Pink becomes red

It occurred to me, after straightening out my leaning green skirt, that I hadn’t seen my sister wearing her leaning pink one for ages. Perhaps she, too, had got fed up with that persistently falling over feeling and dispatched it to the charity shop, thereby leaving a gap in her wardrobe for something slightly hippy but not wonky.
I know… I thought. I’ll make her a new skirt for her birthday! Granted, she would perhaps rather have had something commercially made and with a label on it, but the idea, once in my head, stuck. This would be a first… making something for someone else. Something they actually might wear out into the wide world – a very different matter from me parading my creations around my more narrow world where people, regardless of what they privately thought, would at least be forgiving. But she had no such dispensation, and also has a serious job, for which she needs serious clothes. The pressure was on…
What colour? She had probably outgrown pink by now. Brown isn’t her colour. I flitted through the rainbow and kept coming back to red, which she wears a lot of. Not the safest bet, but then it was a gamble anyway. The problem was where to buy red cord – most places I looked stocked only muted shades of green and brown. Which reminded me of a game we used to play as children, having discerned that a certain type of man, quite often although not always a Frenchman, always wore a certain type of trouser. Corduroy trousers, to be precise; slightly baggy and either bottle-green or mustard-brown.
The game (exciting childhood that we had) worked on a points basis. I had bottle-green while Nats had mustard-brown and we would score a point whenever we spotted our particular colour.
The game, as far as I am aware, is still ongoing (I’m in the lead by several pairs) but onto red cord now. I found it, eventually, at Cloth House, in Soho. It was expensive, but a lovely, vibrant shade of red with thick, wide pile.
Using my greaseproof paper pattern I cut out more triangles, bigger ones, to make the skirt slightly longer (serious job, like I said). I lined it with red satin, added funky buttons I’d found at All the Fun of the Fair and then worked my fingers to the bone trimming the hem with blanket stitch, the fabric, if possible, even stiffer than before. It came out OK, I think, although I haven’t seen her wear it yet. So there you are. Her pink cord skirt turned into a red one; my green one become brown. If you’ve really got nothing better to do, there might be a game in that somewhere.

Leaning Towers

Three months – where did they go? Oops. I can’t really explain what happened there, so let’s just forget about it shall we. Ahem. Now where were we… Skirting the issue perhaps? That’ll do. For a long time one of my favourite items of clothing was a slightly askew skirt I found in a back alley in Camden. I had taken a wrong turn whilst looking for the Vietnamese noodle bar and found a shop selling a whole array of asymmetrical clothing. I liked the skirts so much I bought two – one in green for me, one in pink for my sister. I wore mine through several dark winters, until in a slightly OCD way I realised I was more and more bothered by the fact that the left side of the skirt was longer than the right, which made me feel like I was perpetually leaning to one side, like a human Tower of Pisa. No one else noticed, of course, it was all in my mind. But that’s the worst place for anything to be.
One day I woke up and thought ‘no more’. I took the skirt out, spread some greaseproof paper over it - not with a view to baking, but with the vague notion that I was ‘taking a pattern’. Instead of following the asymmetric lines though I made sure that both sides were even. The skirt still went down into a point at the front and back, but points that met between my legs and not somewhere left of my thigh.
I could feel the stress inside me easing even as I cut out my nice isosceles triangles from brown cord and stitched them together. The feeling of relief continued as I added a lining of yellow floral cotton (last seen inside the disastrous attempt at a hat), a bright orange zip and sewed on a few coloured buttons for good measure. Then I switched the telly on to re-runs of Friends, and spent a lazy sofa afternoon sewing lime green wool into blanket stitch all along the hem. Up at the sides, down to the points, up again. It took ages and my finger pads were numb for a whole week from pushing the needle through the heavy fabric, but I quite liked the finished effect. Not wonky but still slightly hippy; not so much leaning tower as flower power.

ID

Oh, and I made my own label to sew onto the beanbag. Just in case it ever ended up in an identity parade.

The Deep Blue Beanbag

Long time no blog. I blame the weather. Make hay when the sun shines they say, not useless draw string knicker bags. Even ones with red frilly ribbons.
Anyway, I’m here now, and, harping back on the game show theme, it’s time for a quick recap on blogs past.
Contestant Number One is the Pirate Beanbag: painstakingly put together, lovingly presented yet ultimately rejected in favour of Contestant Number Two… Nothing.
Yes. The unhappy truth is that a beanbag shaped hole in the living room was preferable to my tangible yet puerile offering. Rejection hurts. But time heals, and, reluctant though I was to admit it someone (Sam), somewhere (here) in the great beanbag balance sheet was still owed a Christmas present.
I approached the task gingerly. No fripperous fabrics this time; grown-up velvet would replace the Jolly Roger. Bromley market provided 3 metres of dark blue, the colour of the deepest seas where light doesn’t penetrate and those strange fluorescent fish with eyeballs on stalks live.
Lessons learned from the last attempt, such as making the zip on the cover big enough to get it over the inside beanbag, made the process infinitely easier this time. Less haste, less unpicking was another point of wisdom. And of course the universal truth that you can never have enough balls. I ordered a 6 cubic feet bag from the Internet, which was as voluminous as Santa’s sack but deflated sadly when you sat on it. I topped up with another two cubic feet but still the beanbag – no matter how sophisticated – was saggy.
In the end I swapped the insides with those from the more amply stuffed Pirate Beanbag. A small sacrifice so that our two contestants, so wildly different in character, could live together happily ever after.

Just pants

I’ve thought of a good question for Family Fortunes, that grand old Wensleydale of cheesy gameshows:
What do people commonly put in bags?
Eeeeeeeeh. Shopping? Correct. Rubbish? Correct. Teabags? Er, sorry, I don’t think you’ve understood the question. Teabags, by definition, come with bag already incorporated.
Oh, OK. Knickers then?
Knickers? Why would you put… er… security… over here please… This family are having a laugh.
Dearie me. Perhaps it wasn’t such a good idea after all. I thought the knicker bag might be a nice thing to take away on holiday, a slightly classier means of stowing away your unsightlies than just shoving them into a plastic bag. I must be wrong though. It’s pants.

From name tag to label

Ah the days of name tags, sewn into every garment you owned – even socks if I remember correctly. In blue, red, black, always on white tape: each tag turning the most mundane pair of pants into your very own personal fashion label. The purpose back then was to stop loss/theft (you laugh, but someone stole my wet swimming costume once). As we outgrew the need for branding, Mum was given her own set of grown-up name tags by a friend, to sew into her own homemade fashion house clothing. Twenty years down the line, I proudly sewed one of these into the green dress.
It felt like a historical moment. And, with any luck, should keep the wet cossie thief at bay.

Resurrection

Cushions, bags, aprons; these were all a distraction, a play for time, an avoidance tactic from the big scary, hairy thing waiting under the bridge… the making of a proper dress. Something I might actually wear in public. To work. On the tube. To meet ageing celebrity games show hosts.
Brown dress, your time has come…
I dug out the pattern, still marked in pen with my 20-year-old outline, pin-holes in the butterfly-wing paper where the brown cord had been speared so many moons ago. For this latest outing, I’d chosen green cord. Impossible to recreate the same, perfect dress; resurrection would come in a different colour.
Needing moral support, the Machine and I went to Mum’s house for the weekend and installed ourselves, in a bizarre face-off, on the table opposite her new Quiltmaster Nimbus 2000 (a million functions and it can also fly!).
Barely believing it was possible to construct something socially acceptable from the lifeless expanse of fabric in front of me, I re-pinned through the pin-holes then cut, crunch, crunch, sharp scissors eating the green cord.
‘Pin that bit. Tack this bit.’
The arcane instructions came thick and fast. Not a complicated pattern, but each jab of the needle making the difference between wearable and unbearable - with some parts more crucial than others. Inside hems, not worried about. Sewing the lining onto what would be the neck-line, and therefore requiring more than an element of symmetry had me holding my breath. As did sewing the longest zip in the world down the back.
With Heart FM playing in the background and frequent Diet Coke breaks, a whole day disappeared into a vortex of pinning, tacking, tailor-tacking then unpinning, untacking, willing the unwilling. Some sewing. Some unpicking. An overnight pause and back with a vengeance in the morning.
Having assembled the bulk of the dress, it was the finishing touches which took the time. Squaring up the shoulders, making sure they were the same width. I’d always thought there was some magic formula to dress-making. You got everything into its correct position and beeeep, that was it. The reality, I think, is it’s about trial and errror and retrial and even then the finished garment will never be mathematically precise and perfectly symmetrical. Which must be part of the charm - they say people with wonky faces have the most character. Perhaps not quite as wonky as Picasso would have, but an element of individuality must be good.
So here it is. The green dress. Not as perfect as the brown dress, and with no memories attached to it yet. Except of course the whirr of sewing machines, the buzz of music and chatting, the chink of wine glasses, the satisfaction of a weekend well-spent. Which isn’t such a bad start to life really.