Chicken

Hickety pickety my fine hen
She lays eggs for gentlemen -
Some pastel, some purple, some cheerful and gay
Some spotty, some silly, our fine hens doth lay!

Ladies and gentlemen,
I am pleased to finally share with you -

Chicken!

A whole coop of Chickens, in fact.

Meet Tilly- our Buff Orpington

Edwina, our not-so-Barred-Rock Plymouth
and Snowball, our Leghorn,
so named by the girls after reading this book.


All fat and comfortable-looking,

with that ain't-no-one-gonna-ruffle-our -feathers look.

The idea came from the girls when we were reading
The Children of Willow Farm last year.

When Emily and Jenna are not being princesses,
fairies or Narnians, they like to play farm. Specifically,
they did a lot of egg-gathering after reading the
Willow Farm book. And I thought, well, they need
some real chickens. Life-size ones, that they
could tuck under their arms and carry about
like pretend-real farmers.
Chickens that look like chickens
and lay eggs
of the plastic dollar-store variety
(we have a ton of those from past Easters)
as well as the more outrageous wooden kind.
The girls and I painted these last fall. Jenna and Kate,
especially, love the feel and sound of the wooden eggs
knocking together in their little hands, but they are,
after all, only decorative (and luridly so!)

Unlike the plain, pastel, plastic kind

that, if sat on long enough,

might just hatch out somethings teeny and peepy.

Ah yes, an altogether happy brood.
This must be what Chicken Playdates look like:

Are you guffawing yet? Oh if you could have seen
me when I finished Tilly last October (yes, the kids
have been playing Chicken Farm for what, five
months now) and popped out egg after egg in my
sewing room all by my giddy self, so relieved was I
to finally get her out of my head. And heard me laugh
out loud because she was by far the funniest,
funniest, funniest thing I'd ever made. The girls
couldn't believe their eyes when they
saw her lay an egg.

Wish I'd gotten their reaction on video.

I love being a mom of little kids!

I am so glad that you finally got to
meet our Chickens (aren't they silly?)!
And just in time for Spring, too, when the
farmyard welcomes its animal babies.

Want your own egg-laying Chicken?

Here's the pattern

containing the templates and instructions to make both Chicken

and her Chick (plastic egg not included).

They were so easy to make that we hatched
enough to run Chicken Daycare while their
moms were out Doing Hen Stuff.

The pattern is an instant pdf download with 8 pages
of instructions and 4 pages of templates.
The Chickens lay eggs when they are squeezed
(they are popped in through an opening in their backs)
and it took Emily and Jenna only a little practice to
begin coaxing eggs out of Tilly, Snowball and Edwina!

Given that Chicken was inspired by a farm book,
and a person can't have a fun farm with only chickens,
there might just be more livestock appearing here soon!

Go here to buy the Chicken Pattern and read the download instructions.

Things I Got To Bring Home (and a Little Bit of Smocking))

Batik

and more batik


ikat (of course)

drawstring cord by the rolls

and lots of bag hardware and notions

that I'm too embarrassed to photograph

like these zippers, which we can buy in bulk,

(and which I sorta did).

But the nicest stuff I got to bring home were gifts

from mum, like her stash of lovely vintage cotton lace

and old, old children's clothing catalogs left to her by grandma

and a part of another old, old catalog of vintage clothes and dolls


that includes fabulous inspiration sections on embroidery,
some of which I remember doing as a child,

and smocking.

Speaking of smocking,

here's my first practice piece on gingham

(the tension needs a lot of work)

and Auntie Laura's gorgeous sampler on dots.

Check out those upside down hearts in the bottom row!

Coming up are photos of mum's free-motion embroidery work,

including The Tablecloth, and a tutorial from Dad!

Sloper in Pictures!

As promised - here is my sloper! Or basic block, as we call it in Singapore. Unremarkable pieces of brown paper, aren't they? The one on the left is the back block. and the one on the right is the front block. There is also a sleeve block that I didn't take a picture of.

So these are the silly brown pieces of paper that Auntie Laura, Mum and I spent several nights poring over, discussing and arguing and penciling and erasing and redrawing. But those of you who are familiar with slopers will know how incredibly valuable they are, because when done right, they produce a fit like this




Notice:

• the fit of the armscye and sleeve, even when the arm is raised.
• the darts reducing the fullness at the places they are supposed to
• the side seam is completely vertical
• the squarely-sitting shoulder slope
• the skimming of the (bulgy) curves so you don't actually see the bulgy curves (which I possess in abundance, especially around the waist, let me assure you).
• the smoothness of the fabric around the curve of the back

Chuckle - check out my unwaist (and that freaky slightly-longer right shoulder)!

I am so glad that I decided to do this in Singapore. Not only because I'd never have made a sloper anywhere as great as this on my bungling own here at home, but because I needed mum and Auntie Laura to take my measurements, and scrutinize the mock-up when it was sewn. A good sloper is not hard to make, but it is a lot easier with another person to help with the measuring and fit, particularly at the back.

It has been hard to describe in my previous blog posts on sloperism, what exactly a sloper is, and why it's so worth raving about and how it's different from a pattern. Perhaps the photos now will help.

The dress I'm wearing in the pictures is just the mock-up/muslin that was made from the sloper i.e. we placed the actual sloper from Photo #1 on some random fabric and cut it out as if it were a dress pattern. You can tell that this mock-up dress, while still extremely comfortable, is very close-fitting. It is also featureless i.e. it is a straight column-type garment with a round high neckline in front and back and basic, snuggish set-in sleeves. A person could conceivably wear such a dress but it is quite boring. However, no other person could wear this dress unless they had exactly the same body dimensions as I do. See?

So, relating all these visual clues back to the sloper, it is a snugly (but not tightly) fitting paper pattern that is made to fit the individual wearer. It has no features. It does have accurately-placed darts, the purpose of which is to reduce the fullness in the right places so that the sloper fits that particular wearer closely. Does that make sense?

This is a full-body sloper, which we made because I wanted The Works. It is more common to do just a skirt sloper or a upper body sloper, which is typically sleeveless. However, a sleeve block drafted to fit the armscye will give an indication of how the shoulder sits (or - ugh - rides up) when the arm moves. Similarly, a full-body sloper will include the weight effect of the skirt portion pulling on the darts and waistline. So we made a full-body sloper to check this overall continuity of the lines and darts. Very technical, I know, but I wouldn't be bothered to sew a garment for myself or any other adult unless I knew the fit was going to be great.

So what do you do with a sloper once you have it? Off-hand, I suggest two main uses:

1. use it to make dress patterns. With the sleeve block, trace the armscye and adapt the rest of the shape to make different sleeves. The armscye, being unchanged from the original sleeve block, will always fit. Take the front and back blocks and put ease wherever you want, keeping the shoulder line, the waist height, the dart points, and the armscye, and make different garments - loose, long, short, fancy collars etc.
2. use it to adapt commercial patterns so they will fit you better. The sloper has no seam allowance so you can place it on a commercial pattern and re-mark the dart points and all the other important bits and seams and redraw the armscye so that it fits you.

Endless possibilities. After a while, you might even lose interest in commercial (read: expensive) patterns and start making your own because it is just that much easier to start from scratch or, in this case, a good basic block. Fun, huh?

I'll stop here because the jet lag is getting to me, but I want to document as much as I can remember on sloperism over the next few months while it is still fresh in my mind. There are so many things a person cannot learn by reading a book, blog tutorial or watching a video. Working with Auntie Laura and mum over those two weeks was like being in dressmaking school (but with sweet starfruit and decadent Tim Tams to snack on during). It was more than just math and technical drawing. OK, I'll share just one last nugget: that side bust dart, for instance, can be placed anywhere as long as one end of it is at the bust apex. This is common knowledge in drafting circles, but I didn't know how to decide when to place it where - when does it open into the armscye, when does it start at the hip, when does it open into the shoulder and when does it lie horizontally under the armpit? And at what angle?

Mum and Auntie Laura stared at me in stunned silence for a while as if I had grown two heads, incredulous that I actually shared their genes and yet knew not this basic truth. Finally they indulged me with (among many other very subjective factors), three guidelines:
(i) for the most flattering effect, place it at the hollowest part of your body. Often this is under the bust.
(ii) depending on the print of the fabric, which you wouldn't want to mess up with a dart in the wrong place that results in a hideous seam.
(iii) depending on the grain of the fabric - something cut on the bias might need different dart placement (for stretch/give) than something cut along the grain.

Yawn!

OK, I'm done now. Gosh, I love drafting. I'm not promising I'll get to this soon but I will share. Before that happens, though, if you're interested in drafting at all,

Go
Shopping
For
A
Good
Bra.

Go! Or you get expelled from drafting school. And no, bringing nutella will not get you back in the teacher's good books either.

P.S. I know I've regularly hurled insults at my own waistline - and I don't mean to sound like I hate it in any way - it's all in the context of drafting. All those extra curves make odd sloper shapes that are that more challenging to draft for. Less curvy = easier pattern fit, is what I was trying (not very well) to say. And in spite of all my whining, I think it's actually more satisfying to draft for a less waifish figure and get those lines to fall and drape nicely. Much more fun!

Sloper!

I have a sloper! Took us several days to draft because we could only do it after the kids were in bed. Got some inexpensive fabric at Spotlight and made a mockup. It took just one fitting and some quarter-inch adjustments to the back darts, the hip seam and my freakish left shoulder and the main block was perfect. The sleeve block took three drafts to perfect. We like taking the extra time to get the whole shoulder/bust dart/armscye/set-in sleeve area fitting properly.

Must share that all three of us (Mum, Auntie Laura and me) were completely thrown off by my weird large post-natal waist measurement. It made the straightest side seam we had ever seen, since it was almost as large as my hip (with the darts drawn in), which in turn made for a very shapeless sloper. We stared in dismay and horror at The Thing we had drawn and took turns to hurl insults at its bizarreness. After rechecking the measurements, we eventually just went with whatever shape the measurements yielded, in spite of how otherwordly it looked on paper. And it turned out to actually fit me perfectly. Which says very little for the aesthetic effects of pregnancy on a person, but a lot for the combined skills of Mum and Auntie Laura.

I can't wait to actually post some photos when we get home to the US! Which is tomorrow! This has to be the best vacation souvenir ever.

So what's the first thing to make with my new sloper? A little black dress with a mandarin collar and frog buttons, a tunic, a couple more skirts and a bias-cut linen shirt are what I'm seeing in my head. Nothing with a gather or a pleat or elastic - just clean, tailored lines and lots of invisible zippers. Hurrah.

A Bit About Size

A commonly-held belief about relative sizes is that things are bigger in America than they are in Asia. I found this to be delightfully true in the aisles of Costco, particularly where one finds jars of Nutella.

In Singapore, we grew up snacking on Nutella out of these mini single-serving packs:

Before you scoff at their insubstantial littleness, consider how these wonderful these little packs are as sanity aids on fabric shopping trips with young children. Sanity aids for me, I mean, not my kids. I don't share my Nutella, not even with family, thank you very much. I'd imagine it would be much more convenient to have these little things in my purse than my entire jar of Nutella, plus a large spoon. Eh?

So yes, some things are smaller in Asia. And yes, incidentally, we also do have jars of Nutella here, even if they aren't in Costco sizes.

Some things, however, can be found a little larger in Asia than in America:

I am guessing that a person could possibly find both sizes of seam rippers in America, but I haven't been looking, honestly. Here in Singapore, both sizes are readily available. I forgot to bring one of those biggies back to the US with me when I moved, so I bought a few this time around, from the local market. Very useful for hacking at old bags to scavenge zippers and other reusable hardware.

Drafting update: mmmmm, I have learnt

1 that the side dart has symmetry. It seems that it is more refined to draft this dart (the one that starts at the apex of the bust and opens into the armhole/side seam) symmetrically and adjust both the shoulder and the waist to accommodate for it, instead of just the waist. Who knew?

2 when a person drafts for (young) children, the waistline should be curved down a little in front (about a half inch) to accommodate for their round little protruding tummies. Otherwise, the waist of the garment sits too high on the child's tummy and looks like a badly cut babydoll. Or, if it is a dress, the bottom hem will be much higher in front than the back.

Apart from all this lovely knowledge, my sloper still looks like it was made for a barrel. Mum looked at it and drew lines in red pencil all over it and said encouragingly, "maybe you need to do some more stomach crunches" but we still cannot figure out what I did wrong. I think it is a case of reading too many tutorials and tips on too many blogs and in too many books and trying to marry too many modern methods. Tomorrow I'm planning to just watch Auntie Laura draft it from the beginning and take notes. Nothing like going back to basics. I'll still keep the monstrosity that I drafted yesterday, and take a photo for you all to snigger at. Should be fun.

Psst.....Remedial Sewing Update

Smocking Lesson #2 tonight, along with Drafting Lesson #1: Taking Measurements.

Very animated conversation among Auntie Laura, Mum and me, during which Grandma (now deceased, and the same one who made the clown and caterpillars - see sidebar under "Tutorials" for links; too lazy to link myself) was declared Queen of Freehand Drafting. I am foolishly hopeful that genetics, albeit diluted two generations down, will give me some sort of innate skill.

I now have a sheet of paper with my measurements recorded on it, and the assignment to draft the basic block/sloper, to be critiqued/corrected/mocked mercilessly by Auntie Laura and Mum.
Yikes. Secretly excited also, though.

Interesting point: apparently I've lived my entire life with unequal shoulders, or an uneven neck, depending on how one looks at it. Mum claims my right shoulder is a quarter inch longer than my left and that she'd always had to draft slightly lopsided patterns for my shirts.

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

This was confirmed by tonight's measurements- it seems I am still a lopsided specimen. Although, (and this is the Type-B part of my otherwise-Type A personality talking) I think a quarter inch is, well, miniscule, isn't it? Still, this is sewing school after all, so I'm going to focus on How To Draft Anomalies and not my actual newly-discovered-old-anatomical-freakiness.

Where We Are

Hello from Singapore!

We've been here 3 days and only today got some consistent internet access. I anticipate that we might not have regular access to the computer so I may not read, let alone reply to, email till we get home in a couple of weeks. I apologize if you've left a blog comment or an email with a question or request - I might have to respond only after the trip is over.

The kids (and jet lag) have been keeping us busy these three days so I haven't been taking photos of all the crafty things of my childhood like I'd planned to, but they are coming! I haven't bought any fabric either but I did invest in two oversize seam rippers from the local market. And raided the supermarkets for cardboard boxes to do crafts with the kids. And the kids got to do their first craft with grandpa today - potato printing with letters of the alphabet carved into the potato halves. Why didn't I think of that? They'll be doing paper marbling sometime soon.

Sewing-wise, I sewed one seam. Not amazing in itself, but let me just say that it was done on my old Pfaff TREADLE. Yes, this one. The one I sewed all my stuff with when I lived here as a youngers person. It was like hanging out with an old friend except without any of the who's-put-on-more-weight-over-the-past-20-years types of conversations. I just said, "well, hello there, Old Thing. Sorry I've been fratenizing with those vulgar modern electrical gizmos. There's only ever been you, you know." And my old sewing machine growled back, "Shut up and start sewing, you old twit. You always were one for wasting time talking."

And just like that, I was 19 years old again, working away with my feet, hypnotized by the ker-thunk-ker-thunk of the big foot pedal, never needing anything more than a forward straight stitch.

Started Smocking Lesson #1 last night - The foundation stitch and Which Thread To Use. Fun.
Auntie Laura came over to hang out with mum and me. Together we post-mortemed all the stuff I'd made (like those clothes I made for the kids and mum's bag) and nitpicked all the bits that weren't perfect, like machine tension, unmeeting seams, piping that wasn't cut on a bias and poor choices of interfacing. We analyzed Don McCunn's book and approach to pattern drafting (which I finished reading on the plane and then wrote an outline for a future blog post on How To Draft A Skirt). Why don't I live closer to mum and Auntie Laura? I learnt more in that 2-hour visit with them than I have for a long, long time from any blog, any book or any personal sewing experience. Look out for another future blog post on 5 Things To Do With A Seam Ripper (apart from ripping seams, I mean)!

But I will say this for Don McCunn's book:

1 The man is clever. And an excellent teacher.

2 His book is worth its weight in gold. You should all go and buy it now. Yes, even those of you who believe you should only spend money on books with color photos. This is not a coffee-table glossy-paged inspirational craft mag, folks. It is a textbook. This means it actually teaches you stuff.

3 Only two pages are on how to alter commercial patterns, hurrah, (and even then he doesn't actually tell you how to!)

4 He teaches you how to make a dress form that has your dimensions (and this is the best part) OUT OF CARDBOARD and MASKING TAPE. How can a person not love this book?

5 He teaches you how to make patterns for different body shapes. No just small, medium, large types, but

• Rounded backs vs flat backs
• Differently-shaped (and uneven) derierres and bustlines
• Rounded vs flat abdomens
• Men vs women

I learnt a whopping lot of new stuff just reading his book this first time around. His pattern-making approach is different (slightly) from the sloper-drafting approach from my childhood in one important aspect: his patterns have a little bit of ease in some parts, that get adjusted (usually reduced) by the first fitting on the wearer. The slopers we drafted in our family have no ease in them. They fit exactly, if a bit constrictively, from the start, if you were actually nuts enough to use our slopers as patterns i.e. baste them to fabric and cut around them. Only when we adapted our slopers to a particular style of garment e.g. an A-line skirt, did we then put in the ease according to the design of that garment. Once I'd figured out that big difference, it was easy to just absorb all his ideas and tips and feel profoundly enriched after.

The husband and I also went on a date today - to buy a USB stick-with-integrated-SIM-card to get us mobile internet (gotta love technology) so we could get internet access finally. Not wine-and-roses romantic, but that's what retired Physics teachers who marry software engineers do when they finally get someone to watch the kids.

No photos in this post because we just finally got internet connection and I don't want to anger the technology deities by trying to offload photos from the camera to the laptop too soon.