I realised back in December that my wardrobe was pretty light on shorts and set out to rectify that. I ended up making FIVE different pairs from two different patterns, and I’m pretty happy with how they turned out!
These three pairs are all based on Colette Patterns Iris Shorts. They’re sort of retro, with pockets set into a front seam rather than on the hips. They open with a zipper on the left side. I bought this pattern years ago and made a first attempt at them, but they didn’t fit at all and I was too disheartened to try again. This time I was determined to crack it.
This was my first attempt. I didn’t want to use anything too fancy until I had fixed the fit issues so I used this blue floral quilting cotton I had in my stash. My first attempt was again a complete disaster, so I ended up pulling them apart and recutting the bum pieces to add more width to accommodate my hips. That seemed to do the trick! Wearable, but not perfect.
For my second attempt, I made further adjustments. The blue pair felt like they were, uh, riding a bit high, so I lowered the crotch by half an inch on both the front and back pieces. (The first adjustment detailed on this page.) For this pair, I used a pink fine-wale corduroy I bought from Jody’s Mum’s destash. I didn’t have much of it, which turned out to be problematic when I screwed up the cutting and had to recut one of the front panels. There’s definitely some bodgy bits around the pockets on these, but overall the adjustment was a success. The fit is relaxed and comfortable!
The last pair were just finished today. These are made from a beautiful denim that I picked up during The Fabric Store‘s recent sale. I made one final adjustment to the fit, to “scoop out” a little more of the front crotch and remove a little excess fabric there. I decided to get a bit fancy with these and apply piping to the top and bottom of the waistband. I used some beautiful Liberty cotton canvas for the piping and the pockets, and I’m so happy how they turned out! (I also documented the whole process of making them, which I’ll be posting soon.)
This pattern is a roomy cut and features very inclusive sizing, so I didn’t have to make a single change. These were the first pair I made, which used some quilting cotton I’ve been holding on to for years, waiting for just the right project. I’m slightly annoyed that I wasn’t smart enough to vary the placement across the fronts to avoid the obvious repetition across the crotch seam, but it’s fine. The waist is elastic so you don’t have to bother with putting in a zipper. The black trim along the edges is actually recycled from an old t-shirt! That’s a trick that the pattern suggests, and it’s brilliant. Since it’s a knit it goes around the curves easily without needing special bias tape, and it feels great against your skin.
My second pair turned out so, so well. As soon as I saw this Liberty Meandering Chrysanthemums cotton canvas at The Fabric Store’s sale, I fell in love and immediately knew it was destined for these shorts. The dusty pink trim is again from an old t-shirt.
For this pair, I also added welt pockets on the back. They’re a perfect size for my cell phone!
I cannot tell you how satisfying it is to make your own clothes! It’s getting to the point now where Rodd and I will both be wearing garments that I’ve made, out in public or to work or whatever, and nobody knows that there’s actually no label inside. Hm. Maybe I should get my own labels, huh?
For my latest sewing project, I decided to try my hand at using some contrast piping along the waistband. I’ve only ever used piping once before, for the Comma Club Cushion I made for the Canva Hackathon a few years back. It wasn’t too hard though and I still had plenty of the cording left over.
To make piping, you need bias tape. I should probably explain what the heck that means. For those who don’t sew: imagine fabric being woven on a loom. You’re picturing it as a rectangle, right? Pretty much like a big bedsheet. And that’s correct! Woven fabric has threads at right angles to each other, and it’s usually pretty strong and non-stretchy if you pull on it lengthwise or widthwise (unless it has elastane or something like that in it). However, if you pull on a piece of fabric diagonally, you’ll probably find that it does have some stretch. We refer to the direction diagonal to the weave of the fabric as the “bias.”
If you’re cutting out pieces of fabric to make clothing, you normally want to keep the pieces oriented straight up and down to keep them from stretching out of shape. That’s why pattern pieces usually have lines on them so you can line that up with the straight edge of the fabric. Occasionally though – most often for certain dresses – you want a kind of flowiness that clings or skims over the body. In those cases, you cut the fabric on the diagonal. (You may have even heard the term “bias cut dress” or something like that.) Fabric cut on the bias is stretchy enough to move and flex around curves. That’s what we want for the piping, because it’s going to be applied around the curved waistband of my shorts.
You can, of course, purchase pre-made bias tape (also called bias binding). That’s what I did for the Cushion, and it worked fine. But it tends to just come in plain colours though, and I wanted to use a special fabric. That means I had to make my own! I highly recommend you try this sometime. It’s really satisfying, and it doesn’t take that long. It’s also a great way to use up scraps of fabric that aren’t big enough to use in other projects.
The method I use is based on this tutorial from Colette Patterns. I recommend you look at that one first, as it uses a small square of plain fabric and is thus slightly easier to see what’s happening. I started with a rectangular piece of my fabric that was 33 inches wide and 13 inches tall. (Actual size doesn’t matter as long as it’s cut “on the grain” – ie. straight.) And yes, I tend to use English measurements when sewing, just because my cutting mat uses them as well as most of my patterns. Feel free to convert to metric; it makes no difference to the end result.
Next, I cut off one corner at a 45 degree angle. I used the lines on my cutting mat for this with a long ruler and my rotary cutter, but you can also do it by drawing a line and then cutting along it with scissors.
Now you want to move that piece you cut off to the other end of the fabric to make a parallelogram. We could just cut off both opposite corners and throw them away, but that would be wasting fabric. By constructing a parallelogram first, you’re using every bit of it (which is nice, because this fabric is expensive!).
Now I need to sew those two straight edges together to join up our parallelogram into a single piece. Here I’ve pinned the triangle on top of the other pieces, right sides together.
Now to the sewing machine! I’m going to sew this seam with a normal straight stitch and a narrow 1/4″ seam allowance.
Once it’s sewn, it’s over to the ironing board. First I press the seam to “set” it. (I have no idea if this really makes a difference, but I read a suggestion to do it once so I do. 🤷♀️)
Then I place the fabric face down and use the iron to press the seam open and flat.
The end result looks like this on the back…
And now you can see our joined and finished parallelogram!
The next step is to mark the width of your bias strips. I wanted mine to be 1 1/2″. Since my fabric is so dark, I flipped it over and used a washable fabric pen to draw the lines with a ruler. You can just see them in this photo below. (They’re light blue.) The lines go right over the seam we just sewed. Whatever width you’re using, you’ll probably have a little bit left over at the end of your parallelogram. That’s okay; you can just cut it off.
Now – we could just cut all these strips and then laboriously sew them all together. But where’s the fun in that? (Colette’s got a tutorial for it, but ain’t nobody got time for that.) It’s time for SEWING FUN WITH GEOMETRY. We are going to turn this flat piece of fabric into a tube with a continuous spiral of bias tape going around and around it. Get ready for your brain to turn inside out!
Basically, we’re going to line up the marks we just drew on the long sides of the parallelogram and then sew them together. However, if we just lined them up straight, when we cut them apart we’d get a series of circular rings of fabric. So instead we need to offset it by one so that the line goes around and around continuously. Again, I think the Colette tutorial does a good job of showing how this works. (It really is something you need to do yourself to really grok.)
Here I am pinning the tube seam with right sides together. I pin at every single line, placing my pin at a 1/4″ seam allowance and making sure it intersects the other line at exactly that point. You’ll find the fabric doesn’t easily want to offset like this, and to some extent you have to keep turning it and coaxing it as you go.
This is what the tube looks like all pinned up for sewing. It’s like a shirt sleeve, but twisted. You can see that the seam with the pins that we’re going to sew actually wraps around the tube.
Sewing it is awkward but doable. Just do a little bit at a time, and keep rotating the tube as needed as you go down. The key is to make sure you’re not inadvertently sewing over any other bits of it as you go. Just keep a nice narrow 1/4″ seam as we did before.
Once you’re finished, your completed spiral tube will look like this. You can clearly see the offset strip at each end as well as how the lines I drew continue around and around, over the seams.
The last step is the fun part – start at one end and just cut along your drawn line! You’ll go around and around the tube in a spiral, with a lovely pile of bias tape accumulating beside you. This piece of fabric turned into a bias strip 7 yards (6 meters) long! Here’s a time lapse video of me cutting mine.
And that’s it! I gave mine a final iron and pressed open any remaining seams. Now it was time to finally make the piping. I was going to use it around the top and bottom of my waistband, so I worked out roughly how much cord I’d need and cut off that much (plus a couple inches for safety). Then you just lay your cording down on in the middle of the wrong side of your lovely bias tape.
Then you fold it over to sandwich the cord and place pins along the length as close to the cord as you can.
The last step is to sew along the line of pins. You should use a zipper foot for this. This is a special sewing machine foot that only has one “prong” so you can get very close to a zipper (or your bit of cord, in this case).
And that’s it! With my custom piping all finished, I was ready to use it in my sewing project. Stay tuned for that one…
My attempts to scale back my number of meetups and tech events in 2018 is not exactly going to plan. Six weeks in, I’ve been to 14 different events… which, if I extrapolate, puts me at 120 for the year again. Eeek. But yeah, another four this week!
The first was React Sydney, kicking off 2018 in the new event space at Domain. Organisers Jed and Jess have done a great job building this community over the years. A large crowd turned up to hear from four different speakers.
The first speaker was Alex Reardon> from Atlassian showing off some of the performance enhancements that have been made to react-beautiful-dnd (a library for making beautiful, accessible drag-and-drop lists with React.js). With really big lists (like, say, 500 items), dragging felt sluggish and janky. Alex showed off a few advanced techniques he and his team used to get it feeling snappy and natural. At it’s core, Alex said, optimisation is “about not doing things you don’t need to do.”
The second talk was from Ajain Vivek from Yahoo7. Ajain’s fascinating talk was about rethinking how the state of your app stored in an object tree inside a single store can be transformed to memory model. He started off by talking about how human memory works, and how that could translate to a storage model for React. He finished with a demo that earned him applause from the audience.
The third talk was from Lucas Chen, visiting from Brisbane. Lucas walked us through what’s new in React 16 (aka React Fiber). In a nutshell, there’s been a full rewrite but the API remains the same. Ultimately that means not much has changed in terms of your code, but it got faster! He also gave advice on how you can prepare for future changes.
The final talk of the night was a last minute addition from another Atlassian speaker – Jamie Kyle. (Coincidentally, Jamie is responsible for at least part of my Twenty addiction because he kept tweeting photos at me of screenshots where he’d scored multiple 20’s. 😂)
Jamie demoed his new tool Unstated.io (“Because it’s a JavaScript library I had to buy a .io domain. That was a really good use of $65…”), a tool for sharing state between React components. Simple, short, and useful!
My second event for the week was the Sydney Data Science Breakfast meetup. The theme for this meetup was “AI will take our jobs and that’s ok,” and as you might expect it drew quite a crowd!
The main speaker was Tomer Garzberg of Gronade, reprising his TED talk from this past December. Tomer began by describing factories in China that are entirely dark with no aircon or running water, and where workers labour 24-7. The catch is that all of the workers are robots. This scenario is becoming more and more common, and soon even white collar jobs will begin to be automated away.
After his entertaining talk, Tomer joined three others for a panel discussion: Michael Allright from The Minerva Collective, Tim Garnsey from Verge Labs, and Peter Xing from KPMG. The audience peppered them with questions about the ethics of machine learning and AI, the economic impacts of replacing humans with robots, and how individuals and companies should cope with the coming disruption.
My third event for the week was a brand new meetup: Big Data: Engineers and Scientists. Preact Recruitment are hosting these events and they’ve definitely gotten them off to a good start. It’s always nice to attend a meetup in the beautiful event space at Campaign Monitor!
The first speaker was Simon Aubury from IAG talking about using Kafka to build streaming data pipelines. This was similar to the talk I heard Matt Howlett give a few weeks back, but Simon included lots of architecture examples that really helped everyone understand why Kafka is so useful. He also mentioned KSQL, which is still in developer preview but has a lot of folks very excited about its potential.
The second talk of the night was a counterpoint to the first. Raul Beristain from Vocus Communications spoke about SQL on Hadoop using Impala, and what are the pros and cons of this approach. Sometimes the data you’re saving isn’t going to be updated later – like support call logs – so you don’t need a system that supports those transactions.
The third and final talk was by Campaign Monitor’s own Binzi Cao. Binzo spoke at length about Spark SQL and using it to build a rules engine. He showed off some great examples where Spark SQL can make your life easier, like normalising timestamps from disparate data sources.
My final event of the week was a hands-on Scala workshop hosted by Women Who Code Sydney at Quantium. I figured after my three-day intensive Haskell workshop, I should keep up my functional programming studies, right? 😜
There were so many attendees we had to split over two different conference rooms! Marina was our facilitator and walked us through some exercises to build a CLI party planner application. Happily, I found that my experience in the Haskell workshop really helped conceptually with some of the things we did. Where I got hung up was on the particular Scala syntax, and my lack of knowledge around functions available in the core library. (That went for everyone, though.) I did manage to solve the last one entirely on my own, which resulted in a happy dance in my chair! 💃
Of course, it didn’t help that Quantium’s offices are amazing. They opened the blinds in the conference room during lunch, and WHOA. It’s a good thing I don’t work in this office. I’d stare at that view every day.
Other Stuff
I was nominated as one of DevDiner‘s Emerging Tech Inspirations for 2017! Thank you so much to whoever voted for me. That was unexpected and really made my week. ❤
I’ve done my fair share of griping about the stupid share bikes littered all over Sydney.
Yesterday though, I realised I had the perfect use case for one. The Snook’s office was having a party over at the Entertainment Quarter, and though it isn’t far from our house, it’s kind of a pain in the ass to get to on public transport. And sure, I could ride my own bike over there, but then I planned on having some beers and taking the bus back with the Snook which ruled that out. A one-way rental on a share bike seemed like the perfect solution!
First things first – which of the (many) options to choose from? I googled “Sydney share bike review” and found this article in The Australian which indicates that Mobike (the orange and silver one) and Ofo (the yellow one) were the best in terms of build quality. I quickly installed the Mobike app. Next I grabbed my own helmet – no head lice for me, thank you! Then I just needed to locate the nearest bike. OH RIGHT, THERE ARE LIKE EIGHT ON THE FOOTPATH ON MY STREET RIGHT NOW.
I used the app to unlock the nearest Mobike, which was painless and honestly kind of neat how it worked. Then I raised up the seat as high as it would go. Hm. First problem. This felt pretty low. (For the record, I’m 5’10” / 1.78m with longish legs. Tall, but not freakishly so.) I persevered though, and took a quick photo to send to the Snook (who was already at the party) to tell him to expect me in 25 minutes.
SEE? I GOT ON!
Then I headed off through Chippendale. About thirty seconds later, I went to change gears and discovered THIS BIKE HAS NO GEARS. The handlebar control that I thought was a gear shifter is just a bell. How can you offer bikes in Sydney without gears?? We’re not Santa Monica. We have HILLS. Oh, and did I mention this bike was HEAVY AS HELL? No way was I puffing through the back streets of Surry Hills on a too-small tank of a bike with no gears. I pulled over at the nearest pile of share bikes to chuck the Mobike and try another. I’d made it three blocks.
After locking that one up, I switched to an Ofo (the yellow one). The seat went a little higher on this one. Still not as high as I need, but better. Also – it has gears! I felt optimistic. I headed off through Redfern and Surry Hills.
Well. My 25 minute ride actually took me 35 minutes, and that’s not counting the couple of times I stopped for a drink of water. (It was a hot and sunny day.) Even with gears, that heavy-ass, still-too-tiny bike was murder on the hills. I even ended up walking it on a couple. I finally made it to the Entertainment Quarter though, parked, and staggered into the party – sweaty and dazed and in desperate need of a beer. On the upside, neither bike ride actually cost me anything as they’ve all got introductory specials on right now.
Results of experiment
Scenario: This was the most optimal use case I could think of for me to use a share bike – a short, one-way trip to a location inconvenient for public transport.
Good stuff: It was free. The apps were easy-to-use for unlocking the bikes. (I didn’t bother using them to find a bike since, as I previously mentioned, THEY’RE BLOODY EVERYWHERE.) I didn’t have to worry about getting my bike home or making sure somebody didn’t steal it.
Bad stuff: The bikes weigh a ton. They’re too small for people on the taller side of the bell curve. Some of them have no gears, and the ones that do don’t have very many, resulting in a painful, sweaty, very difficult ride. And then there’s the whole helmet situation (public lice helmet vs. no helmet at all), of which the only remedy is to bring your own (which you then have to carry around with you).
So yeah. That was my one experiment on a share bike. Now we can shoot them all into the sun. 🚲🚀☀
