Bits and pieces

• Knitting update: I am CRAZY proud of my sweater so far! I had to take a brief hiatus from my Knit Every Day In July plan for reasons of (same old, same old) illness, but happily I managed to get the whole body done and cast off before I downed tools. \o/ I started again yesterday and so far I have picked up the first sleeve but I have yet to start knitting it. I am not anticipating the sleeves taking all that long given how quickly I progressed through the main body of the jumper.

The jumper before I knitted the hem band; close up of the pretty woven stitch hem band; trying on the finished body section

• The summer dress thing: I have such ~~~issues about wearing dresses, it's nuts. I wear skirts a lot more often these days than I was ever comfortable with before but dresses, I don't know, somehow I just can't wrap my mind around wearing them or even making them despite owning, at a conservative estimate, a million dress patterns. This summer, in an effort to get over myself I promised myself I would make and wear a summery dress, but... yeah, not so far. I have traced a pattern out of an old issue of Burda but then, fatally, I paused, unsure if this was really the right dress/fabric combination and promptly stalled out entirely. If I want to get any use at all out of a summer dress I need to make it soon, so, I don't know, a swift kick up the backside is required I guess.

The dress I may or may not be making (from Burda 05-2011) although definitely not ever in orange

• One of these days I will make a coat: I am also inching towards making my first muslin of piece of outerwear, mainly as a result of finding the actual perfect pattern for a coat I want to make, Burda 6772. The only thing I am not sure about is the side panel/Dior dart thing, because I can find only minimal information on where the seam is supposed to fall if it's not a princess seam (beyond "to the side of the bust"). More on this eventually, I am sure.

Burda 6772

•  Bias binding the edges of sleeves/armholes has to be one of my least favourite things to do. This realization is brought to you by three separate (as yet unblogged) garments that required bias binding and how little I enjoyed the process for each of them.

•  I just recently received a plaintive message from a former colleague, enquiring what I thought a suitable outfit would be for the social event at the academic conference I would normally (if I weren't sick, out of work and otherwise exiled from my chosen profession) be attending with her later in the year. The conference is in Texas and the social event is at "the world's largest honky tonk bar", which, no offence to any Texans reading this, sounds like a living nightmare when combined with several hundred academics from my field of study.  At any rate, I e-mailed her back and suggested jeans were the safest option, and we got into a 10 e-mail discussion about the ridiculous double standards for dress for male vs. female academics, her loathing of the conference's stated "anything goes" dress code as it provides no actual useful indication about what she should wear, and the fact that the men in her department (which is to say, fairly typically for our field, everyone in the department that isn't her) compete over how little luggage they are taking, as if the size of their carry-on bag is inversely proportional to the size of their dick. This was all very amusing, but I was also relieved to find that my very erudite former colleague also has similar concerns to me, because I was starting to think I was the only one!