kerry-litka.com|small things considered

I am obsessive compulsive. It’s not in a bad way, for the most part. I inherited this trait from my dad, which is interesting since I didn’t live with him after age 7 and spent next to no time with him during the rest of my life. I see him now at Xmas and that’s about it. My brother reported that I am “just like Dad” because of my hoarding tendencies and compulsive need to keep things in original packaging to a point where things never get used.

My OCD does have some good attributes – specifically, I love organizing things. I also obsess on any given topic or idea to the point that it perpetually consumes me until I have exhausted all available resources on said topic. This proved very useful for my masters thesis – I had all of my journal articles collected, read, summarized, and sorted by topic in a 3 ring binder before the first semester ended. My lit review was over 30 pages and I could recite studies, articles, authors, methods, and subject demographics from memory.

So, back to my OCD and everyday life. I obsess on things, and my current obsession is (duh) sewing. I also am a cheap ass mofo and refuse to throw things away if they can be useful. I refuse to pay a lot for things if I can make a reasonable facsimile cheaper. This stems from my childhood of growing up kinda poor. I remember wanting a Cabbage Patch Kid but my mom couldn’t afford one, so I settled for a cheap imitation Pumpkin Patch Kid instead. It wasn’t the same – it had plastic hands instead of hand sewn cloth ones, but from behind it looked real enough that if I kept it facing me and cradled it just so the other girls in my third grade class thought I finally got one. (I eventually did get my mom to buy me a Preemie, apparently they were cheaper than the full size Cabbage Patch Kids. I still have both the Pumpkin Patch Kid and the Preemie, by the way…again, cannot bear to throw things out).

When I was in middle school my best friend Erika had this really cool Lego set called the Camouflaged Outpost. It was a neat Castle set and I wanted one, but hey…we were poor, and my parents did not spend money foolishly on me. So, I did what any enterprising youngster would do and borrowed Erika’s instruction booklet and cobbled together my own Camouflaged Outpost from obscure Lego pieces that were not part of any one set. Was it an exact replica? No. But did it enable me to play Castle Legos with Erika and not feel like a loser because I only had one set and it was a Modular Space Transporter? Why yes, indeed it did.

This carried through into my cycling career with my creation of the original GhettoCross mountain bike-cyclocross conversion (namely because 1.) I had no money and 2.) I couldn’t get a cross bike to fit me anyways). The GhettoCross was also inspiration for the Ghetto TT bike. Both bikes are still in existence although they have been replaced with authentic versions of what they were trying to mimic.  One could argue that my current TT bike is still a reasonable facsimile of a proper bike since it is just one of my road frames radically adapted for TT use.

What I am getting at here is that I like tinkering with things and trying to build, if not a better mousetrap, my own inexpensive version of a commercial one in order to appease my sense of frugality and my OCD. This is why I like sewing so much – I can see something in a store or a catalog, find a pattern, then buy fabric and try to reproduce it at home.

My sewing started out haphazardly with one cheap ass entry level sewing machine and a few supplies. I have since expanded my tools into a lot more things that I didn’t even know existed 4 months ago but now consider necessities. However, there are still things that I refuse to spend money on. For example, take my sewing kit:

I also reuse various other containers to hold my miscellaneous notions and supplies:

I also don’t have an actual tailor’s ham. I learned after a few garments that pressing seams on things like sleeves required a ham. I didn’t have one and needed to find something that was suitable to get the job done. If not a ham, then why not a cow?

I have taken to collecting vintage patterns, but I realize that every one of them is still too big for me and requires lots of alterations to fit me. I am now retracing my patterns with 4mil mylar to adjust for my alterations – I will use these final copies for future garments. I also have been grading patterns up and down in size for both myself and for others (four friends now want hoodies, and of course my pattern is a size 8/XS and they are all size 12/M). So, in my first attempt at grading an existing pattern up I traced it onto the only large size paper I had available to me at the time.

This worked great and was sturdy enough for slashing and spacing and taping that I bought a whole roll at Lowe’s for $7.99. I now have 120 feet of the stuff. All patterns from this point on will be traced onto this stuff before I begin the mighty project of size adjustments. I can also copy alterations from an existing pattern and make it my master template for future custom patterns for a specific individual.

Storing the mylar patterns is difficult because you can’t fold it. I was rolling them up and taping them shut. Then on Sunday Andy finally got around to cleaning the bathroom and look what I now have:

The great thing about those is there are always new ones becoming available.

My OCD kicks in when it comes to pattern storage. Patterns are removed from the envelope and stored in a larger, sturdier envelope that is labeled with Pattern Number, Description, Company, Vendor, and Size. These are then stored in a collapsible file folder that is rapidly becoming overstuffed, so I need to expand to a filing cabinet or something larger.

I keep the pattern envelopes in presentation sleeves in a 3 ring binder (I am about to expand to a second binder as the first one is overflowing). I stick Post It notes on them indicating fabric choices. I also add magazine and catalog pages of garments I want to reproduce and pair them with the appropriate patterns. This often ends up looking like a Choose Your Own Adventure book (This Bodice with Arm Holes from Simplicity 3378 and Collar from McCalls 5782, need fabric)

Left: to be replicated. Right: not sure why I bought this one

And there it is. I think I have somehow managed to use my issues in a positive way, and organizing patterns and filing them is a lot healthier for my psyche and everyone around me. This is far better than screaming at ninth graders not to mix the crayons or spending my plan period painstakingly separating the modeling clay after they built their subduction zone models so that I could reuse the colored layers again next year.

Seriously, I used to do that.