Crabby about pockets -- amen!

One of my art pals sent me links to a bunch of articles about pockets -- namely, rants about how the pockets in women's clothing are always much smaller than those in men's clothing.  I read them all and found myself getting madder the more I read.  Because they are so right!!

Read the best ones here, and here.

Fortunately those of us who know how to sew can remedy the situation.  I can't count the number of readymade garments that I have augmented with better pockets, or pattern-made garments that I have improved with more pockets.  Among my greatest hits was a pair of pants that I cut off to knee-length, then used the cut-off fabric to put huge cargo pockets on both thighs.

In my closet right now are a pair of jeans with the shallowest pockets I've seen in ages. 

I added five inches in length to the right-hand one just before I embarked on a trip (but never got around to doing the same with the other one).



And a suede-like shirt that had no pockets at all!  What were they thinking!!  Even if you carry a handbag, which I don't, where do you put a Kleenex or a Chapstick?

Fortunately the shirt had a horizontal seam right about where the top of a pocket should fall.  I opened the seam, added a big pocket in a matching batik palette, made a button loop out of the batik and used the extra button from the little plastic envelope.

Hah!  Outsmarted the product police!

Lingerie tales -- outwitting the product police

The product police have several branches; besides the guys who keep track of products you love and take them out of production, there are some who keep track of products you love and introduce design flaws.  I'm sorry to say that the second bunch have long been active with the bras that I have worn for a long time.  (Male readers with delicate sensibilities might want to take a pass on the rest of this post.)

The bra straps on this model are made by folding some tricot knit around a base and fusing the edges together on the back side.  Unfortunately, long before the bra is ready to be discarded, the fusing starts to come undone and the two halves ooze outward, exposing a line of scratchy used glue that does not feel nice against your shoulder.

I should point out that I am the descendant of the Princess known for her relationship with the Pea.  I hate little external irregularities that impinge upon my perfect, sensitive body.  I always cut out the labels from my clothing (irritating on the back of my neck), can't wear shoes with thread ends on the inside, can't sleep if there's a wrinkle in the mattress pad.  So a line of scratchy stuff over my shoulder will drive me crazy.  Over the years I have used various techniques to repair these straps by pulling the tricot edges back together, some involving hand sewing, others involving careful pinning and machine stitching.

A past repair

This week I took another culprit to my studio, resigned to spending a half hour fixing it.  But inspiration struck.  Why repair the strap when I could just turn it upside down?  I cut the stitching that held the bra strap to the back of the bra, unthreaded the other end of the strap from its metal ring, turned the strap upside down, rethreaded it, and stitched it back to the bra the other way up. Total time, maybe five minutes, of which one was figuring out whether it would really work and one was rethreading the machine with the right color.

Before: beautiful side up; scratchy side against my shoulder

After:  scratchy side up; beautiful side against my shoulder

Take that, product police!!

Good news and bad news at the fabric shop

I try to avoid fabric stores, especially the big national chains, unless I really have to.  About the only things I've bought much of in the last few years are solids, and I try to buy staples like thread and batting in bulk, often by mail, so my trips to the store are limited.  Thank heaven -- I hate retail establishments and I hate shopping.

But yesterday I was in need.  I just finished quilting Top #1 for my Quilt National entry, and that used up my last big piece of wide drapery-weight cotton that could be used as backing.  To move on to Top #2, I needed some more fabric for a back.  Armed with a 50% coupon I headed off to the Big Fabric Store.

Let's start with the good news.  At least I'm going to regard it as good news.  I found some stripes!!!  Not red and white, which is always in stock, and not even blue and white, which I had bought a yard of at a pre-July 4 sale.

These were browns and dark reds, plus another yard of a yellow-and-red I had gotten a few months ago and used plenty of in my striped quilt, just finished.  I wish I had found these darker stripes three weeks ago when I was making the dark half of Top #2, but at least I'll have them on hand for the next time.

But on to the bad news.  At least I regard it as bad news -- probably the CEO of the Big Fabric Store will break out in smiles when he reads it.

I've watched thousands of yards of fabric being cut during my lifetime, and I have never seen a clerk as ostentatiously stingy as the one who waited on me yesterday.   With each piece of fabric she spent at least 30 seconds lining up the cut edge of the fabric with the line on the left of the yardstick, tugging and pushing the bolt so not a single loose thread protruded beyond.  When she had to cut more than a yard, she fussed and fiddled with her thumbnail to make sure she didn't grab an eighth-inch too much, or place it back on the line an eighth-inch too far.

For one piece of fabric I told her I would take the entire length left on the bolt.  She measured it as one yard, 28 1/2 inches, then converted it with her calculator to 1.792 yards.

One piece of fabric had gotten wrinkled at the cut end, and after she fiddled with it a bit I noticed that she was getting ready to cut two inches off the cut end.  Ordinarily I would probably have watched with curiosity to see what was going on, but I was really getting annoyed by this time.

I asked her why she was going to cut it.  Because it was all wrinkled and this would give her a clean edge to measure from.

Why don't you just cut my yard without trimming off the end?  Because that would cause our inventory to come out wrong.  We have to keep track of the shrinkage.

Were you going to throw the two inches away?  No, it would go into a bin to check against inventory.

Having detected my annoyance, she decided to change course and spent a full minute smoothing out the wrinkled edge and lining it up carefully.  After a great deal of back-and-forth nudging I said, "God forbid you should give me an extra quarter-inch."

At which point she righteously sniffed "well, if we give you a quarter-inch extra and the next person a quarter-inch extra and everybody else a quarter-inch extra it would really mount up.  You have no idea how much we lose from shrinkage."

Well, she's right.  But the policy seems like a good example of penny-wise, pound-foolish.  For one thing, it takes an awful lot of time to push and pull to prevent giving away that extra quarter-inch.  I had previously spent at least ten minutes leafing through some truly awful scrapbooking magazines while waiting for my turn at the cutting table, while the clerks fussed and fiddled to keep from giving other people an extra quarter-inch.  We all know that the customers' time means nothing to the Big Fabric Store accountants, but how about the clerks' time?  How about the time that somebody was going to have to spend to measure that wrinkled two inches and tote it up for inventory?  And I thought retail shrinkage mostly comes from shoplifting or employee theft, not from inaccurate fabric measurement.

More important, this kind of stingy behavior tends to annoy the customers, already testy from ten minutes worth of awful scrapbooking magazines.  There's a concept in retailing called lagniappe, a little bit of extra product that the vendor gives away for customer goodwill.  Whether it's the chips and salsa at the Mexican restaurant or the cheese sample at the grocery store, this makes people happy and, supposedly, willing to keep that wallet open a little more and/or come back again soon.

For most of the thousands of yards of fabric I've purchased in my life, clerks have been fair in their measurements but on the generous side.  An extra half-inch in the grab, rounding the end of the bolt down to the nearest eighth-yard instead of measuring it to three decimal places.  Did that practice send their stores into bankruptcy?  I don't know, but it sure did bring me back to buy another hundred yards of fabric.  By contrast, I'm really looking forward to not patronizing the Big Fabric Store any time soon.

Spam police

If you are a blogger, or if you hang out in places real or virtual where bloggers occasionally discuss their nasty habit, you know that Google is not universally loved.  (Funny how it used to be fashionable to hate the phone company, then to hate Microsoft, and now Google -- all institutions without which life as we know it wouldn't be as we know it.)

Currently those of us who use the Google Blogger platform are wrestling with a new interface.  For weeks ominous messages have been popping up on our pages, announcing that the new interface is Coming Soon, and why don't we try it, it'll be wonderful!  You guessed it, there are still a few bugs.  The new interface won't work with certain browsers (I allowed my sons to talk me into substituting Chrome for Internet Explorer, and so far that's working well).

And the capability to make "scheduled posts" has disappeared for many of us, including me.  This feature allows me to write a post, choose a future day and time for it to be published on the blog, and then sure enough, it shows up on schedule, whether I'm asleep or under anesthesia or in the Amazon or whatever.  Surely you didn't think I get up every morning well before 7 am just to make blog posts, did you?

Or at least that's what it used to do.  Google's geeks are supposedly working on this problem, but it's been almost two weeks and no progress yet.  So my posts are showing up either late at night or much later in the morning, whenever I am actually at the computer.

But enough badmouthing Sergey and Larry -- I want to say something nice about them.  A couple of months  ago another New Improved Feature appeared on our blogs, whether we wanted it or not, making it tougher for readers to prove they are humans and therefore allowed to leave comments.  I had chosen that feature long ago when I set up my blog, and it didn't seem to be too difficult for people to comply.  But all of a sudden the captchas were much more illegible, and there were two instead of one, and people started complaining on some email lists that they couldn't cope.

I had noticed that Blogger had a storage bin behind the regular comments page where it stashed spam.  When I had captchas there was never anything in that bin, but I thought I'd try an experiment: I turned the captcha feature off and waited to see if my blog would be inundated with spam.  And now the good news: in two months the spam catcher has let only one questionable comment through its net.  It has erroneously caught two or three legitimate comments, but I check that folder every time I sit down at the computer.  So my apologies if the spam police have subjected you to false arrest -- I'll get you out of jail as soon as I notice you're in there.

While I'm deleting the real spam, I scan the comments to see what loathsome products and services are being peddled.  And this has proven to be more interesting than you might think.  I'll tell you more in a later post.

Another reason to hate THEM

I haven't had a good rant on this blog in months but today's the day.  I woke up this morning, sat down at the computer, and discovered that while I slept the people at Google (I think -- although you can never discount the possibility that it's the people at Microsoft) had totally screwed up my settings for the internet.

In the olden days (and I don't mean the days of manual typewriters, just the good old days before the war in Iraq) you would set your computer the way you liked it, and it stayed that way.  If something got updated, it was up to you to find the update and if you wanted, install it.  Perhaps you missed something nifty for a while, or forever, but if you liked what your software did and how it was configured, you got to keep it as long as you liked.

Now your computer is never safe from THEM.  While you sleep, they sneak in and make things better.   Whether or not you think they're better or not, you're stuck with them, at least until you manage to turn them off.  Which is not always possible. 

Today's "improvement" has changed the way my internet screen looks.  The tabs aren't where I look for them.  The blogger interface works different.  I can't find the "history" listing at all, so if I want to reconstruct where I read that interesting blog post day before yesterday, I'm s.o.l.  I suspect there are other features of this update that I will dislike when I discover them. 

I hate it when THEY decide that I need help.  First THEY came up with automatic capitalization while I typed away on Word.  Since I often like to make lists that begin with lowercase letters, this was a pain in the neck.  Through several updates I was able to turn that feature off, but then THEY took away that option.  Lately my email program won't let me write, for instance, comment(s).  When it sees the character string (s) it replaces those characters with a smily face, and I throw up.

You may be old enough, or addicted enough to old movies, to remember the old James Coburn flick "The President's Analyst."  The vast conspiracy at the heart of the caper traced back to The Telephone Company (and you may be old enough to remember life before AT&T was busted).  Now we have no Telephone Company, just 12,000 telephone companies.  But THEY are smart enough to regroup as the world changes. 

I hate THEM.  Makes me wish I had a gun so when THEY sneak into my office in the dead of night, I could blow THEM away.  No jury would convict me.

Good news / bad news

Many years ago I bought a pair of small Fiskars scissors, which have been my favorite for small tasks.  I wear them around my neck on a cord whenever I sew, so I don't have to search for a scissors to clip a thread or little bit of fabric.  I acquired a twin pair from a friend who was liquidating her studio.

At some point I realized that both pairs were starting to lose their edge and tried to get replacements, but the product police were onto me.  The scissors I loved were gone.  I bought a similar model but it was like the poor country cousin -- smaller finger holes, a clunkier mechanism, matte finish plastic instead of shiny -- it cut things, yes, but it wasn't My Favorite.

The other day I was in the fabric store and found what looked to be almost the twin of My Favorite!  Had the product police been temporarily off duty in a government shutdown, just like the FAA?  And they were on sale for 50% off, so I bought two pairs.

on the left, My Favorite; on the right, the poor country cousin; in the middle, the new ones

The good news is that almost everything does seem to be exactly like My Favorite, the bad news is they've made the finger holes smaller.  Perhaps the product police have persuaded Fiskars that people are getting skinnier, contrary to all evidence.  I hope I will love the new pair almost as much as I love My Favorite. 

The product police strike again

I had one of those triple-digit grocery runs the other day, during which I went up and down the aisles and contemplated what a busy and productive year the product police have been having. You know the product police – the guys who notice how much you like that brand of salsa and promptly remove it from the sales chain. It often takes me a while to accept the loss of my friends, so for several months I may check the shelves in a vain hope to find them back again.

So yesterday I checked, and sure enough, my salsa still wasn’t there. Neither was my cereal or my hair conditioner, or oil-packed tuna in a pouch. (Let’s don’t even think about what happened a couple of years ago to tuna in a can, which wasn’t discontinued but just made so crummy that I had to upgrade to the pouch in the first place.)

The same thing happened earlier this summer when I needed an emergency wardrobe update before embarking on a big trip. The product police had gotten to my favorite underwear and socks, on their way to pulling all remaining copies of the new shoes I had bought two weeks earlier and fallen in love with and wanted at least one more pair of.

The cops are at work in other areas, too, such as fiber art. Hear the pain of dyers who can no longer buy Prima muslin from Robert Kaufman. Many of us are still in mourning over the untimely death of Walmart black, a cotton that discharged to gray and white – and then, one day, they changed the formula and it went to red instead, just like all the other blacks on the market. Moving to higher-end merchandise, let’s cry for Bernina, which about five years ago decided their presser foot needed a new coupling device, meaning that the 20 specialty feet I had lovingly (and expensively) acquired over the years for my two older machines won’t fit on my newest one.

That’s not to mention the demise of our favorite retailers. Sewing types in my part of the Midwest still have a hard time accepting that Baer Fabrics is no longer in business in Louisville, nor is St. Teresa’s in Cincinnati. Online we’ve lost Web of Thread, and Carmenwarehouse changed hands and stopped being wonderful. I could go on and on – and I’m not even a shopaholic, way more a retailphobe if you must know.

What’s going on? Do manufacturers think we’re all airheads who won’t buy anything unless it’s new, new, new? When did brand loyalty get redefined to mean we should buy anything that says “My Favorite Brand,” even if it isn’t My Favorite Product any more?

We needed a bar of soap last month in Germany, so we dropped in at a small market and had a choice of three, count ’em, three different kinds! One of which turned out to be what we needed. Contrast that to your basic US store, where there would be three, count ‘em, three whole shelves of soap and it would take you five minutes to find the one you want, or more, because they changed half the products since the last time you bought soap.

Yes, US consumers have all the choice in the world, except if they want to buy the same salsa they bought last month. This has to be economically inefficient – all those R&D and advertising costs rolled in to your new kind of salsa, not to mention the administrative burden for the stores, the distributors, the guys who stock the shelves, all of whom have to phase out the old salsa, rearrange the warehouse and the shelves, make up new signs for the new salsa and explain to the unhappy customers that they’ve been screwed.

I hope my malaise isn’t just from getting old and crabby. I think it’s more basic than that, a symptom of what’s wrong with the US consumer economy – too focused on superficial glitz, too lacking in real substance and value. So I take perverse pleasure in mending the holes in my old favorite socks and hoarding my last three yards of Walmart black for the perfect bleach job at some future day.  And speaking of hoarding....

Silkience shampoo -- discontinued seven or eight years ago.  I found six bottles on a bottom shelf in Virginia shortly after it disappeared in my own stores, and bought them all.  This is the last one left.

Tame creme rinse -- discontinued around 1990?  This is my last bottle, hoarded through the years, recently stretched with a little bit of water, and about one rinse away from eternity.