bike jersey - first try

 

 

That floral pattern, as The Excellent Wife (TEW) points out. is pretty awful for a bike jersey. But this is just a muslin, a test.

But the pattern mostly works, and it mostly fits. What worked:

• Adjusting the basic pattern to my own measurements worked a treat. I'm not as thin as the average bike racer of my chest measurement, and making the waist adjustment worked. (This pattern is supposed to be skin-tight, and works up thinner than your body size. Such things can be adjusted.)
• I've used an open collar, but I didn't put in the zipper. It will definitely work without a zipper, and when I make up a real one for myself, I'll make it with a t-shirt collar. TEW has already said that if I make one for her, she'll want a zipper, and I figure if anybody else wants one, they will want a zipper as well. 

What didn't work:

• The pattern calls for the rear pocket to be split in two. I split in three, and the pockets are too narrow. The side panels are wider than most, and don't leave enough room for a three-section pocket. (Sewing the back panel to the side panel at the pocket opening also needs special attention.)
  
• They're serious about the amount of stretch needed. The floral is stretchy in all directions, but the white is mostly stretchy only one way, not the other. Putting in the sleeves was tough on the white side.
• The sleeves want to be just that little bit narrower at the cuff. That's an easy adjustment to make. It would be harder if the sleeves were tight at the shoulder: probably possible, but not at my current level of expertise.

OK. Time to go choose some fabric (and if you'd told me even last summer that I'd be bookmarking a site called Spandex World...)

more sewing

 On a Zoom call with Laura OLPH and a number of the Hill Slugs last night, I told 'em I was wearing the worst t-shirt ever. Herewith:

It's the first shirt I've sewn up. I learned a lot on it: sleeves are hard, but less so for knits than woven fabrics; collar circumference should be shorter than neck-hole circumference (the fabrics are stretchy; they'll work it out); the division of effort and attention for a successful sewing project is 40% choosing the right pattern, 50% measuring accurately, 40% cutting accurately, and only about 30% sewing machine skills (that's my story, and I'm sticking to it).

As bad as that shirt is, it went well enough that I'm putting together a dummy for my bike jersey project:

The cheapest of cheap fabric is muslin, and for woven clothes, it became so common for tailors to make their dummy, how-does-it-fit practice garments out of it that the practice garments themselves are called muslins, even when muslin isn't used. My jersey is a knit, so it can't be made of muslin, but that flowery stuff is the cheapest stretch knit I could find. The white stuff is left over from the tee.

The pattern I'm using has a center front and back body, side pieces, a collar, and sleeves. It's plain from the pattern that the designer thought that the bodice and sleeves should be one fabric and the side pieces another, but what do they know? I'm making it with the body and one side and sleeve the main color, and the other side and sleeve the other color. I may also widen the collar a bit so I don't have to use a zipper; I never open 'em, even on the hottest days... sometimes comfort has to yield to fashion and vanity.

Earlier, I'd made this overconstructed apron:

At top, you can see it on a hanger. The straps cross in the back, so it doesn't need ties, and the pockets at the sides are big enough to hide illegal aliens from the Trump administration. It's all French seams and heavy work; all those panels in the second pic go into it. At bottom are the straps, all sewn up.

It's boxy. The Excellent Wife (TEW) doesn't like the way it hangs on her, but when I get some more heavy, canvas-ish stuff, ommina make one for myself as a shop apron. I may add some.smaller pockets in front.

I laid in a supply of non-woven interfacing (a fabric used between layers to add body to a garment; there's some in hat bills, for example) which has a couple of other advantages: it's more substantial than tracing paper but still transparent enough for tracing patterns, and it makes an effective middle layer for a face mask. I made up this one that promised to keep my glasses from fogging.

It's not effective, and it hurt my ears. This one below is both more comfortable and less vision-obscuring:

With two layers of tight weave and one of non-woven facing, it should be pretty effective.

So that's what I've been doing under lockdown.

gotta do sleeves

 In an earlier post, I made reference to my poor fabric-cutting ability. I'm still not great with scissors, but it turns out there's this rotary-cutter thing:

You use it with a special mat, and you can just draw the outline and cut with it (and that exposed roller is sharp enough that you can end up with blood on the walls if you're not careful; I popped for the slightly-more-expensive one with the self-retracting feature, but changing blades will take some grace). There's a certain amount of disdain for them in the sewist community*, and I'd be among the disdainful if I had better scissor skills, but I don't. And this thing makes for easy, accurate work of cutting patterns.

(*Yes, there's a sewist community, complete with snobbery and hierarchy. There is ALWAYS another rabbit hole...)

So I cut out a t-shirt pattern, and started sewing it up, and discovered:

• Slippery knit fabrics really are as difficult as reputed, and 
• I suck with sleeves.

 The next thing, to do, of course, is cut out a bajillion sleeves (even with this rotary cutter, there are enhancements to my technique I'd like to introduce) and do the steps involved: easing, gathering, fitting, and all that jazz. Like this video. And this one.

I've got yards of junk fabric and no plans to ride this weekend (too cold). I won't be a master, but I hope to be better at this by Monday. I figure it's the seamster* equivalent of "wax on, wax off".

(*Because of rampant sexism, "seamstress" is a word in disrepute, as "actress". I mourn the loss of them. But no such association is attached to "seamster"; indeed, I wasn't even sure the word existed, although dictionary searches indicate it does. It's archaic and obscure enough to be appealing to me. "Plain Jim, Seamster". I oughta have labels made.)

In other news; I've altered a few of my button-down shirts (after doing about a dozen polos and another dozen turtlenecks) and have a tentative plan to do some for someone else.

free hand? balderdash!

 After the trolls at Reddit have completely taken over the value of Gamestop stock...

... don't ever talk to me again about the magic of the free hand of the Market.

Edit Feb 1, 2021: On reflection, I realize I was wrong. The Reddit trolls ARE the free hand of the market. The market includes those who have money, but no traditional knowledge of the market. I'm especially gleeful every time I read of another fatcat who bemoans these folks because they're upsetting the market. Nope. It's just that it's a different market now. Deal with it.

another mask project and other sewing stuff

 

With the new, more contagious variants of the virus about, I figured I might need a better mask, and I found a pattern for one that reduces fog on the glasses. It's easy to add another layer to this one, and I've got a length of non-woven fabric that can be used either as tracing paper for patterns or as a stiffening layer, so this mask has layers of cotton on the outside and a layer of the non-woven between. I didn't get the shape exactly right, but it hugs closely to my face, and the not-glasses-fogging feature is reasonably effective.

I've also made up an over-constructed apron with pockets for The Excellent Wife (TEW). Pictures of it are useless if she's not wearing it, because it depends on being wrapped around a body to hang right. It's all straight cuts, so it goes together easily, unless you make every mistake you can in the assembly (ahem). I'm sure a second try will go more easily. She's on the phone as I write this, but I'll probably post a picture after she's available.

I've got a pattern for a t-shirt that's probably next, and I've got the patterns for bike jerseys... but those are a bit more complicated; I'll want to make 'em up in cheap fabric before I try 'em in fancy four-way stretch.

I need to work on altering my button-down shirts. T-shirrs and polos are easy, but button-down shirts require darts in the back. If I get good at this, maybe I'll start tailoring.

what she really said

She said,

You know, to just be grossly generalistic, you could put half of Trump’s supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables. Right? The racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamaphobic — you name it. And unfortunately there are people like that. And he has lifted them up. He has given voice to their websites that used to only have 11,000 people — now how 11 million. He tweets and retweets their offensive hateful mean-spirited rhetoric. Now, some of those folks — they are irredeemable, but thankfully they are not America.

 Can we revisit that whole "basket of deplorables" thing?

And while it's not true that all Trump supporters are like that, the burden of proof is now on them to prove they are not.

apothanein thelo

 The Sibyl at Cumae was the priestess of the oracle there. She lived about a thousand years, but aged miserably during that time; she had gotten long life as a gift from a god (sources differ), but when she refused the advances of Apollo, she was allowed to age, as she had not asked for eternal youth.

In Petronius's Satyricon, Trimalchus finds her shriveled to a tiny lump and kept alive in a jar. He asks her, "Sibyl, what do you want?" (in Greek, Σίβυλλα τί θέλεις; pronounced more or less "Sibylla, ti theleis"). She replies, "I want to die" (in Greek, ἀποθανεῖν θέλω, pronounced "apothanein thelo").

I learned this, as you did, not from reading the Satyricon, but from beating T S Eliot's The Waste Land to death in my English Lit class. 

I know someone who, if she knew the story, would empathize. But I doubt she ever knew the story, and the ravages of time will have taken it from her even if she ever did.

and we finish into the wind

 

Eric, Dave, and Ricky outside Carrier Clinic at East Mountain Ave & 601, cheering because I've finally caught up with 'em.

As we made the last turn onto Claremont, Laura OLPH said, "And we finish into the wind."

It was just that much of a meteorological insult, because for about two-thirds of this ride, we were fighting either a vicious headwind or a substantial lateral wind.

When I scheduled the ride and picked the route, I looked at temperature and likelihood of precipitation. I didn't think to look at the wind predictions, and didn't until, on a Zoom call with Laura's Hill Slugs, somebody brought it up. I might better have done the route I chose last week... but I don't like to repeat routes that close together.

(Two riders who had signed up initially, later cancelled. I wonder if they had more sense than we...)

At the start:

The route was over most of my usual roads, with a stop at Thomas Sweet. But several of the regular porta-potties are gone: on Amsterdam at the Country Classic field and the Amsterdam School, and at the HIllsborough Municipal Building.

The real challenge on today's ride, though, was the wind. We really didn't get a break until we turned onto Orchard Road, where we finally got a tailwind for a while. We stopped at the Thomas Sweet, and at the Montgomery Arboretum (the porta-potty is still there), and coasted most of the way back to the Claremont School...

...until we turned onto Claremont for the last quarter-mile or so.

---

In other news: I'd been complaining about a repeating squeak, that I thought I'd fixed. It's much better... but it's not all gone. Laura thinks it's temperature-dependent; that the cold opens up something, due to differing coefficients of expansion, that's just not an issue with more moderate temperatures. She's probably right.

But I'm going to have a look at lubing the pedals anyway.

surgical cap

 Remember those do-rags I made, for which there was some technical sewing required?

Well, they don't usually cover the ears. The Excellent Wife (TEW) has a few that cover her ears, and she prefers them... but those rags were big, and her head is small (it's a bit of an anomaly to me how she crams so much good sense into her head; for example, she is, as I have told her regularly in the decades of our marriage, a wizard of domestic finance... but I digress*). I tried adjusting the pattern so that they cover her ears (adjusting patterns is A Thing, but there are rules about doing it, and I didn't exactly break the rules as much as ignore the discipline entirely, like trying to do particle physics with the rules of grammar).

The pattern adjustment worked about as well as you expect it might.

(*but I digress. Now THAT was unpredictable.)

In my internet ramblings, I came across patterns for surgical and scrub hats:

When the coronavirus first hit, there was a call for these from healthcare providers, and volunteers shared the patterns free; I found half-a-dozen patterns in the first page of results (including one that was usable, but hand-drawn and not symmetric). The one in the picture above, linked here, is the one I wound up using.

It's just two pieces; no technical bits; and you can make three or four mistakes on the first one and still have a usable item (ahem!). I had enough fabric for two; TEW has one, and the other is up by The Excellent Mother-In-Law (she chose it over a do-rag I made for her; there's probably something about the outlaw-ness of the do-rags that strikes her as unseemly. Or something).

OK. I think it's time to try a more demanding project. I've got a pattern for a cross-back apron in the works, and a tee-shirt behind that (knitted fabrics are reputed to be difficult). TEW has hinted that some of our pillowcases are a bit tired. And the patterns for the bike jerseys (one for matched X chromosomes, and one for XY) are in the mail.

i think i found the squeak

 The Yellow Maserati, my titanium bike (which is neither yellow, not a Maserati), has had this persistent and annoying squeak. In an earlier post, I pointed out that I had lubed, adjusted, and swapped out parts... but in the following ride, the noise was still bad enough that I got a number of rude comments, one, for example, about riding among a flock of songbirds.

The squeak occurred in time with the pedal stroke. I decided the problem might be the saddle, and I think I found it. That Selle Anatomica I ride has an adjustment bolt in a specialty fitting... and the fitting has developed serious wear (you can see it on top in the photo above). For reasons we need not go into here, I have another one, which you can see lower in that photo, with no such wear. I've swapped them out, and we'll see if the squeak disappears.

If it does, when this one develops the squeak, I'll have an excuse to try that Brooks Cambium C17 Carved on which I've had my eye.

kitty crack dealer

 If you read the bottom of the last blog post, you'll remember that Laura OLPH had given me some catnip for me to sew up into kitty toys.

Today, I got a chance to do it.

Putting that catnip into the little packets was weird; I'm in addiction recovery, and spooning out small quantities of dried-up plan matter was reminiscent of something I haven't done in nearly forty years. (I didn't have as bad a tremor then, either; I didn't spill anywhere near as much.)

Sewing such small items took focus. It's undoubtedly because of my inexperience, but I find the machine doesn't like to start right on the edge of a cut of fabric; I have to start a few millimeters into it (although the machine will run off the back end nicely). I sewed up three sides of the rectangles while the fabric was inside-out ("wrong side showing", as they say who actually know what they're doing), but to sew up the last side, after turning the little packets right-side-out, to close up the last side, I had to start in the middle of the side and sew off the end, then turn the packet around and start in the middle and sew off the other end.

One winds up with a lot of extra threads to cut off. 

 

That's what my lap looked like.

Anyway; they're done. I've got about a dozen small bags of catnip for Laura. Maybe this will be my retirement business.

a good route for iffy weather

 For most of my ride start pictures, I was too far away.

I listed this ride late in the week, thinking that with the weather prediction as cold and windy as it was expected to be, I'd have few takers. But the ride was full by mid-day yesterday; in fact, I had one rider waiting in case there were any cancellations.

There weren't. All nine of the other registrants came.

The theory for this ride came after a discussion with Dave H about doing rides in winter during the pandemic when we might not be able to go inside anywhere inside for a stop. His thought was that we could stop somewhere briefly for toilet breaks and eating whatever bars we'd brought, and then go on. We agreed the ride might need to be shorter.

So I came up with a route from Claremont School, going down to Kingston and then up to Somerset, with a stop at the Montgomery arboretum.

It worked fairly well. I'd made the plan on the ride listing and described it at the start. Laura OLPH and Peter G each separately pointed out other benefits: that we were never far from the start if the weather turned, and that we didn't have to ride long into a headwind (in addition to the cold, it was windy, as predicted). I'd like to take credit for planning both those things, but honesty and humility demand I point out both were just dumb luck; I'm not that smart.

Shorty before the end, one of our number went off the road. He complained of no injuries, but his chain got caught inextricably between the cassette and the spokes. (It's a simple job to fix with a socket wrench, a cassette gig, and a chain whip... but these are shop tools; who rides with them? Neil C, do you keep those in your Tardis bag?). The easiest solution was for a rider to head back to the lot, and drive out to pick up stranded rider and bike. I waited at the end for them, and when they showed up, the rider was still complaining of no injuries (well, sort of; there was a certain amount of good-natured pulling of Plain Jim's leg). He should have the wheel tuned when the chain is cleared out of it, too.

The few regular readers who don't only read these posts when I announce 'em on Facebook will know that I recently got a sewing machine (you can click on that link for some sewing machine posts). Laura decided that an apt use of my new talents will be to sew up some catnip toys for her cats, and she delivered my some loose catnip.

There's the catnip, and a few fabric cuts that are too small to do anything else with. I'm not up to tailoring or alterations yet, but I'm fairly sure I can contribute to the delinquency of a few representatives of felis catus.

the enemy in the capitol

 See the article here about why this particular photo is so telling.

It took 160 years for the traitors to get this flag into the capitol. To me, this will always be the flag of treason and insurrection, of anti-America.

more sewing

 

More news on the sewing machine front: the machine comes with a dustcover, but sewing sites all over the internet suggest that one of the first projects for us noobs is a new cover, probably because it means sewing in straight lines. I decided to make one with pieces from all the remnants I was cutting up for my first projects. Above, you can see three of the five panels that make it up.

That gold piece in the left foreground, on the short side, was a penance: it's a fabric called taffeta, which is a bargain-basement satin replacement. It's thin, slippery, and fussy to work with. You probably have some in the linings of your coats and blazers. The other guys were all plain cotton weave, and much better-behaved.

I put some bias tape around the hold for the handle, and as a finish at the bottom because I hadn't left enough seam allowance at the bottom to finish it properly, but it looks pretty good anyway.

The other side:

The machine comes with a foot pedal controller, and there wasn't any good place to keep it, so an earlier project was to make a bag for the pedal. The key was to make the bag handles of a length that the bag would hang from the sewing machine handle, so I could pick up and carry the whole business. 

The blue of the pedal bag and the panel that faces it aren't the same, but they're close. I didn't plan it that way. The weight of the pedal bag keeps the handle upright; otherwise, the sewing machine handle falls into a channel molded into the machine body for it.

I've made a number of face masks, but my new project is these do-rags:

There's a surprising amount of fussy sewing that goes into them, including two darts, and complicated curves where each side piece meets the top. Those last are curves that are cut so they don't match, and their layout is similar to the way a sleeve fits into a shirt shoulder. The do-rags take little fabric to make, so I expect to have a number of 'em. I've adjusted the pattern: The Excellent Wife (TEW) has a head that's much smaller than mine (mine, after all, needs room for all the bad ideas), and I can make the items to fit. 

I've been fooling around with knit fabric preparatory to working on bike jerseys, and knit fabric poses its own difficulties (like, it stretches ALL THE TIME: when you measure it, when you mark it, when you cut it, when you sew it up...). And I also need to learn to cut fabric so it doesn't look like I used my teeth.

But I DID repair a pair of TEW's jeans yesterday, and I've altered a couple of my t-shirts to be a bit more form-fitting...

Maybe a bow-tie pattern?

in with the new

 

Above, Tom H lays down the law on Alexander Road.

Although none of the stuff that made 2021 awful has passed yet (we are yet afflicted by both the coronavirus and our orange president), I'm certainly ready to move past all that, and so when Tom invited a few of us on a pickup ride out of Cranbury today, I was ready to make believe that all my troubles were over, and good times had come again.

Although the Cranbury lot was lookin' pretty dismal, even with two other rides going out of there.

Nonetheless, we braved the raw cold (and raw it was when we started!). Smarter heads than mine had figured that the wind would be substantial so Tom plotted a route that led us into the wind on the way to the Thomas Sweet in Montgomery, on the theory (mostly proven correct) that we'd have a tailwind on the way back.

Tom took us across Route 1 on Alexander Road, partly to check out the bridge that's been open a few months and partly because it's one of the reduced-risk Route 1 crossings. Shortly before we turned onto Alexander Road, we came upon FreeWheeler Dr Len, out for a solo. He's got the same uncommon bike jacket as Bob N. From the picture below, I decided to call 'em Team Pea Soup.

Dr Len left us shortly before the rest of us stopped at Thomas Sweet.

On the way back, we took a number of the roads I take on the rides I lead; it was pleasant not to be so lost as I usually am. As we went through the path at Magill, Pete had a flat. He tossed the empty tube at Ricky G, and got a ringer on Ricky's bike with it. It was memorable.

Also memorable was the water level at the Griggstown Causeway. The Causeway was locked, but we got across... but while Moses and his followers may have crossed dryshod, we were definitely wet-shod by the time we got to Canal Road.

I had the worst squeak on this ride: perhaps it was the chain, or the bottom bracket, or the jockey wheels... but a few miles before the end, the squeak stopped. Now, maybe it was because whatever dirt had gotten into the workings had worked itself out... but maybe it was because whatever part was offending had finally completely disintegrated, and I'm a few miles from having the drivetrain completely dissolve from right underneath me.

Well, the chain is off for a new paraffin lube, the jockey wheels have been greased, and a new bottom bracket is on order. One of those things oughta fix it.

See our ride page here.

One more thing: The Excellent Wife (TEW) got me the Planet Bike USB Grateful Red light to hang from my seatbag for Christmas; it is Just.The.Thing. Here it is keeping the seatstay light company.

I hate having to worry about batteries, and a USB-chargeable light that clips to my seatbag, so I can swap it from bike to bike, is a great idea.