I’m doing magazine work today on my kitchen counter where I can keep an eye on and play with the kids. Today while I was building ads for the upcoming magazine, the Jan/Feb 2008 issue, I noticed a typographical error in the table of contents of The Best of the First Two Years, BHM’s first anthology. I checked with Lisa, and after 25,000 copies (and quite a few reprintings later) the typo is still there. Whoops.

Before I finish the ads I need to get page counts to Lisa, who coordinates all of the article purchases and contracts, and does so many other jobs around the office that she’s pretty much the backbone of the editorial side of putting out the magazine. Page counts are just an estimate of how many pages each article will take up in the magazine. They take into account photographs and any fancy typography we put on the article, and determine how much we’ll pay the writer.

In the back of my mind is another project I’m working on, a new Backwoods Home Magazine series of small info-packed books on various important homesteading topics. The first book published will be about chickens, but we’re expecting to have quite an expansive series out soon.

Many readers of BHM will recognize me as Dave Duffy’s daughter, the little girl who helped build a house in the woods. Now I’m “grown up” (sort of) with a family of my own–but my love of the woods and making things with my own two hands hasn’t changed a bit.

This blog was previously hosted elsewhere, but not to worry–I’ve imported all of my old blog posts so you won’t miss a thing. Over to the right there’s a list of categories, if you’d like to browse by subject; otherwise you can browse by date, or just start at the beginning and read in chronological order.

I’ll be posting more frequently over here on topics ranging from sewing, knitting, and quilting to life in the Corps (my husband is a Sergeant in the United States Marine Corps) and our first forays into food preservation (we’re just learning!). Ultimately, this blog is about creating–not just pretty or useful things, but a better life and a chance to realize our dreams.

The Marine Corps Ball is coming up fairly soon, so it’s that time of year when the Man hems and haws about which uniform he’ll wear, how poorly his blues fit, and how smarmy he’ll look if he’s the only jarhead who shows up to the birthday bash in Service As (the green uniform a few posts back). Last week he asked very nicely if maybe I could fix them for him, so he could look just as dapper as all the other lads (okay, he didn’t say that part. that’s what he meant, though.).

See the wrinkle across the shoulders? That means it’s too narrow. And see how tight the waist seams are? They need to be let out a bit. The tight waist was the easy fix, because there were several seams to work with, each with about 1/2 inch of seam allowance to let out. I only needed to let out two seams, so I did the two that had been taken in when The Man first bought this coat–the seams directly adjacent to the center back seam.

I basted along my projected new seamline with contrasting thread. I never use matching thread for this, especially on dark fabrics, because it is impossible to find and later remove the stitches. A long running stitch is perfectly fine for this. After I sewed my basting line, I ripped out the old seam, then had The Man check the new fit. So far so good. I waited until I finished my other alteration before sewing these seams. Sometimes making one alteration can change the other one. In this case, it allowed the coat to hang a little lower, and took up a little bit of the fullness under the cross-shoulder wrinkle. But the neck was still obviously way too narrow. Unfortunately there was very little seam allowance to work with at the neck. I first tried to widen the top back only, leaving the collar intact so I wouldn’t have to mess with it. That made the wrinkle even worse.

So I took off the collar, basted a new, much narrower seam allowance at the top of the center back and let The Man try the fit. It eliminated every wrinkle! (Below, the pressed seam at the center back neck has only about 1/8 inch left to give.)

Of course now the trick is to get the same collar, which hasn’t grown any, back onto an altered jacket that now has a neckline 1/2 inch longer than before. A normal, well-rested professional might tell you it can’t be done, and that you’ll need to order a longer collar. Since by this time it was 2:30 am, I was willing to try anything. [Note: I’m writing the rest of this post a couple days later. I will infact need a longer collar, but the assembly instructions would be the same as the rest of the photos below.] I basted each collar edge to its respective front, then basted the collar on by machine (with contrasting thread).

Now at this point, had the Man been awake, I should have had him try this on. Since it was the middle of the night I didn’t. I’ll go ahead and show you the rest of the process, but you should know that I’ll have to go ahead and buy a larger collar for this after all. All of my alterations did work, but since I let out the back neck so much, I wasn’t able to fudge the collar back on as I had hoped.

After stitching in black over my basting line, I picked the white thread out, then whipstitched the collar lining back in place.

In the end I did manage to get the too-small collar back on evenly, but I’ll have to replace it with a properly fitting one. (I’ll post again about that whenever the new collar gets here.)

Now that my sewing table is set up, I’m getting around to a bunch of sewing and mending that I’ve been putting off since we moved in. I just finished replacing a hem that had fallen out of my silk jacket.

The original hem was probably a machine sewn blind hem stitch, but I used a hand-sewn herringbone stitch this time. Either one is appropriate.

You might know this better as an embroidery stitch, as seen on crazy quilts. Actually, my big Erica Wilson’s Embroidery Book was the only book I had with a diagram of this stitch.

You see this stitch mostly used in the hems of womens clothing, because the wide spacing of the stitches lends itself well to easing the hem, and the tiny horizontal stitches are truly invisible from the outside of the garment. The blurry background below shows the shadow of the hem (I haven’t pressed it yet), but in the clear forground of the picture there are no stitches to be seen from the right side of the jacket.