel.



Friends, I fear I may be at high risk for becoming a hipster.  I may even have to move to Brooklyn -- the "fringier" the neighborhood the better -- and take up some kind of craft I can sell on Etsy.  It's a slippery slope from that to tattoos.  If you see it happening, please comment Hipster Alert! and bring me to my senses.  I really don't want to grow a beard.

Anyway, that's what's going on today beneath the snow drifts.  I'm having lunch with my brother and  SIL around noon and then...and then....

Patient readers, if I said that after lunch I was going out to check out a vintage sewing machine, would you think I was crazy?  It sounds a little out there even to me but my policy has always been full disclosure and I'm not going to start lying to you now.   Regardless, expect more info tomorrow.

In closing, have you ever made a men's shirt?  Do you have any interest in it whatsoever?  If not, I won't dwell.  Otherwise I can break it down and maybe make a movie or something; let me know.

Remember: the squeaky wheel gets the grease so squeak a bit if you're up to it.

Are you recovered from the holiday yet?  Brace yourself: we have another one coming.

Have a great day, everybody!