Sumit's Seattle Scribblings

So once again my blog has moved, hopefully this time for good.  After playing around with many free blogging services, I realized there was a lot more that I wanted to do that just required hosting my own site, so here it is: thatsgreat.org.  I hope to see you all there soon!

On Sunday, I hopped on over to the Oracle Gatherings get-together at Magnuson Park.  Along with the usual great beats and dancing, there was a live performance from Piece, a spoken word artist who apparently won the Seattle Poetry Slam a couple of years ago.  Her rhymes are rhythmically strong as well as meaningful; you can check out her work at her website.

Wow. This guy is really something. I saw him open for The Gossip a few weeks ago, and he really stole the show.    What exactly does he do?  Well, he puts on a track of freaky beats, and then starts freaking out all over the place.   I don't know how else to describe it.  It's beautiful.  It's hilarious.  It's crazy.  But it's pretty awesome.  I finally found him on the web, thanks to Copy (see earlier posting), who he's apparently touring with right now.   Listening is not enough, you have to see the video to get even a rough idea of what he's like.  Take that video, multiply it by 12, and you'll still know nothing.  Just go see him live, and get prepared to get sweat/spit on and love it! Link

I had an old pair of straight leg gap jeans (I know, why buy straight leg), though they were 1969's, which are about the only jeans out there that really fit me well, so I thought instead of tossing them up I'd try to make them more interesting by widening them.  And while widening, why not add some color?  So after a quick trip to JoAnn's and about $3 of fabric (1/2 yard of red/black denim), I came home to set it up.

This turned out to be easier than I'd expected, since the way these jeans (and I believe most jeans) are constructed, the outside-facing seam is a pair of serged edges that come together as a T.  This makes it a particularly opportune location to insert a new panel, and fortunately, this is exactly where I wanted to add the material.  After ripping out the outer seams almost to the hip, I cut the 1/2 yard swath in two lengthwise, giving me two 1/4 yard wide strips.  I pinned the bottom of the panel at the full 1/4 yard width, and then pinned the apex of the panel near the hip.  Next came half an hour of really tedious pinning to get the panels smoothly aligned with the interior edges while watching a lame rerun of Saturday Night Live.  After double stitching each of the strips, I undid enough of the original legs' bottom hem to fold in the new material into one continuous hem.   Finally, I trimmed all the loose ends and ironed the seams flat.

The result is in the picture - not perfect, but better than I'd expected.  Since the jeans were not meant to have this extra width, the fabric folds a little strangely in places, and since the new fabric wasn't broken in, there's a significant shift in roughness from one section to another.  I'm hoping a few wash cycles will smooth both of these small issues out.