Everything Old is New Again

 

 
I really am trying to use up my stash of materials. These 3 projects sort of go together because they all had a previous life as other things. I showed you the scooter skirt already, but it's worth mentioning that I made it out of the skirt of a half finished dress Mom abandoned back in the late 60's or so.

Why didn't I just finish the dress? Because it was cut along very similar lines to the pink and white one in the picture below. As you can see, it is a terribly dumpy looking fit on me. Mom is nearly 4 inches shorter than I am, and all of it is torso. The waist line any dress made for Mom cuts me right across my 3rd rib from the bottom. So, no point in making up the dress as it was. The material is too stiff and coarse to make a good blouse, but it's just perfect for a short a-line skirt. I'm very happy with it.

Before...

But then there was still the pink and white dress. It's one of a pair, also from Mom, but made by Great Aunt Gatha. When I was little, Aunt Gatha's sewing was held to be an acme of durable clothing construction. And durable it was- although looking at it now what comes to mind is the bit by some comedian, maybe Jeff Foxworthy, where he was talking about his redneck relatives fixing something with duct tape: If one or two layers will fix it, then 40 or 50 layers will fix the hell out of it. These dresses are obsessively, if startlingly coarsely, assembled. The waistband had a piece of material tacked in as a stay, to which the bodice and skirt were affixed by machine, having first been basted in place with what looks like button hole twist. Both parts were previously gatherd by hand with the same coarse thread. All basting and gathering threads had been left in place. Each seam had been closely but unevenly overcast by hand, and the hem of the skirt as well as the facing of the bodice placket had been whip stitched in very small, closely spaced stitches of rather erratic appearance. The under arm seams hadn't even been clipped so as to allow the side seam to flex without puckering the armpit! Altogether, the construction was rather lumpy.

After!

These two dresses were neither in wearable nor collectable condition by the time they came to me. The shoulders were dry rotted, the collars stained, and there were serious mouse bites in various places. But they were made in the 50's, which means that there is a mile of fabric in the skirt. With a little scootching and fudging, there was exactly enough to cut a hawaiian shirt for David out of it. I have a nice vintage shirt pattern that suits the material perfectly.

The third thing is this wing collar shirt I made for myself. It's the second shirt I've made out of this pair of curtains, the first being a Halloween costume I made for Cynthia. It has the distinction of being made not only out of material from goodwill, but made out of something I actually used for its original purpose for some years. Eventually I moved out of places that had windows you could put normal curtains in, and I remembered that I had actually wanted to make clothing out of them in the first place. It took me a very long time to finish this shirt because I lost interest halfway through, for no reason that I can remember, especially as I am very excited about the finished result. I always thought that tuxedo shirts were the fanciest thing imaginable, and I really wanted one.

The thing that inspired me was the idea to merge the bust darts in the front of the shirt with the seam where the pleated section is inserted. The result is a fit that is very feminine and curvy, but clean and uncluttered the way a man's shirt is. Also, I finally managed to get the proportion of sleeve width, body width, size of arm hole and length of shirt tail worked out so that it looks right and feels comfortable. I feel very luxurious wearing it.

As David said about his pink and white shirt: "Yeah, this is a really good shirt. I feel like a badass wearing it."

Hooray!

  

  
...hooray! My summer vacation starts today! Actually, it started last night with a very silly cocktail with dry ice in it.

Mix equal parts cheap white wine with decent quality sparkling apple juice drink. Add a chunk of dry ice (Chemical substance be shape like sugar cube. Prohibit to eat.) because you have some around, and because it's festive and makes these goofy boobling noises while you drink it. Very refreshing. Also makes you schnockered faster than you meant to be, which is fine because you're on vacation, Bitch!



I also made some more pants last week. Yes, more shorts pretending to be a skirt. The pattern envelope called this a 'scooter skirt', and it has a very hip looking group of young caucasian women in pigtails and knee socks on the front cover. In spite of the illustration depicting some inhumanly elongated beings, the pattern itself required essentially no alteration whatsoever to fit me. Wonder of wonders! I sewed it up in an afternoon.

It is the most comfortable thing imaginable, and the fact that it is shorts, not a skirt, just adds practicality to the whole arrangement.




Above all, it is Thursday in the last full weekend in July, in Portland. The taps begin to flow at 11:30!

Prost!

I've been to the Zoo!

  

  
There was a steam train! And naked mole rats! And baby turtles, and polar bears, a rhinoceros, a zebra and some otters and some other stuff!

The steam train was the main object of my field trip today. I went during my vacation week before last, and it was too early in the season for them to be running it. I was quite disappointed, and vowed that I would ride the tiny locomotive at the earliest opportunity. The very nice man at the ticketing booth told me they would start running it this weekend, so in spite of the chilly weather this morning, I got up and went off to the zoo.

At the ticket booth by the train station I asked if the next ride was the regular train or the steam train. I felt a little sheepish. No, it was the regular one, the Zooliner, said the ticket agent. The Oregonian would be another half an hour, he said, would I like to wait? I said yes, I only came to ride the steam train. Well, I think that's great! That one's my favorite too, he said. Nerrrrrddds.

By chance, I had arrived just in time to catch  The Oregonian's first run of the day. The Zooliner, which dates from some time in the early sixties I think, was already running. As they loaded it with passengers, I could see these two guys in stripey engineer's overalls messing around with the steam engine, which was parked on a siding. Once the Zooliner left the station, the engineers backed the steam train up to the platform. Sorry about the jiggly camera angles, there were a bunch of us milling around watching.

I hope the station attendant didn't think I was really annoying. I was the first person in line to board. Maybe the engineer's cap was a bit much? He's probably seen worse. One benefit of riding the first train of the day is that you get to watch the engineers perform a couple of maintenance tasks that aren't done at other times. One of those is sanding out the engine. They drive the train to a section of track with a slight downward slope, then blow a large quantity of (I think) steam out through the smoke stack while backing the train uphill. The steam essentially pressure washes the guts of the engine stack and flushes out all the accumulated soot and grit. They back it up the hill so that all that stuff will fall onto the tracks in front of the train rather than back onto the passengers. When they're done, the train starts rolling forward again. I didn't get a very good shot of it; it's quite dramatic, and I was too busy gawping.

The other thing they do is blow down the boiler. I imagine this serves a similar purpose, but for the tanks of water to make steam which powers the engine. Much of the Washington Park loop of the track is laid in close proximity to the sides of the hills, so they have to drive the train to an area that has a large ravine on the left side so they can safely vent the steam from the boiler.

After that, it's just a very pleasant little ride through the woods and around the bottom of the zoo. The last part of the track before the station is a miniature tunnel. It's probably only about 50 feet long, but there are no lights in there so you can see the reflection of the boiler flames coming off the bottom of the engine, and the smoke billows around the ceiling in this very spooky-cool way. Is a bit stinky though. If you want to get a good view of the engine working, I recommend riding somewhere in the middle of the train. If you ride right behind the engine, you have to stick your head way out of the car to see anything, which is frowned upon, and if you ride at the end of the train, you will be too far back. Sit in the middle, and you will get very nice views of the engine every time the train goes around a curve in the track. Also, the train stops above the rose test garden for a photo op, and you can get a re-boarding stamp if you want to get off and mess around in the park. Next time!
 

Of course, I did wander around the zoo for a while. I missed the naked mole rats last time, and it was a particular object of mine to see them. They are so beautifully horrid looking. Does anybody know if they even have eyeballs? And then there were polar bears, and the hippos, and a tiger, and african wild dogs, plus gazelles and bunches of things I didn't get pictures of. That'll teach me to wander off without a spare set of batteries for my camera.

Still, for me it was all about the little train. On Friday I heard somebody say that they rode the train for zoolights a couple years ago and didn't think it was anything to get all excited about. Dude. Some people are crazy, that's all I'm saying.

More pictures on my photostream!