I enjoyed my weekend. I hope you enjoyed yours as well.
Here we are on Monday morning, ready to get back to the salt mines.
Daylight Savings Time is always a little disorienting for me, and I don’t believe that it produces much of an energy savings, so I don’t even have that pitching in for a good cause feeling for it.
So I can’t say that I am exactly bright-eyed and bushy-tailed and rarin’ to go this morning, but I do feel that I accomplished a good deal this weekend, including a good quanitity of lolling around.
One thing that I did not accomplish was finishing my jacket.
This was the jacket before I put in the lining. It fit well, felt good, and basically I loved it.
I got the lining together and put it in. I didn’t line the sleeves, but instead finished the armscye with seam tape — I love that stuff. It looked neat and finished.
I did the top stitching with great trepidation, but it turned out well, too.
And then I tried the jacket on again.
The seam tape finishing meant there was no give at the arms — fine unless for some reason you want to move your arms. Some tiny fractional difference between the lining and the body of the jacket — unnoticeable when the jacket is flat — meant that one side front of the jacket ended up wavy.
The firmness of the lining meant that the princess seams now give me the old Brunhilda effect.
So I do not have a Finished Object here.
I am not sure how to fix it. I hope I will not have to take the lining out entirely. The jacket fabric has a loose enough weave that I will have to undo the stitching very carefully in order to prevent raveling at the edges.
Good thing it’s my muslin, I guess.
Here, too, is the back of Bijoux, not finished either.
The choir was very small yesterday. Everyone who was missing had a good reason for being missing. However, there were just two sopranos, and not the two most confident ones, either. They got off pitch early in the anthem and didn’t get back.
There were just two of us altos as well. In such a situation, you wonder whether it is better to back off a bit in case they need to hear each other better to catch their error, or to sing out more loudly in order to drown them out till they figure out their place. The director gave no hints, but just kept marking the time. I just sang it as written. Maybe the congregation thought it was a piece with edgy modern harmonies.
The Oldest Member was there. He has gotten it into his head that my name is “Peggy.” It isn’t. Wrong starting letter, wrong number of syllables, wrong era, not really a whole lot in common with my name, actually.
But he has been calling me “Peggy” for a long time now. At what point can you correct an error like that? At what point has it gone on too long?
The errors in my jacket are easier to fix than either of the choir-related errors. I must remember that, and be brave about correcting them.
Returning to add: Chanthaboune and I thought perhaps I could open and resew the seam of the lining, rather than taking out the topstitching. Thus, the changes would take place in a less public spot and I may be able to get away with it. What do you Real Seamstresses think? Are we barmy?
When I was young, the Choir Debacle I dreaded most was the annual duet version of “Whispering Hope,” where I was supposed to be singing the harmony, but the person they gave me to sing the melody would keep switching without warning to the harmony and I’d have to switch instantaneously to the melody, and we’d go on trading back and forth like that for verse after verse. Horrible. This was usually part of the Easter sunrise service, which meant that there was no accompaniment — this was before the days of portable keyboards and roll-up keyboards, and long before guitars for a church service were considered respectable. Horrible.
As for being called “Peggy” by the Oldest Member …. it won’t do you any harm to be called Peggy. If he were calling you “slut” or “vicious female” or some such thing, a correction might be indicated. But Peggy? That’s harmless.
Good luck with the jacket, which I thought was beautiful without the lining; I hope you can fix it without too much hassle.
The jacket is lovely. Even for a “muslin” version. I hope it will be easily fixable.
Well, I’ll call you Peggy too then.
My Granny used to call all the women Lizzy and all the men John. If we tried to correct her, she’d give us a mischievious grin and continue saying whatever she wished.
ryc- I’ve seen the other Sir Cumference books on the library catalog (computer). They are on my “list.” I’m checking them out one by one over the next month or two.