the bow-ie shirt

the first installment in my sewing with a semi half assed plan is finished! accordingly, it did not go according to plan.

the perp: mccalls, 8348.  you see, the bow tie, she was too big.  or rather, too weighty.  that keyhole neck opening did not exist until well into sewing.  when this shirt had a collar and two-inch wide ties, the neck looked like it was trying to do me bodily harm.  so i snipped out a keyhole opening and enclosed the raw edges with self made bias tape.  et voila! 

(yes, it still drags.  but it's no longer choking me.)  

the cuffs weren't much more pleasing.  they were also trying to kill me.  and doing a piss poor job of it, as strangulation around the mid arm is a hairbrained way to do anyone in.  judge and jury, i sentenced the ill willed cuffs to death and hacked them off.  guillotine.  old school in kalkatroona, baby.  after evening up the slice, i blind stitched a nice wide one inch hem at cuff, and told the sleeve it was better off without that bad influence.

oh, why yes, that is a horse of a different color.  while i was playing around with photoshop to coax the silk shirt into the right shade of IRL purple, i found i wished it were another hue altogether.  i can't have my way in my closet, but i can haz it here...

wouldn't it be so great in this colorway?!  i love how the blue plays with those ikat shapes.  are they ikat?  eyes? navajo thingies?  

the sleeve cap had about 5 inches of ease, which i mostly took out.  in hindsight i was probably overzealous.  the shirt wins that decision, it lawyered up.  

OH I WISH IT WAS WHITE.  it's so clean and chic and it matches the glass beads i chose for fun!  and, you know, no one ever finds a white shirt guilty.

but no, it is purple.  for you peeps who just look at pictures, let me reiterate, it is indeed purple, i did not make four colorways of a botched vintage bow tie shirt.  and although i still like it, i'm gonna have to let it do a little time in solitary confinement.  i blame it on photoshop, but the shirt is taking the fall.

too many things

i have about three hundred things to blog about and no clear way to begin.  there are three reasons.

1. i like to type in lowercase.
2. i have too many gadgets.
3. i have watched more news in the past two weeks than i have in the past twenty years.

i'm not a bad news kind of girl.  in that i don't watch the news.  because it is All.  Bad.  years ago, ruggy and i sat curled up on a thin mattress in a brooklyn basement, in our first apartment, my mind filled with every horrible thing my parents said could happen in new york, watching the eleven o'clock news.  i do believe, in the grand scheme of news hours, this is probably the worst sixty minutes of news to watch.  STAY UP!  the eleven o'clock airing commands. YOU WILL NOT BELIEVE THE HORRORS GOING ON!  SLEEP AND YOU WILL CERTAINLY BECOME SAID NEWS!  as a video shot inside a deli played, a newscaster muttered oh by the by this is graphic as the tape rolled through the killing of a man.  all o'clock news officially done for oona.  while some might say i've got my head stuck in the sand, i say i've got it up where the air is actually breathable.

that said, i had no idea hurricane sandy was headed our way.  indeed, ruggy stays on top of things and informs me on a need-to-know basis (ruggy! what did that senator say?!), but when we left town that friday to hang with friends in vermont, miss sandy was not the monster she was to become.  as the bars on our phones began to creep back sunday afternoon, we found we had a couple hours to get back into the city before they shut 'er down.  caught the last train in, stocked the fridge with what little was left on the market shelves, and lamented the paltry amount of bottles in our liquor cabinet.

and... watched the news.  kept it on just about non stop.  we were horrified at so very many things, most of them not having anything to do with the storm: the makeup on the anchorwomen. the sportscasters stationed on docks.  the absolute flood of graphics and musical swells designed to make your eyes widen and your heart race. the incredibly stupid banter (here you see a helicopter keeping an eye on the situation!).  it was like my first sip of coca cola afters years of quitting the stuff:  EGADS! THE TOXICITY!  SURELY THIS IS KILLING ME!  KILLING ME RIGHT THIS VERY MINUTE!

but we were unable to turn it off.  very serious news actually did happen, still is-- it is supremely disconcerting to be in the middle of manhattan, business as usual, while the surrounding areas are Apocalypse Now.  and then of course the news had to stay on for election day.  my alarm clock was set for 5am, but i couldn't tear myself away from the boob till we had some good news.  finally i had to get some sleep and settle for -ish, and this morning a very groggy kalkatroonaan read the news on a tiny phone while sitting on the porcelain throne.

i will always remember where i was when i found out president barack obama was re-elected.

with two crises averted, i believe our vast music collection shall resume its rightful place as ruler of the sound system.  once ruggy figures out what happened to our itunes, that is.  it crashed.  in protest, i think, against the never ending blathering coming from the talky side of TV.

if it keeps up this mutiny for very long, i fear nor'easter She-Ra will set up shop on our screen.  

a-ok

who ever said NYC is unkind to bikers.

just popping in to quickly say we're fine here, thank you for the shout outs!  it's been bumpy but certainly we're VERY lucky in kalkatroona.  the news from Sandy is astounding, and i hope you and yours are well.

now i'm off to do some subway investigating.  sewing coming soon!