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more updates coming soon

on buttonholes

There’s a saying in knitting that you don’t knit a man a jumper till he marries you – because men’s jumpers take so much work and tend to be very plain (and therefore tedious) knitting, you want to be sure he’s not going to leave you and waste all that effort.

As I don’t intend to be married any time soon, Mr Machen will have no jumpers from my hands. I did make him a shirt for his birthday though, and here he is wearing it.

(apologies for the bad photo, he was only prepared to pose for one)

Erm, that’s his birthday as in the birthday he has in July. I didn’t quite get the shirt finished in July, so the one he got on his birthday had no buttons or button holes, but I did promise to provide same within a month.

And then disaster struck. My sewing machine had a tantrum over button holes. It. Would. Not. Sew. Nettie came to the rescue with a tip-off: a tailoring service that would sew buttonholes (TT Fashions upstairs at Bailey’s Corner, for those locals reading).

So after a few months of the shirt sitting in a bag in the hallway (‘Are you taking that shirt to the tailor this week?’. ‘Oh yes, this week for sure, I just didn’t get round to it last week,and the week before that, and the week before that’.) off it went to the tailor.

Now, this is the sad part. The lovely Mr Tran at TT Fashions gave me a discount on the button holes – usually he charges $4, he did them for $3 each. But a shirt has 13 buttonholes, so they cost me $39 in total. Mr Machen pointed out, that’s the price of a cheap shirt or half a nice one.

To me, $3 per buttonhole is sort of a bargain – I find doing buttonholes quite nerve-wracking and tiring, and I was kind of glad my machine refused to play along so I could hand the job to someone else. But if a whole shirt only costs $39 or so, designed, cut, sewn, wrapped, tagged and delivered, how much is someone paid to do just the buttonholes?  And by golly, buttonholes aside, there’s a lot of work involved in the rest of a tailored shirt too. There are many pieces to it, and there are a lot of steps. The collar, the cuffs, the slit in the sleeve, a yoke. But somewhere, someone does it all so that we can buy shirts for $39…

:: details ::

pattern: Vogue 8096, view B.

fabric: cotton-linen blend, purchased at Tessuti.

january | summer

The next few posts may have an Xmas-y theme, as I didn’t get time to blog them before Xmas.

In the mean time, here are the summer holiday snaps. And I hope everyone who holidays at this time of year had an enjoyable time too.

:: housesitting with a gorgeous dog ::

 

:: beach ::

 

:: art museum ::

 

:: knitting (including a lovely afternoon on Bells’ famous deck) ::

 

:: reading in a shady hammock ::

 

:: watching my tomato plants grow ::

 

:: biking ::

 

:: wine ::

:: flowers ::

 

:: three wishes ::

spike!

Yesterday: pransellknit tweets me to say hey! you’re on how about orange! http://is.gd/c8BlX. I’d not heard of How About Orange before, but as ever, it’s nice to be linked to…

Today I take a look at my blog stats (see picture above), and holy moley, it seems being linked by How About Orange is quite something! So if that’s how you came here, welcome! Make yourself comfy, leave a comment, and come back again.

Once again it’s been a bit quiet on the blog. Last week I was away on a whirlwind trip to Paris and London, and in the weeks leading up to it there was a lot of preparation going on. I am really pleased that knitting is once again allowed on planes; I was less pleased with the results of my plane knitting. Let’s just say jet lag, tiredness, cramped spaces, poor lighting, dark yarn and lace are not a great combination, and I will have a lot of frogging to do, when I decide I can face it.

I have a couple of blog posts in the works which I’ll bring forth over the next week or so.

haiti appeal

If you’ve been around this blog a while, you’d know that I sometimes write up my designs and make them available for download here.  I’ve always done this for free, for reasons which you can read about over the fold if you’re interested.

During January and February 2010, I am going to charge US$3 for my susie pattern.  All proceeds will be will be donated to Médecins Sans Frontières Australia’s appeal for victims of the Haiti earthquake.

You can now purchase the pattern from the machen|machen Ravelry store for US $3.

If you’re an Australian resident and have already donated to any Haiti appeal, you can email machenmachen@gmail.com with a copy of your receipt and I’ll send you the pattern in return.