The Archives
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09.14.08Sewing Heritage: Women, Sewing & the WPAFolks, it's time for a little sewing history lesson... The Works Progress Administration (rename Work Project Administration in 1939) was created in 1935, and employed millions of people--especially in the rural West and Appalachia and other mountain regions--following the catastrophic downturn of the U.S. economy resulting in the Great Depression. What many people don't know about the WPA is that a sizable number of people put to work during this time were women, around fifteen to twenty percent of WPA-participants. They were considered unemployed heads of household for a variety of reasons, including abandonment or a husband's death or disability--and the ...
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09.10.08Crafts We Can Believe InWe hope you'll humor us for a moment while we diverge ever-so-slightly from our regularly scheduled programming... From the "Crafters for Obama" badge that's been on our site since Julie Ree created "Crafters for Obama" back in January, you've probably noticed that we're supporters of Senator Barack Obama's campaign for the Presidency. We believe that his leadership can help our country move in the right direction. We've been personally affected by many of the tough issues that are facing our nation, and many of our friends and family have also been directing impacted by the poor economy, lack of accessible and ...
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08.18.08A Giveaway!(Note: Comments are now closed. We will announce the randomly-drawn winner shortly.) But you gotta work for it a little bit. Remember The Alabama Stitch Book that I reviewed back in June? The one that I used to make the skirt that I wore to that get-together with some old friends? Well, the lovely folks at Stewart, Tabori & Chang sent me a copy to review as well, so I have two copies. So, looks like I need to get rid of one of them... I think that whomever gets the copy of this book will really enjoy it. There are lots of ...
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08.08.08Field Trip: A Hood River SurpriseWe really like the Columbia River Gorge town of Hood River. Not only is it beautiful, scenic and home to very cool action sports like kiteboarding and windsurfing, it's also home to both Full Sail Brewing (Session seems to have become our "house beer" lately) and Tofurky (don't knock it 'til you've tried it - the soy Italian sausage is really good!). You can't beat that! We, along with Sarah's mom, went out there for lunch this week and after lunch walked around the town. In a window of a shop called Parts + Labour, we spotted this: That vine of flowers ...
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07.21.08Crafting Across Cultures(Or why we love Uwajimaya.) Maybe it's because we both lived in the international dorm in college, went to grad school oversees, did a fair amount of international traveling (before the dollar tanked and it was actually affordable to travel) and possibly even because Josh has a degree in International Studies, but we are both really interested in books, magazines and publications about sewing and "making stuff" from around the globe. (We also are both compulsive consumers of books and magazines on all sorts of subjects, so this feeds multiple interests at once...) One of our favorite Portland grocery stores happens to ...
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07.14.08A Day at the BeachWe're lucky here in Oregon to have wonderful beaches---and every last one of them are public, thanks to the 1967 Oregon Beach Bill (learn more on this site from an episode of The Oregon Experience). We haven't been to the beach since last fall because it's gotten just so expensive to drive the eighty or so miles over the mountains to the coast. But, we make the trek to Cannon Beach today---and oh was it worth it! We couldn't resist taking a few pictures so we'd have an excuse to post beach photos here on Sewer-Sewist... (Josh wearing his Sewer-Sewist ...
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04.02.08Sewn House = Fun HouseAs if the Tacoma News-Tribune telling us that "sewing is the new knitting" wasn't enough, the new-found coolness of sewing is rearing its head in the latest Anthropologie Home catalog. Yep, the retailer that's so great for sewing inspiration (love their styles, hate their pricing, really hate their bizarre fitting) featured a completely stitched together "Fun House" in the pages of their latest catalog. If the Sewer ever neglected to trim his threads like Anthropologie did for this photo-shoot, he'd be in big trouble, but I guess that's artistic license for you. Actually, I just bought The Alabama Stitch Book ...
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03.06.08Things to Make & DoAfter finishing my baseball caps I started working on another "idea hat" for Sarah. This was much easier after going through the fit problems of the earlier models (it involved only sizing the main panel which wraps around the head). Taking inspiration (those are the pictures at the top of this post) from my winter head wear, my very nice wool Borsalino Fedora (thanks babe!), I interfaced this model with fusible fleece (which really is the gift that keeps on giving) and underlined it with lining fabric. The result is a really nice quilted look from the inside and ...
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02.23.08Putting on our idea hats…You may remember that we’ve mentioned a few times that we really like hats. You may also have noticed that we’re slightly obsessed with looking for weird, quirky things to make together. Our latest project really scored on both accounts. Recently, we have taken to going to Uwajimaya and the Japanese language bookstore contained within, Kinokuniya. It is a fantastic place where you can not only get cool books (albeit in Japanese) and then get us all sorts of tofu and interesting sauces to put on said tofu. Plus, we were able to find some great embroidery books for Sarah’s mom, ...
recent posts
- Sewing Heritage: More Stitching Up Old Glory
- Train-Inspired Screen Print
- Sewing Heritage: Stitching Old Glory
- A Little Late to the Whole Apron Thing
- Wear a Dress Week & Another Amy Butler Lotus Dress
- Run With It
- Sewing Heritage: Women, Sewing & the WPA
