Two Issey Miyake Skirts

You ask, I answer.

Here is a schematic of my skirt made from Vogue 1256, a vintage Issey Miyake dress.  The original pattern had a drawstring casing at the junction between the bodice and the skirt.  I made a tunnel elastic waistband.

Construction Steps

1. Sew center seams and make pleats.  Baste pleats.
2. Staystitch inset corners, then clip to stitching.
3. Sew rectangular pocket back pieces to both front and back.
4. Stitch pocket sides, drape top and side seams.
5. Attach a tunnel elastic waistband (a tube of fabric the length of the waist opening). Insert elastic.
6. Trim corners, finish edges, hem

Because Marie-Christine asked nicely, I decided to draw a schematic for a second, bonus skirt.  Vogue 1256 didn't have a copyright YYYY notice on the envelope, so I didn't know the exact year of the pattern.  However, the $9 price on the envelope places it in the 1980s.

I think it was near 1984 because of this skirt that I tried on in a boutique on College Avenue in Berkeley in 1984.  It was made of cotton knit and black grosgrain ribbon.  I am not sure about the stripe orientation.  I think it went horizontally, but I thought it would have looked better vertically.  Knit-in stripes usually go horizontally, so that the machines knit with only one color at a time.

I am not sure which way the stretch in the skirt went.  It was 25+ years ago, and I think I should get a bye on that.  I do remember the very soft cream and grey fabric and black grosgrain ribbon.  I recall now that the stripes went horizontally, and the skirt appeared to use the full 60" width of knit fabric.  I  thought it was weird the stripes went in an unflattering direction.  I had no idea about machine knitting back then.

Topologically, it is the same as the skirt I just made.  There is no pocket and the drape portion is proportionately wider, almost 1/3 of the full width of the skirt.  (That's why I put 1/3+ or 1/3- on the drawing.)

Happy sewing and send me a picture or link to your skirts!

When I saw this knit skirt, I had never heard of Issey Miyake.  The window display intrigued me. I went right into the store and tried the skirt on, even though I couldn't afford it. I think the boutique was called Miki, but it may no longer exist. They sold the kind of cool clothes that I couldn't afford back then, and that don't fit my conservative workplace of today. Sigh. Life is so asynchronous.

A year later, SFMOMA devoted the entire top floor to a retrospective of Issey Miyake designs.  I blogged about that in Imagery from the Past.

The worst superbowl commercial

of all time? Or for 2010?

Did you see the Audi Green Police ad? Methinks they just shot themselves in the foot. I am their target market, and there is no way I am going to buy one of those after seeing that deeply insulting commercial.

If they were looking to alienate Boho Greens, they did a great job.

If they are were looking to sell cars, I gotta ask what they were smoking.

The NY Times calls this commercial misguided.  I call it marketing malpractice.

Time Machine

I make stuff. I am proud to be both a producer and a consumer. I don't just use software, I can write my own. I don't just wear clothes, I can make my own.

Exhibit A & B, the time traveling sweater and skirt combination.

I've liked this Adrienne Vittadini cabled shell since the pattern came out in Fall 2000. Have you ever seen cables in garter stitch? It looked so unusual, I knew I had to make it someday.

Theirs is made with Eva, a wool and alpaca blend.  Sleeveless and alpaca?!?  Not in my Los Angeles climate.  I used Art Fibers Liana, a pima cotton and merino wool blend.  A navy wool fine yarn is twisted around plum cotton boucle yarn.  It is soft, springy and loopy.  Sadly, it is also discontinued.

It felt like miles of garter stitch, but it was only slightly less than a kilometer of yarn (on size 1-2 needles).  Instead of the k2tog 10 times, I waited until the cable row. Then I put 10 sts on a cable needle and knitted the front and back stitches at the same time (like a 3 needle BO without the BO).  The ravelry review is here.

I found a real seersucker*  in my stash with threads that matched the two colors in the yarn almost exactly.  I had also wanted to try this1980s vintage Issey Miyake pattern, Vogue 1256.  Before I made the entire dress, I thought I would make just the skirt portion.  That was the part that I wasn't sure would be wearable in real life.

The pattern was given to me by a fellow ASG (American Sewing Guild) Boulder chapter member.  I had helped her grade another IM pattern up, and then she gave me a bunch of patterns in size 10 that she said she'd never use again.  I am a size 12-14, but IM runs large anyway.

Here's the pattern back.  It doesn't really show you how the skirt works. 

Does this picture of the skirt alone help?  Do you want me to post a hand drawing of how the skirt goes together?

In the interest of completeness, here is the AV full pattern page.

Skirt design from the 1980s, sweater design from 2000, outfit completed in 2010.  When you make stuff, you can time travel!

In other news, I am sick again.  The only question in my mind is if I have one infection or two different infections.  Immune deficiency sucks.  But at least I can time travel.

* Do not be fooled by fake seersucker sold at certain big box craft stores masquerading as fabric stores.  Those are cotton/poly blends treated with chemicals to create a bubbly texture.

Real seersucker is made on special looms that vary the tension on the warp threads.  The real stuff is 100% cotton.  In warm climates, real seersucker keeps you cool because the fabric doesn't cling to your skin.

The cotton/poly stuff feels like you are wearing a plastic shower curtain.

@Marie-Christine
I bought the seersucker at SAS fabrics in Hawthorne, CA.  It's on the corner of 135th and Hawthorne Blvd (of Pulp Fiction fame).  They sell leftover ends of fabric from the fashion industry.  The one I used in this skirt looks like Indian cotton.  I have also bought Japanese seersucker there in red/white or gray/white.  It costs about $2.99 to $5.99 a pound or $1-3/yard.  I am on a fabric diet, but I got a bunch of stuff there last week that was too good to pass up.

Well said

“There is a certain stigma that comes with being from Berkeley,” [Scott Fujita] said. “And I’m proud of that stigma.”

Read The Saints Linebacker Who Speaks His Mind.

Education Links

There will be knitting and sewing posts coming soon.  But exhaustion (& a possible infection) and commitments at work and home preclude blogging.  If you follow Space News, today's headlines give a clue.

I would like point out a couple of education links from the NYT.  From Fish to Infinity is the first in a promising series explaining the beauty of math to the uninitiated. Steven Strogatz promises:

Crazy as it sounds, over the next several weeks I’m going to try to do something close to that. I’ll be writing about the elements of mathematics, from pre-school to grad school, for anyone out there who’d like to have a second chance at the subject — but this time from an adult perspective. It’s not intended to be remedial. The goal is to give you a better feeling for what math is all about and why it’s so enthralling to those who get it.
...
A further subtlety is that numbers (and all mathematical ideas, for that matter) have lives of their own. We can’t control them. Even though they exist in our minds, once we decide what we mean by them we have no say in how they behave. They obey certain laws and have certain properties, personalities, and ways of combining with one another, and there’s nothing we can do about it except watch and try to understand.

This column has generated 470 (mostly positive) comments so far. One curmudgeon (#51) took exception to the sentence about numbers having personalities.

Hmmph!  How can he not notice  that some numbers are more gregarious than others? In fact, some numbers (and I won't name any names) are downright unsociable.

The other unintentionally hilarious article is about grade deflation at Princeton.

OMG, less than 40% of grades handed out last year at Princeton were As.  Compare that to the 50% in 2004, when the grade deflation policy was instituted.

Let me put that in perspective.  In Organic Chemistry for sophomore chemistry majors at Berkeley, the grading curve was a strict 15% As, 25% Bs, 45% Cs;  the remainder got Ds & Fs.  One can be above average and still earn a C.

Moreover, my TA, who had been a Harvard undergrad, said that he couldn't believe what was expected of sophomores at Berkeley.  Undergrad O-Chem for Chem majors at Harvard was taught at the level that Berkeley taught the biology majors.  The sophomore O-Chem class for chemistry majors was taught at the level and pace of graduate O-Chem at Harvard.  My second semester TA, a CalTech undergrad, said that our classes were very similar in content and pace to his undergrad classes.

There are also huge differences in curves between departments.  The math department at Berkeley used to cross-list upper division and graduate classes, pitting undergraduate and graduate students against each other on the same curve.  One professor apologized to the undergraduates, saying that he gave all the As and all but 2 Bs to the graduate students.

No wonder another professor, who gave me a C+, offered to write me a letter of rec for grad school.  I questioned if he had me confused with another student.  He replied, "Of course not!  I remember you as one of my stronger students."

(The departmental secretary later told me that typical successful undergraduate students pass that course on their second try.  Only a few pass their first time, as I did.  After the third failed attempt, the department gently suggests those students select another major.)

Coincidentally, I recently read What Does It Take to Get Into Graduate School? A Survey of Atmospheric Science Programs (full pdf).  It had a few interesting tidbits.  The minimum GPA required to be admitted to the graduate programs that participated in the survey varied by major and undergraduate institution.  The lowest acceptable GPA named was 2.7 for math majors.  For non-science majors, the minimum acceptable GPA could be as high as 3.7. 

In the interest of full-disclosure, my undergraduate GPA was 3.14.  No, I didn't plan it that way, but there is a certain humor in a math major earning a GPA = π.

It didn't limit my prospects for grad school.  The Princeton kids should spend less time whining and more time studying.  Graduate admissions committees know what's what.

The difference in mean grades between science and non-science departments within the same school has a dark side.  I want to discuss that, and how I am trying to do something about it.  Another time.

From the Mountains to the Sea

I had hoped to show a completed sweater and skirt today, but no sewing or knitting got done this weekend. Here are some pretty pictures instead.

Yesterday, Iris and I drove to the Los Angeles Zoo for a behind the scenes tour. (I hope to post about that later.) Iris took this picture from the back seat of the car as I concentrated on driving. Aren't the snow-capped peaks behind the downtown skyscrapers pretty?

Today, while Iris was visiting the Heritage Square Museum with a friend, Bad Dad and I enjoyed lunch and a walk on the pier in Manhattan Beach.  Look at the choppy surf.

We saw two tankers and a very large ship I can't identify.  On the left is a tanker that has finished unloading and is departing.  I can't figure out what the boat on the right is doing.  Is that an empty container ship with nowhere to go?

This tanker is docked at the offshore platform for unloading. 

There is an underwater pipe that leads from the platform to the Chevron refinery in El Segundo.  In fact, the town of El Segundo is named that because it is home to Richmond Oil refinery #2.   (#1 is in Richmond, CA near Berkeley.)

You know the saying about steering a supertanker?  (Make small adjustments, far in advance.)  You really understand it when you see the supertankers slide next to the platform very very very slowly.  When they are done and leaving, they go much faster.  They also ride higher in the water when unladen.

Ethnic Cleansing (and Knitting) in Doonesbury

I read today's (24 Jan 2010) Doonesbury this morning in the Sunday comics section. I am only showing the last panel of it because I don't want to get in trouble for copyright infringement.  You can look it up by day at the Doonesbury archive at gocomics.com.  My first thought was, "Is she wearing the ruffles scarf from Scarf Style?" Because that is a really cool scarf and it's in my queue of stuff I would like to knit someday.

My second thought was WTF?  That cannot possibly be a cafeteria at MIT. But all eight panels, showing various figures walking in the background were guilty of the same thing.  I showed it to MIT alum, Bad Dad.  His first thought was, "Cool, MIT is in the comics!"

"That character has been at MIT for years.  Is there anything odd about the picture?" I asked.

"Is this supposed to be present day MIT?"

"Yup, and he's killed off all the Asians at MIT."

I shouldn't have typecast.  I expected better from Garry Trudeau because he appears to be a liberal.  But I guess liberals are just as racist as anybody else.

The Backstory
I lived in many places as a child, but spent more time in the San Francisco Bay Area than anywhere else.  I consider that my hometown.  When I moved from Berkeley to Boulder, I was homesick.  When I heard about a new TV show set in SF called Party of Five, I tuned in to catch a glimpse of home.

It was sickening.  I was physically ill.

It wasn't just incredulity that these financially-struggling orphans could be living in a multi-million dollar mansion in pricey Pacific Heights (with Danielle Steele for a neighbor).  It was a classroom scene with 11-year old Claudia who supposedly attended a public school in SF.  The camera panned across the classroom and all but one student was white.  There was a token black kid in the back row of chairs*.

We were wiped out of the picture.

I told Bad Dad about the disturbing scene and the dearth of Asian characters in movies and TV overall.  He said that, to be fair, a lot of movies are constrained in their casting by their genre.

"How so?  Which genres?" I asked.

"Science fiction and things set in the future."

"Are you saying that, in the future, a virus has wiped out all the Asian people on earth, over half the world's population, and it is never mentioned in the story lines?"

Now that is creepy.

In the original 1966 Star Trek TV series, there was Sulu.  (OK, one character represented all the Asians on Earth, but at least he was there.)  Fast forward to the four Star Trek series from 1987 to 2005 and all the Asians in the universe had died out with the exception of Sulu, who made a brief guest appearance.

Other TV series purportedly set in SF were no better.  Dharma and Greg, Suddenly Susan--all ethnically cleansed.

A friend told me that televisions are not designed to bring entertainment to people's homes.  It's designed to deliver eyeballs to advertisers. 

If TV shows are going to advocate ethnic cleansing, then they will have to do it without my eyeballs.  I haven't watched network television (with the exception of the Simpsons) for the last 15 years.

And now you know the secret to my knitting and sewing productivity and why I have time to read so many books (and blog)!

I grew up in the burbs, but Eric attended public HS within the SF city limits.  Would he care to state the ethnic breakdown of his senior class?

* At around that time, I read in the newspaper that the public school population of SFUSD was about 80% Asian-American.  The rest were mainly Latino and black.  See the current demographics.  Whites (second column) now make up 10% of the district overall and Asians represent about half.  I wonder when we will see that on TV or in the movies?  I won't hold my breath.

Links
See pictures of present day MIT when we attended Bad Dad's college reunion last year.  I need to print a retraction/clarification about what Iris was emulating in the photo.  She was not taking a swig as I had joked; she was emulating a park ranger who had shown her how to tear open a paper packet of gunpowder with her teeth and load a musket (and then fire the musket at redcoats).

The informal food network

Or perhaps I should have called this post, "How to barter backyard fruit."

I have a surfeit of Meyer lemons.  I gave some to a coworker who gave me kumquats last year.  This year, he gave another bag of kumquats to me (as well as periodic pictures of the ripening kumquats in his yard).

There is a retired lady on my block with 4 mature avocado trees.  There is no way she can possibly eat them all so I asked her if I could trade her some Meyer lemons for her avocados.  She said yes, she could use three lemons.  I went home to fetch her three.  Upon my return, she handed me six avocados and told me I could come by later for more.

Then I brought some to Dave's Olde Book Shop near my home because the lady who works there on Sundays (I forgot her name) is a fan of Meyer lemons. 

I also brought some to Neighborhood Grinds to thank the owners for distributing our CSA boxes.  They use the lemons for the lemon water they serve gratis to their customers.  We buy a prepaid card at NG and reload the card about once a month.  That way, Iris can stop by with her friends or her Tae Kwon Do instructor and buy a round of treats.  I stop by at least once a week for a soy latte and Mark goes on weekends for a vacuum flask of their 'single origin' coffee.  Our habits should cost us about $25-30/month.  Imagine my surprise when I discovered that our account was down only ~$10 last month.  The owners have been slipping free brownies to my kid.  (OTOH, I did sew a swirly dress for the 3 yo daughter of one of the owners, which he claims is her favorite dress.)

And why is she buying treats there for herself and her TKD instructor?  Because he drives her from her elementary school over to the community center for class (while Bad Dad and I are at work).  As some of you know, we lost the world's greatest nanny when she transferred to a 4-year university and moved away.  We couldn't find a replacement that suited Iris.  So Bad Dad and I were stuck taking time off from work to get her to TKD class.

When I heard the principal of her school complain about a karate instructor's failure to return the principal's phone calls, I quickly asked him if he was willing to consider TKD instead.  Score!  Her TKD instructor teaches a beginner class at her school (with Iris as the teacher's aide), and then they grab a snack (Iris misses snack time at the afterschool daycare on these days) and head over to the community gym for the intermediate class.  We pick Iris up at the gym on the way home from work.

At first, I didn't know about the missed snack time.  But then Iris let it slip that she went to McD's weekly.  How can that be?  Our family rarely goes to McD's, and then mostly on our road trips.  Not only had her TKD teacher been driving Iris to class, but he'd been buying her snacks at the McD's next to the gym.

I figure, with the money we are saving not paying for after school care and a nanny to schlep Iris around, the least we can do is pay for both of their snacks.  And she loves being a teacher's aide.  She says the little kids in the beginner class are so cute.  Remember when she was one of the little kids?

If you shop at the South Bay Gardens nursery on Manhattan Beach Blvd, under the power lines, they sometimes give you free fruit with a purchase.  The owner gives away Valencia oranges from his orchard in Ventura.  One of the employees gave away Fuyu persimmons in December.  Hmm, it's orange season and I need a few things...

Oh, we got kohlrabi in our CSA box today.  Don't they look like purple UFOs?  If you see me in person, don't forget to ask me to tell you my hilarious UFO story.

Here's the rest of the box.  I posted about it at the CSA blog.

It's not backyard fruit, but I also bring apple-persimmon cake to a coworker who brings me Hashiya persimmons from the Santa Monica farmer's market whenever he sees 'the persimmon lady'. 

Shameless plea for votes

No, not Massachusetts. This is really important.  ;-)

I entered my 4 t-shirt skirt in the Pattern Review Refashion Contest. If you are a member of PatternReview.com, take a look at the contest gallery. If you should be moved to vote for my entry, vielen Dank!

BTW, I know many people are in shock about what happened in MA yesterday. But, I noticed that none of the MSM outlets and talking heads (or at least none that I follow) say that she lost because she was a woman. Remember what they did to Pat Shroeder? There has been some progress.

Winter Strawberries

True winter strawberries (rather than those imported from a warmer clime) are a rare and precious commodity. They look pretty ordinary, but they are the most amazingly sweet strawberries we have ever tasted.

When we took the Tanaka Farms CSA family day tour, Glenn Tanaka told us that the first crop of strawberries in the season are his favorite.  They plant strawberries in October/November.  By the end of December, the first strawberries ripen.  Winter berries are the smallest and sweetest strawberries the plant will ever produce.

They mature more slowly due to the cold weather and shorter days.  There are only a few, not enough for commercial harvest. Glenn says he and the rest of the TF family love to walk the fields then, searching for strawberries under the leaves and eating them right away.

By January, there are a bit more--enough to share with the CSA families.  Last week, we received two pints of these ambrosial berries in our CSA box.  In February-March, when the days get warmer and longer, the plants go into full-scale production.  They can pick the plants every few days because the berries grow and ripen so quickly.  They will also be bigger, but they will never be as sweet and precious as those early season jewels.

Sadly, the heavy rains this week may damage the strawberry plants.  They need just the right amount of rain and this may be too much.  Mildew can set in on strawberry plants if there isn't sufficient sunshine and wind to dry the plants out between waterings.

We hope for more winter strawberries in this week's box, but we are prepared to be disappointed.  The ones from South America or greenhouses sold in the supermarkets are not the same.

If you live in Beach Cities/ES/Torrance and want to order Tanaka Farms CSA boxes, visit the Madison and Lincoln School CSA blog for signup information.