Tokohana!

The new CD/DVD from Nagi Yanagi came today, with the song from the Cross Road spot. After the past year, I cannot stop saying "Kotonoha", instead of "Tokohana", and I can even read the words now! I got the version with the DVD, but unfortunately though unsurprisingly I guess, the Cross Road video was not on it.

This was the last piece of my last outstanding order from Amazon Japan, and it was pretty cool getting it on the release day. I also picked up a new copy of the Voices of a Distant Star soundtrack for the "archives", so I would have a new one to backup my old second-hand copy. Somehow I had missed the Radio Version CD of Voices of a Distant Star, so next time I get an order together on there, I'll have to pick that up. Amazon US has it available to order, but in a "order now, we'll cancel in a couple months" sort of way it looks like to me.

 In sewing news, well, there's not much news. Despite back to back long weekends, there hasn't been much sewing to speak of. I did have to use up the latest round of vouchers and with no plan in place to pick fabrics by, I ended up with a couple pieces that I figured would magically turn into something later.

First is a bit of another pima cotton print. There's always something in this section if you don't know what else to buy.

Second, I went to my favorite section and after some indecision, I went with a longer piece of this lace. They had some really nice things that I might have bought had I not already picked up the pima cotton print, but at that point, I didn't have enough vouchers for very much of them. It's one thing to go crazy with a plan, but having no plan, I went with the more "practical" choice.

And just to show I haven't been totally slack, I did fill up the freezer with a batch of sauce. This time, I got out the smaller jars for the single size too (only one half piece of sausage per for that). The cat makes it a pain to make noodles anymore, but at least there's good homemade sauce. Just add Detroit cheese (aka Romano) and I can overlook the noodles from a box.

A Walk in the Park

I tivo a bunch of the shows on the half-hours on NHK and on this week's Tokyo Eye, I saw a familiar sight...

Looks a little something like this...

It was the second part of their tour of Shinjuku, which included the Shinjuku Gyoen National Garden, which everyone knows better as The Garden of Words.

I don't know why NHK has a half-hour news show between every show, but I guess it gives me a reminder to also watch the Emergency! reruns before the Tivo fills up.

Press On!

The last fifteen pillowcases have had thread tails tucked and trimmed and been turned and pressed. The labels are all used up so the serger has been put away until more show up in the mail some day.

Rotate Every 1,000 Yards

I ended up with some more fabric so instead of my original plan, I decided to finish off the remaining 15 bands and labels. I have 11 of 15 pillowcases done and should be ready to mail these by Saturday. Looking at the serger, I was reminded that the four threads aren't used up at the same rate.

After these last few are complete, I'll pull out the needles and thread and clean and lubricate everything, then put the cones back in the reverse order. It takes a lot of pillowcases to use up these 5,000 yard cones, but you can see some progress now.

Mother's Day

Is it too early to claim these pillowcases are a Mother's Day present? Fourteen more this week, and a dozen last week, and that's it until the next good coupon comes up. Somehow I managed to make a lot more band pieces and could do 12-15 more if I hadn't used up all the "body" pieces. In the meantime, I'll sew the tags on all these extra bands.

Now that I'm caught up on pillowcases and the house projects I'd been waiting for winter to end to do, I need to get back on one of my "couture" projects this weekend. Last thing I remember, I was screwing up on the Yui dress, so I guess first thing on the list is to cut out some new muslin pieces.

Nee...

Nandaka marude yuki mitai ja nai?

It's supposed to rain all day tomorrow and that will probably be the end already of most of the blooms. Well, I guess that's why it's a theme, but one more sunny day of them would have been nice.

The Garden of Words, the Novel

Yesterday, going to work in the morning, I thought the trees would be blossoming any day now. By the late afternoon, I could hardly see the cars parked under the row of trees outside my office window. It seems like the flowering trees around here, now all in bloom, are not as well filled-out as previous years, and I wonder if it is due to the "over-achieving" winter that finally just ended. Good enough, though!

The Garden of Words novel came today, and I neglected to notice that it is a hardcover. Since I was ordering them from Japan, I got three copies. One for reading, one for "the archives" and one more cause it's easier to get one more now in case anything happens to the other two.

The cover is nice, with the foil leaf details. I didn't get a picture, but the book has green and pink leaves on the cover under the dust jacket.

One copy came with this card tucked into the little band.

Speaking of "the archives", I immediately picked the nicest copy and put it along with the card into this waterproof plastic tub I got to consolidate all my "good copies" of books, CDs, DVDs, blu-rays and everything else. In case of fire, this is the first thing that gets saved!

The Garden of Words - Coming Soon

The Garden of Words novelization is out this weekend and I'm hoping to see it next week. Normally, I would have ordered it from Yesasia, but they didn't list it til just recently. So I made my first order on Amazon.jp since I didn't want to risk missing it, like I did when I was trying to get the individual chapters in DaVinci. Amazon.jp seems to have updated their website so you can see a lot more in English, plus I could read more of it than I used to be able to.

While I was paying the shipping anyway, I also added a reading copy of Place Promised and another copy of Voices of a Distant Star. I've been (trying) to read Voices of a Distant Star and only had the small version, so I got the larger one to save my eyesight.

Even though I selected the "as few shipments as possible" option, and the new book is coming out in a week, they shipped these two books already. I got a shipment notice late Sunday night and they were delivered today (Tuesday). Hopefully that's not just a lucky case and The Garden of Words will show up that fast too!

Compared to Yesasia, I paid more in shipping (Yesasia having free shipping at $40) but the books were cheaper so overall it was close enough to get me to try it. Looking at some other things I might order, price+shipping works out better for Amazon in some cases and for Yesasia in others. Other considerations between the two would be that Amazon won't ship some items to the US (eg- some soundtrack CDs) while Yesasia sometimes doesn't have or has some items for only a limited time (eg - She and Her Cat novel), so I guess I'll keep an eye on both. It must be time for news on Shinkai's next movie, and I'm enjoying all these books more now that I have some idea what they say.

100 Pillowcases

Since no one makes Angel Beats fabrics that I know of, I tried Spoonflower finally for the first time for a special request pillowcase. I took a guess on which cotton fabric to pick from their options and went with the poplin, I think because of the higher thread count. Not having seen the other ones in person, I don't know if that was the right choice but I ordered it as much to see how the printing would come out as much as the specific fabric.

I took the CUTE! picture of Shiina and used the mirror layout to make something that could be folded in half and show the same front and back. For the band, I used some pima cotton print I had already. The case turned out well enough, though the picture makes the colors look a little washed out (and wrinkly) but the printing is fine in person.

Not Dead Yet Bloggerfront

"Less snow than expected" sounds great, unless you get more ice than expected first... Maybe now I can get back to work on something a little more fun. The weekend's trip got called off, but I gave the serger a once-over and started back trying to catch up on this pile of pillowcase parts. Somehow I got cabin fever spending all my time outside shoveling snow and now I want to spend all my time indoors sewing. It makes sense to me anyway.

Ｚ会 「クロスロード」 120秒Ver.

A little something new from Makoto Shinkai.

Oops

This post is supposed to be about my test of the Yui pattern, but whatever I thought I was doing, I was not basting the pieces together right. I decided to quit while I was behind and will cut some new pieces out later.

In the meantime, it's time to start prepping a new batch of fabric for pillowcases. We're supposed to visit the Shriner's hospital next month, and I don't want to show up empty handed. Joann's has the 20% off your total purchase coupon this weekend, so it was a good time to buy a whole pile. This coupon works on regular and sale items. Their regular 40-50-60% off coupons normally specify "one regularly priced item" which means you can't use it on sale items (and get less of a discount) and you only get one cut of fabric. This way, between the sale prices and the coupon, I was able to get the 50% off ten or twelve kinds of fabric at once.

Try, Try Again

Here comes the first test of the Yui pattern. I traced off a copy of the Misato shoulder and marked the shoulder seam line.

Do I remember those waza names?

For this first pass, I just went straight on with the forward shoulder section to the jacket front. Putting the corners together and then the point of the other end on the jacket front line, the two sewing lines matched up almost exactly. Which is to be expected, since it really wasn't for shaping on the Misato.

Flip the shoulder piece over and hit the other side and this is what you get. When making up the muslin pieces, I just traced one half and then shifted the pattern over and traced the other half.

For the back, I moved up the dividing line. While I was looking at it, I thought the top half would end up with such long, thin points, that they would be difficult to handle. By moving the line up, I get shorter points, with less acute angles.

The pieces are cut so hopefully they'll go together tomorrow.

This latest bolt of muslin got really bunched up on the bolt and I'm pressing the hell out of it as I tear sections off, but it's putting up a good fight. Well, it's laying flat enough while I trace and cut out, but not very photogenic.

New Parts

Another bag of silk taffeta is what I ended up with from the last vouchers. This latest idea is supposed to have a dress and a jacket based on the Akari and Misato projects, so today in lieu of any great ideas, I started tracing out potential pattern pieces.

I'm thinking that the front of the jacket may not have any closure, just two edges meeting in the center front. I started tracing the two fronts, overlapped as the garment would be, but leaving out the "notch" in front.

The bottom edge is straight across and I put a center line in. This piece will get cut into two separate pieces eventually. A similar back piece was traced out, omitting the "step down" in back.

For the moment, I'll keep the shoulder and sleeve pieces from the Misato on top of the pile. I haven't decided on the neckline either, but I'm leaning towards nothing. The jacket may be heading boler-ish, just by coincidence.

For that shoulder piece, I'm debating cutting it in half at the shoulder seam and integrating the front section into the front jacket pieces and leaving the back section as-is. I could have sworn I took a picture of the rear body piece, but the combined front looks almost the same, so I'll use that for a quick idea. As part of this, I would split the rear body piece also as below and then sew a test up to see if it looks like it does in my head. In the meantime, I'll try to come up with fabrics and how I would use them if I go for that.

Fictional Garments

The latest round of vouchers expire at the end of the month, so I have to get back to work and plan what to get with them. I have a general idea what I want to do, but am still sketching and thinking. First pass, it looks like it will have some cross-over with both the Akari dress and the (Not) Chanel Misato jacket. How much that holds up though, I wouldn't want to bet on.

A new line, sort of

A new center front

Something in this direction, but not exactly

Unfortunately a mostly whole bolt of 44" muslin was lost last night when I went to tighten a light bulb and it exploded, throwing glass everywhere. The muslin was standing upright next to the lamp and as I was cleaning a million pieces of glass, I decided to skip not finding all them in the folds of the fabric until... Oh no, only 10 bolts left! Well, Joann's has a 60% off one fabric coupon at the end of the month if I can hold out that long.

Back to the Skirt

Not much today, but I want to get back in the habit of doing "something" every day to try to make some visible progress (eventually). Put the darts into these front and rear skirt pieces and then pinned them on Lucy to think about possible adjustments to the patterns.

Oops, one side should have been folded over along the top edge a bit more and pinned a little lower, but I was distracted by Penguins fighting on TV. I'll mark the guidelines for the "placket" closure before taking these back off.

Got a good match of the various points on this side of the front. That is, the side seam of the skirt matching the side seam of the form, and the darts lining up with each other and the princess seam of the form.

On the other side, you can see that the front piece is overall correct. The side seam matches the side seam of the form with the rest of the waist pinned in place. However, the bodice and skirt darts don't match up. It feels like the skirt dart is closest to the princess seam of the form, while the bodice dart goes a little over to the side seam side of things. The overall bodice piece also matches the form fine, and with the ruffles on, this shouldn't be visible, but I'm sure I'll mess with it again before I'm done for psychological reasons at least.

The length of the skirt section also needs to be determined. With the ruffles going over it, it technically doesn't need to be that long. But even though no one will ever wear it, I'm still going to set it long enough to cover Lucy's backside, if she had one...

Akari's Back

Today I put the back pieces on the new Akari bodice. Before starting, I realized that I had already put the band on the front. Next time, I imagine I will make the band up in one piece and add it after the sides/backs go on.

The heavy 12" shears are probably overkill, but I still like them for trimming all the layers of the seam allowances. Since the side/back pieces are also underlined, they had enough weight to them to match up okay with the front section, just by folding over and pressing them. The separating zipper was added similar to on the Misato (Not) by Chanel jacket, with the one sided presser foot.

I tried to sew things "tight". That is, to err to the inside of the sewing line. This mostly went well, though I did come up not quite skin tight on the sides. Even though there should be additional bones added to the side and back seams, it still needs to be a touch tighter coming around the sides, given that this is basically a corset.

Next step will be to add the skirt base for the ruffles. I have pieces drawn up based on my best guess as to where on the bodice I want it to sit.

Akari Returns

Finally I got a chance to get in some sewing today. I've been spending my little free time between shoveling snow and other fun stuff studying Japanese, but I can feel my brain getting full. Maybe tomorrow I'll make a review to be sure I'm really remembering everything.

There was already a pile of pattern pieces on the ironing board based on the next theoretical construction plan. For these, I cut two of each front and side/back pieces and then a band to go along the top. The two each were so they could be sewn up as underlined pieces. Of course, both pieces are just muslin here, but it's the thought that counts.

The underlining test is mainly for the front, since that is the one with all the darts. Ecru thread on unbleached muslin isn't the best for photography, so some of these pictures may stink. Underlining involves basting the two pieces of fabric together and them working them as a single piece. First, the pieces were outlined and then the darts also basted together. I had read competing articles on how to baste the darts together, but what I went with was to baste the two legs.

Despite the thread becoming invisible, it was easy to feel on both sides as I was basting the darts together with the green silk thread.

For this round, I'm going back to my previous theory about making a band along the top edge of the bodice that would then attach to lining pieces on the inside. Based on the bodice pieces, I drew up some pattern pieces for this. The side and center back parts are individual pieces but for the front, I darted this single piece up.

The band piece was basted on with the contrasting silk thread. Thread basting this long waving edge instead of using pins really makes life easier on the sewing machine. The sewing line of course goes back and forth, but also at this point, the pieces are darted which makes them not flat anymore.

Usually I would end up using a lot of pins to keep all the lines lined up and account for the 3D nature of the fabric. Getting them out while steering on the machine ends up being a distraction and you can end up with puckers sewn in or some drunken sewing lines. If you ran off outside of where the sewing line should have been, it's not so bad to go back and resew that section but if you went inside of it, then you get to practice your seam ripper skills.

Once the band was sewn on, the seam allowances were trimmed and clipped. Then the twisting and turning of the ham and seam roll got under way to help press out that edge.

The seam allowances were pressed towards the band. I think this picture is beforehand, but the band was then pick stitched to the underlying seam allowances.

The cased steel bones from a previous test were transferred to the long darts of this front bodice. Because there is an underlining layer, the bones are only stitched to that, so that the stitching doesn't show on the outside of the garment.

Trying the front bodice on Lucy, I found all the points lined up well. With that small triangle shaved off this side of the pattern piece, I finally have it matching all of Lucy's seams.

Up next, I will put on the side back and center back pieces, including a separating zipper for a closure. Also, I have "skirt" sections that will go over the lower portion of the bodice per my previous post about taking this section in more of a Grace Kelly direction. The skirt will be attached to the bodice, and the rear closure will just be an overlap that snaps closed. This piece will end up being the base for the ruffles (maybe).

Atogaki

The single-volume of The Garden of Words manga arrived today. I knew it was out for delivery and had seen the mail carrier coming so I went out to the mailbox to wait for it. But following this morning's snow, the sun had come out and the snow was melting and falling off the trees. I tried to stand far enough to one side to miss most of it, but of course, just before I got back to the house, a big pile fell right on my head. Well, I was just happy the package had finally arrived!

A really nice color cover. The majority of the book is as it appeared in Afternoon, with the color pages up front and then the rest in B&W. The manga in the magazine had a little something past the movie, and the book has a few extra pages. I'm only up to 30 kanji so far, so it will take some time to translate them.

I've been getting better at telling the difference between shi and tsu and so and n in katakana, but here I'm working on reading someone's handwriting. The small size of some of this isn't helping and again making me miss my Optivisor. I'm trying to make out what it says under Yukino and Takao's names but I'm just going to have to work through likely suspects until I get something translate-able. Arigato gozaimasu!

Also in this shipment, I got the "Promise" CD by the Eminence Symphony Orchestra, performing Tenmon's songs from Shinkai's movies.

Did I not take a picture of the front? Well, here's one of the back.

Inside, there is the CD on one side...

And a booklet on the other...

The booklet has pages on Tenmon, Shinkai, and the Orchestra, as well as pages about each of the movies and the selected songs.

Amazon and itunes have the album which may be the easier way to get the music if you don't need the booklet to satisfy your collector's urges.