Every year I make the last dress of summer. (Some years I make it more than once.) Even here in Greater Suburbopolitan San Francisco … digression: I really have trouble with the phrase “the Bay Area” — I mean, it sounds like something you tell your doctor when you have an embarrassing ailment: “It hurts in … [vague gesture] the general bay area.” Also: lots of places have bays: Massachusetts, Tampa, Wisconsin [they have a Green one!].

Sorry, epic digression. As I was saying … hereabouts … where it will be summerishly warm for another couple of weeks, at some point in October lightweight and light-colored cottons start to feel seasonally inappropriate. And judging by the number of people I saw in the city wearing corduroy and tights today (when I was perfectly comfortable in a sleeveless dress), I’m not the only one who inclined to go by the calendar instead of the thermometer.

Yep, this is ANOTHER Vogue 9929, in this Michael Miller gray and green key print:

I really like the key motif. (Prediction: I think keys are the new bicycles. They may even be the new birds, mustaches, and owls.)

The way you can tell when you’re sewing the last dress of summer is that it takes a real effort to finish it. When you started it, you were excited to get it finished so you could wear it, but then at some point … you slow down. You start to fondle pieces of corduroy in your fabric stash, and think about what might look good with boots and leather jackets. You work on it, not because you want to hasten the wearing of it, but because you need the cutting table for something that has sleeves, or is mustard-colored, or that is plaid (or all three).

If you give in to giving up, if you don’t buckle down and finish the last dress of summer, one of two things will happen: there will be a freak early-fall heat wave just when you are SOOOO BORED with all your summer clothes, and/or you will gain or lose a size-changing amount of weight before summer dress time rolls around next year. This is guaranteed. If you *do* finish it, though, you’ll only wear it a couple-three times before it gets autumned out by last year’s unfinished Last Dress of Winter wannabe, which you will finish immediately after finishing the Last Dress of Summer. This is also guaranteed.

The upside is that the Last Dress of Summer often turns out to be The First Dress of Spring, because when you dig it out on the first warm day next year, it will feel absolutely brand-new.

There are other ceremonial-slash-seasonal types of clothing, of course … some of my favorites are The First Day of Wearing Those Tights You Bought On Clearance Last Spring That You Thought Would Never Go With Anything, But Somehow This Year Work, and It’s Still Too Cold For Sandals But These Are Super-Cute Day (in Chicago this would happen in late April/early May), and everyone’s junior-high favorite, First Day It’s Cold Enough to Wear Your  Fashionable Back-to-School Sweater. (Which, when I was in junior high in Florida, didn’t usually happen until after Thanksgiving. Torture!) And of course many people celebrate Charmingly Ironic Holiday Sweater Day (or week) as well as (under varying levels of duress) the annual Day of Wearing the Gift Well-Meaning Relatives Gave You Last Year at This Event.

Of course, you can’t take these seasonal influences too far … or you wind up with this.

What’s your last dress of summer?

Plaid: I Vant. To Suck. Your BLOOOOOOOOOOOOD.

Yellow: I wonder how my dress would look with a bow? Not red, of course, but maybe white? Or green? I’m getting hungry, I don’t know why Mina said we’d have lunch here, I don’t see anywhere to eat …

Pattern and sale today thanks to Jen at MOMSPatterns — use the code ‘hotsale’ to save 25% on all orders until midnight EST tonight, Monday October 1.

So it turns out that Plaidurday is a thing (as it should be) and it’s on October 5th this year. I plan to participate fully — I’ve been itching to make a plaid shirtdress (or two) and this is a great excuse.

I don’t know if I’ll have all the kinks of a new shirtdress pattern worked out in order to use this fabric, but I hope so:

It’s plaid AND dots, and it’s really, really nice Italian cotton (here’s a close-up). I bought it in Portland completely serendipitously — there was a great little fabric store about a block from my hotel. I really liked the fabric store — it’s called Josephine’s — for a number of reasons. First, they weren’t irked at all when I wandered in fifteen minutes to closing; I’ve been to way too many small shops where it’s as much as your life is worth to go in thirty minutes before the closing time written on the door to take that niceness for granted. And in addition to this plaid, they had some really good fabric, including the fox fabric I posted about the other day. (It’s always fun to see something you’ve already made up still on the bolt in the fabric store — it feels like greeting an old friend.) Besides, I’m always wary in a (US) fabric store when I don’t recognize *anything* — I feel like that means everything is either super-generic or really, really old. But this place had some nice Moda fabrics and a good balance between cotton prints and fancier stuff. (Although: what is up with all the ITY knits or whatever those slinky poly things are? I don’t understand it.) They also had this pattern — which has been in my “maybe” pile for a while — made up and on display, and it looked really good.

They don’t have a web store (and anyway, I bought the last of this on the bolt) but they do take phone orders (and also had it in blue). I was briefly tempted by the blue colorway, but it had a lot of navy in it — this plaid has just enough blue, anyway. The whole point of plaid is being able to pull any of the colors in it to the foreground through determined accessorizing, and I just never am able to find navy shoes that don’t make me feel like a cross between a first-year associate in a very conservative law firm and a gawky eighth grader in a parochial school.

This is probably my favorite kind of plaid — a little rough and painterly, not exact (which seems like an odd thing to prefer in a plaid, but there it is). And the dots are just a whole extra level of busy-cute.

So what are you wearing for Plaidurday?

Michelle (at OldPatterns.com) has a score of mint-condition 1920s patterns right now. Check out this one:

This one almost makes me think that perhaps airship hostessing started in the 1920s, rather than the art-deco 1930s. I love the determined asymmetricality (and the Modiglianish pattern illustration). I also think with great sympathy of all the women in the 1920s who had to wear stuff like this and who weren’t sylphlike gamines. That must have really, really sucked.

These patterns are definitely on the pricey side but they’re mint, practically Starlight mint, actually. (Maybe Michelle has been raiding some time capsules …) The 1920s are where I start to feel that sewing patterns are edging into Collectorsville and out of the range of “I’ll make this up next Saturday for a lark,” but the boundaries of your Collectorsville may vary. (I think that for some folks 1950s vintage clothing is now edging into Collectorsville — as I skip gaily towards my dotage, I start to realize that The Kids Today are now buying “vintage” that I wore in junior high school, and that the 1950s day dresses I took for granted as costing $7, tops, in the local Goodwill can and do now hit three figures. Speaking of 1980s “vintage” — dear children, floral rayon rompers are not improved by the passage of time. Take it from your Great-aunt Erin.)

I have one or two 1920s patterns I’m holding onto just because they’re so pretty to look at … like paper dolls. But I think if you want 1920s patterns, you might want to hunt them up now, because I have been given to understand that once the new Gatsby movie comes out in December, there will be a rush to flapperdom in fashion. (I hope there’s a rush to 1920s men’s fashions, too …)

But always a crossword dress! Thanks to Sarah Dyer (aka @colorkitten) for pointing out to me that there’s a new crossword novelty print quilting fabric out there, in multiple colorways.

I was really tempted by the aqua, but I went for a more classic (if not more subtle) look:

Right now I’m thinking that a) this will be another 9929, because they’re SO EASY and b) this means I should really go back to the ACPT next year, huh? It’s been a while since I showed up in a crossword–puzzle dress, ready to place far, far down in the standings.

No, really. I want to link to your blog. I love how many sewing and crafting and vintaging and just plain gorgeous-ing blogs have sprung up lately … but there are so few hours in the day! It’s hard enough to find time to write a post, much less traipse through the blogosphere to find all the insightful stuff that’s being written about vintage patterns, fabric hoarding, and Airship Hostessing. So (as you may have noticed) I was happy to start using a new WordPress plug-in, Related Content by Wordnik, to start adding not just links to related posts from the archives of this blog, but links to related posts from other blogs, too. So much cool stuff to discover!

(Astute readers will notice that Related Content by Wordnik is made by Wordnik, the company I work for. It turns out that knowing a lot about words leads to knowing a lot about how words go together, which leads to knowing a lot about how collections of words — like blog posts — go together. Next up, we’re going to mix chocolate and peanut butter. Stand back!)

Anyway — I’d love to link to even more cool blogs. So if you have a cool (WordPress-only, for now, sorry) blog, would you consider installing Related Content by Wordnik, so I can link to you better? Tell ’em Erin sent you.

I’m on vacation! That is, I’m in St. Augustine, Florida, with my mom, sister, and son (and two aunts who arrive today), and my brother and his fam this weekend. So far I have inhaled most of the Atlantic Ocean, neglected to pack sufficient contact lenses, been terrified by animatronic instructors, and answered far too many work emails! But still: vacation!

On vacation I tend to think that I will have TONS and TONS of time to do project-y stuff, forgetting that the whole point of vacation is to NOT do stuff. So far I have only done a couple baby projects, like finally transferring my iTunes library from an external drive to my new laptop, and tidying up my Pinterest boards a wee bit, and minor-league things like that. I’m also reading this fascinating book about the Mitfords.

Another thing I always do on vacation is think of new and exciting projects for when I get BACK, which so far include:

— making another 9929 and covering it in TINY MULTICOLORED BUTTONS (<– I will never do this, I actually dislike sewing on buttons, but it would make an amazing dress).

— deciding on a MAXIMUM NUMBER of patterns I can own, and culling the rest ruthlessly (any suggestions as to what’s a good number?). And, oh, by the way, I have purchased three patterns online since being on vacation …

— hiring someone on TaskRabbit to take pictures of everything I’ve sewn but don’t have pictures of yet, since this taking the darn pictures is something I always put off doing. I will justify this by calling it an “insurance record” for when my house ultimately burns down from me leaving the iron on.

— doing a tutorial video (probably with my son’s help, he’s very good at making videos) of each step involved in making a shirtdress. I know there are tons of things I do when I sew that aren’t in the pattern instructions … and probably more helpful things I could be doing, if only I knew about them (which the comments on the video would help with).

— figuring out how to make the Vintage Pattern Wiki have better category search, so you can search for “1960s” AND “Peter Pan collar” together.

I am now taking bets for when these projects actually happen. Anyone want to put their money on 2017?