First wool coat in a long time

Hisashiburi no uuru no kooto

Here’s another shirt I shortened the sleeves on. I bought it a few years ago at a thrift shop. I own a few shirts from this brand I bought new (mostly on sale), and it would have been well over 10,000 yen full price. This one had blouse style cuffs. 

The slit backings were a single strip of fabric. The backing was just stitched straight on the slit. 

I shortened the sleeves 4 cm, so I extended the slit 4 cm. Because of the blouse style cuff, the top of the slit didn’t have a v shaped cut. Since there were fewer moving parts, there was a smaller room for error, so it turned out better than the white button up shirt. 

I also shortened the sleeves of a tweed Uniqlo coat. This is my first wool coat in over ten years. I chose this one because of its timeless design and simple, easy-to-alter sleeves. 

What I really wanted was a tailored camel coat, but the only tailored camel coat they have at Uniqlo this season has actual cuffs that button open and closed. Which is awesome, but really difficult to alter nicely so that the buttons and the opening can be salvaged. 

BTW, coats that button open and closed at the cuff are a throwback to the days when doctors made house calls. Patients' homes would be poorly heated in winter, so the doctor would do his (they were all male back then) work wearing his coat with the sleeves rolled up.)  

I ripped the lining from the cuff and turned the sleeve inside out. The cuff had interfacing fused to it, so I peeled it off, shortened the sleeve (about 5 cm), and fused the original facing back on. Then I stitched the (also shortened) lining on the new cuff line. 

I realized after I'd finished one sleeve that I'd bought a book on how to sew your own coat a couple of years back, hoping it would help my alterations. By the time I remembered this, I was so far along that I decided I might as well finish both sleeves the same way so they'd be symmetric. Maybe I'll have the chance to sew my own coat or alter another sleeve one of these days, and the book will be put to good use.

And yes, they ended up crooked, but since the lining is stitched to the cuff inside the sleeve, this time, no one will ever notice. Unless you turn the cuff inside out and look carefully. Which I will let you do if you ask me nicely.

Culture festival

Bunkasai

My Year of Requirement wasn’t all academics and PE. There were some arts-ish things too. One was “Bunkasai.” When I first heard about it, I didn’t get it. Culture festival? Cultural festival? Culture? Which one? Medival Europe? Classical Greece? Ming Dynasty China? Well, apparently, what was supposed to happen was stuff that wasn’t academics and wasn’t sports. So, band, visual arts, drama, home ec club and science club got to showcase what they were doing, plus each class worked on some kind of project. ("Arts festival" might have been a better name for it, but it wasn't exactly art. Science is, well, science, and Home Ec and Shop are Home Ec and Shop.) One class did a haunted house. Another made an original 15-minute movie, complete with their own script. Another made a makeshift planetarium with black trash bags and an overhead projector (remember those?) Our class researched local foods. We called local candy and food businesses to schedule visits and interview people about origins, ingredients, production, and such. We presented our findings in poster format.

(People familiar with Japanese anime might have read stuff about beauty pageants and cafes. Beauty pageants are a university thing. Yes, I said “are.” In this day and age, universities are parading women to be judged for their looks. I mean, seriously. Cafes were not permitted because they involved serving food, which the local Health Department didn’t allow JHS students to do.)

Now, this is in the mid ‘80s. Posters (especially posters in a language that didn’t use a phonetic alphabet like Japanese) meant handwritten posters. The kids with nice handwriting did a lot of the work. They’d (understandably) cry foul. If you knew better, you’d kind of ignore them hoping they’d calm down. But if you didn’t, like me, and meant well, like me, you might volunteer to do some of the handwriting work.  If you’ve seen my English handwriting, you know it’s not too bad. Not breathtakingly beautiful, but neat. Legible. So you might be surprised to know my Japanese handwriting is pretty bad. Legible, but not nice by any means. So I’d meant well, but the poster didn’t turn out as nicely as everyone hoped, and they let me know they were disappointed. Um, ok. Next time, remind me not to try to be nice or fair.

I was in drama club (shut up) and I had a little part in the play we put on. It was a 20-minute performance and pretty much the only performance we did all year. The audience was reasonably respectful. No one messed up. It went all right. Band (wood and brass ensemble) played a few pieces. They were pretty good. Not spectacular by Japanese standards, but good. Probably would have blown away most US high school bands, but the band from my school in Suburbia was pretty put together, so they don’t count.

One thing that really surprised me is that they had band performances. Like, rock band. Like drums and electric guitars and synthesizers. Bands that wanted to perform in the festival auditioned in front of the teachers. Those who passed the audition were allowed to perform in front of the whole school. The audition was mostly about whether the kids had decent grades and attendance and behavior.

Which brings us to the outlaws of the school. Every culture has its outlaws, the “troubled” kids, the ones that have to be different. It was easy to be an outlaw in a Japanese JHS because everyone was so outwardly the same. If you colored your hair you’d be an outlaw. If you wore your skirts longer or shorter, you’d be an outlaw. If you wore pants that were baggier than everyone else’s, you’d be an outlaw. If you ate food other than school lunch during school, you’d be an outlaw. (Of course, cutting classes and giving other kids a hard time and fighting each other and kids from other schools is kind of universal.)

So the outlaws had a band. They auditioned, and the teachers called them not on their lack of musical talent (they were pretty o.k. and seemed reasonably well rehearsed, unlike some of the bands) but their attendance and behavior and their baggy pants and hair that wasn’t black (keep in mind this is Japan and the default hair color is black or normal aging gray, not peroxide yellow). The teachers used the band performance as a bait/ switch to blackmail the outlaws into going through the motions of law-abiding behavior and academics. So, predictably, the kids sat in class and wore the school uniform, including straight leg pants, and colored their hair black, until the day of the performance when they showed up in their baggy trousers and yellow hair and put on the best performance out of all the bands, and then went back to their wicked ways.

One of those kids now has his own company that hires out construction workers. At our JHS reunion, I heard him telling his former teacher that he understood now how hard it was to try to keep young kids from doing stupid things for their own good and protect them from the mistakes they made. The teacher was crying tears of joy. Not all the kids got their afterschool special storyline, but sometimes things work out.

Shortening shirt sleeves

Shatsu no sodetake wo tsumeru

This is an alteration I’d been thinking of doing for some time. I bought a book about shirt alterations ages ago, but I didn’t do anything after reading it. 

When you google “shortening sleeves,” you get info on ripping off the cuff, cutting the sleeve, and stitching the cuff back in place. This is very simple, but it means the sleeve slit will become shorter, making it harder to roll up sleeves. Plus, shirts look nicer with a full length slit.

Behold, the two-year-old white Uniqlo wrinkle-resistant button-up shirt. The sleeves are about 4 cm too long, but it’s a comfy, practical white shirt, so I’ve worn it at least once a week for the entire time I’ve had it. It’s probably due to be replaced, but I decided to do the alterations anyway, as practice, wear it some more, and then buy a new white shirt ;)

If I do the “rip out cuff, cut off sleeve, stitch back together” thing, I’ll land just below the buttonhole on the slit, which would look kind of wrong.

Before doing anything else, I stole a pencil from the Pumpkin Prince’s school pencil case and marked the cuff and slit backings “R” or “L.” Then I ripped the stitches out of the cuff and the slit backings. I had to rip off the button on the slit, but not the cuff.

Then I marked 4 cm above the cuff stitches as the sew line, and 1.5 cm (seam allowance) below that as the cut line. 

 I extended the slit 4 cm, and imitated the V-shaped slit at the top as well as I could.

I then basted the inside slit backing to the seam on the extended slit, and machine stitched it to the sleeve. I made sure the free edge was on the right side (outside) of the sleeve (this took about three tries to get right, but wrinkle-resistant cotton is forgiving). Then I stitched across the top edge of the slit.

 Then, I basted the outside slit backing to the seam, making sure to cover the free edge of the inside slit backing with the triangular edge. Then, again, machine stitching.

(I forgot to take pictures of this part, but this is the same as a lot of other online tutorials, so you can ask Prof. Google for help) I basted the inside of the cuff to the sleeve. The sleeve was, of course, slightly wider at the new seam, so I ended up making wider tucks than the original sleeve to fit the cuff. Then I machine stitched the inside of the cuff to the sleeve, basted the outside cuff to the whole thing, and added top stitching to the outside of the cuff.

Like all my alterations, slightly crooked, but most of the time, “slightly crooked but right length” looks better than “perfectly straight but too long/ wide.”