Red wool top, and I’m (sorta) famous

So, we’ve moved. Again. But this is a good thing because we are now in Colorado Springs where it’s almost always sunny. 

A week or so after the movers brought all our worldly possessions, with everything unpacked and the house reasonably organized, I was itching to sew (priorities, you know). Plus I wanted to have something new to wear to a class at the new sewing store that just opened this month.

Out of my stash came this lovely lightweight wool double knit – bright red, super fine yarns, and not scratchy at all. Just like a wool knit should be.  It came from Ginny’s in Rochester, MN. 

The pattern is a copy of a RTW top from Costco. The fit was nice but the fabric was all polyester, and it pilled terribly after the second wash. So I took it apart and made a pattern from it. I tested it last year in a cotton french terry.

I wore that one quite a bit but never really came to like the length. I really prefer my untucked tops shorter. So for this red version, I chopped off 4.5” – much better. At some point, I’ll figure out the picture-taking again. Until then, here’s the red top on my dress form.

I like the fit through the torso and the length. The collar needs a tweak though because I would like the edge to spread out a little bit more, to cover the neckline seam. 

Wearing the top to the sewing class got me an invitation to the next ASG garment group meeting so I got to meet a fabulous group of women, all focused on not just sewing, but specifically garments. Yay!

Fast forward to this past weekend, when one of the ASG members said I looked familiar. I figured, nah, we haven’t been here a month yet, can’t be me. So she had me recite where we’ve lived – I started saying, “well, we just moved from Iowa, before that we were in Guam…” and I didn’t even get to finish because as soon as I said Guam, she exclaimed “yes, it’s you!” 

Turns out, she knew me from my previous blog, Studio Alexandra. Sadly, I closed that blog and deleted all the posts back in 2020. (Can I just blame it on that year? I mean, it brought a few other dubious decisions, too.)

Anyway, she made me feel famous for a minute, and appreciated too. She remembered some pretty specific details of several of my knitting projects. Impressive memory.

And then I was mad at myself. For deleting the blog. It had held years of notes about my projects. Helpful stuff. And like a total twit, I had hit the delete button like it was no big deal 🙄 (Yeah, no backup either, because that didn’t even occur to me.)

That night, I looked it up on the Wayback Machine. To my delight, it was there, in all its glory – words, pictures, all of it. So I’m going to bring it back, slowly but surely, I will get as much of it re-posted here as I can. The comments are gone, and I can’t get them back. But over the next few months, I’ll revive what I can, with the original publishing dates.

Plus I’ll be writing about my latest sewing adventures. With the garment-sewing group here, I’ve been feeling super inspired to sew up a new mini-wardrobe, and I’m ready to try the TDCO (top-down, center-out) method to fit my next pair of pants.

There will likely be fewer wardrobe musings. (Was that a sigh of relief? I don’t blame you. Same here, hehe.) I think I’m better off just making pretty things to wear and seeing where that takes me.

Stay tuned!