Hemming on My Lunch Break

All right, career girls. I need your advice. How in the world do you fit sewing into your work week schedules?

I just recently went back to work after a blissful five month period of unemployment. During that time, I mostly just hung out in my sewing room with my cats. My sewing skills improved, I worked on a ton of projects, and I started this blog. The only downside was a far diminished fabric budget. Now I have more cash to support my fabric habit, but less time to support my sewing habit.

I love what I do, but I can't help but feel overextended sometimes. My work requires a lot of reading off-hours. Again, I'm lucky--how many people get paid to read novels? But sewing is what keeps me sane (well, and insane, sometimes) and refreshed for work.

I've started bringing in hand sewing to do on my lunch break. It's kind of fun, actually! I have a cozy little office with a lime green door. I just shut myself in for a bit and take a little handwork break. It doesn't feel like as much of a chore as when I do it at home. There's no sewing machine in sight at the office (though that does give me some ideas!), so I don't think about how much quicker I could be doing something by machine.

So my question is this: how do you juggle a work (or childcare) schedule with a sewing hobby? And a blogging hobby on top of it? I'd love to hear your solutions.

Career Girls

I've been making an interview dress from the reissue of this Simplicity jumper pattern. Don't those girls on the envelope look smart? Do you think they're resentfully commuting to their jobs in the typing pool, just waiting for a marriage proposal so they can quit? Or are they young whippersnappers with CEO dreams?


As I'm honing my career girl image, I keep thinking of the book The Best of Everything by Rona Jaffe. It is the ultimate in scandalous office tales of the 50's. It's like Mad Men, but set in the world of book publishing. And the clothing descriptions are fabulous. Just check out the first paragraph:

You see them every morning at a quarter to nine, rushing out of the maw of the subway tunnel, filing out of Grand Central Stations, crossing Lexington and Park and Madison and Fifth avenues, the hundreds and hundreds of girls . . . They carry the morning newspapers and overstuffed handbags. Some of them are wearing pink or chartreuse fuzzy overcoats and five-year-old ankle-strap shoes and have their hair up in pin curls underneath kercheifs. Some of them are wearing chic black suits (maybe last year's but who can tell?) and kid gloves and are carrying their lunches in violet-sprigged Bonwit Teller paper bags. None of them has enough money.

Oh, the kid gloves and chartreuse overcoats and chic black suits! Doesn't it all seem so glamorous?

The Best of Everything is an awesome and (unintentionally) hilarious book. Caroline Bender, the 20-year-old heroine, gets a job in the typing pool at a book publishing house. Soon she's climbing her way up the corporate ladder. She goes out for multiple double scotches with the sexy office men every evening, yet still manages to read an entire manuscript before the next morning. And all the manuscripts are fabulous and brilliant.

Why couldn't I have worked in publishing in the 50s? Sigh. But then again, the moral of the story is that if you pursue a career as a single gal, you'll get pregnant and fall down a flight of stairs and die. So tragic!