Blood, Sweat, and Tears Cashmere

I’m deep in the middle of my research at the moment. I was fortunate enough to get 5 days off at xmas and another 4 days off at New Years, but I will spend the rest of my winter break from school doing approximately 30 Lactate Threshold/VO2 max tests and 90 steady state tests. It’s buckets of fun, and I mean that for real. I get to hook people up to a face mask that does not allow them to breathe through their nose, force them to ride their bike as hard as they can until they practically pass out, and take blood samples from them every 4 minutes. I think that by the end of January I will have been snot on, spat on, and bled on by nearly every female triathlete and time trialist in New England.

I haven’t been sewing much because this semester was brutal in terms of a lack of any free time, but I did manage to complete the two lined wool coats for Andy and myself. When I was purchasing lining fabric for Andy’s coat, I happened across a bolt of super soft wool cashmere stretch blend suiting fabric in charcoal gray. I fell in love with the soft hand, tight weave, and color (I’m a sucker for charcoal gray…it’s probably my favorite clothing color). I bought the last 2.3 yards on the bolt and took it home with no real specific idea for it’s use.

I decided that the wool cashmere had to be made into something special. Originally I was thinking of making one of those Vogue Couturier Paris Originals vintage patterns – something like a nice couture tailored suit. Something like Vogue 1939.

But then I thought that was rather daft, as I have absolutely no where to ever where a dress/coat ensemble like that and I already labored over a dress/coat ensemble that has yet to be worn for the exact same reason – I seldom have a need to wear a matching dress/coat ensemble.

So then I got to thinking about possibly sewing a dress with some of the similar style elements that the Vogue couturier patterns use, but make it something wearable to work or out to a casual restaurant or whatever. So I bought Simplicity 7802 from 1968.

And then I started thinking about that, I decided that I still have no real occasion to wear such a dress because I don’t really work, and depending on what I end up doing when I finish graduate school, there is a good chance that I will end up covered in a lab coat or other people’s body fluids anyway, so again…what’s the point?

As it happens, tonight Andy and I went out to do errands in the middle of a snow storm. We decided to wear soft shell jackets (his is from The NorthFace, mine is from EMS) because, you know, it was snowing and they seemed appropriate for the weather conditions. How wrong we were. We had sort of a warm fall here in New Hampshire and I was wearing a lighter weight jacket right up until December, when it finally got cold enough for a proper winter coat. And, because I was so excited to wear my newly crafted wool Spy Girl coat, I had eschewed my normal EMS winter coat for the last 30 days of cold weather.

Tonight I realized just how warm my wool coat was. I felt every blast of icy wind that hit me as I crossed numerous parking lots. My pathetic soft shell – a coat that had cost well over $100 – was not doing much in the way of keeping me warm, and it wasn’t even that cold out. We had temps in the single digits earlier in the week with wind chills below 0ºF, and as I trudged my way across campus to the lab every day I barely noticed the cold. I guess my hand made coat is not only stylish – it’s currently the warmest thing I own.

Which got me thinking – if I am going to cut into this luxurious cashmere wool blend, I should make something that I will actually wear often. A dress or a suit or a dressy coat is not something that gets much wear in my line of work (that is, not actually working) or climate (cold at least 6 months of the year). I decided that the best use for this cashmere was another coat – something shorter, more fitted, and slightly more casual.

Like…a motorcycle jacket. Fortunately I have a modern Vogue pattern in my collection. It unfortunately lacks an asymmetrical zippered front, but I think I can work around that. I am starting a pattern drafting class on Monday (YAY! Learning to draft patterns to properly fit me…) so I have been holding off on sewing anything since I finished Andy’s coat…everything needs to be redrafted to fit me anyway, I figured I should just wait and get through the 5 week class and avoid any more fitting errors.

But the need for another coat (especially now that they have turned the heat off in my lab for at least a few weeks while they work on the building) seems like a pressing issue. I need to think about this more, but it seems my track record for sewing lined coats so far is good and I like working with wool. And, I could definitely use a warm wool cashmere jacket when I am bustling around a freezing cold lab at 6:30 in the morning, in the dark, swearing at the lactate analyzer for not calibrating correctly.