Making Mountains

So you want to take a present to some people you haven’t seen in two years, who live in a swish Swiss ski resort, and who have impeccable taste. Play it safe with chocolates you say? Come on, this is the land of Toblerone. A chocolate shaped like a mountain really cannot be improved upon. Flowers? You’ve heard the edelweiss song – they’ve got it blooming up to their eyeballs. No, it has to be something different… something unusual… something not available in the haute Alpine High Street.
Of course. The answer is obvious when you think about it. Just take a little blue fabric, a smattering of cherries, some wadding and a hastily sketched outline of Switzerland’s most famous mountain. Throw it all together, put a couple of eggs on to boil and there you have it: miniature Matterhorn egg cosies. Different? Yes. Unusual? Yes. Utterly Useless? Of course. The perfect gift in so many ways... and no, I don't expect we'll be invited back.

Some gentle TLC

It’s been a long, dark winter for sewing. Partly because there’ve been other things going on, and partly because I was scared to go back to the Machine. I broke it you see. Or thought I broke it – it kept making a horrible noise and swallowing up the fabric and regurgitating it in chewed-up pellets. Hungry? More like angry. After 30 years of faithful service, the Machine had just had enough and was putting its foot down.
‘I broke the Machine,’ I wailed, feeling like I’d committed a small, mechanical murder.
‘I’m sure it’s not broken,’ Mum reassured me. ‘It just doesn’t like some kinds of cotton.’
She had a fiddle and the noises stopped. It emerged that there was nothing physically wrong with the Machine – it just didn’t like being taken for granted. Phew, I thought. Mechanical issues are beyond me. Stroppiness I can relate to. So I did the only thing you can do in such situations – I soothed and coaxed, carried out a long-overdue de-fluffing, bought some brand new non-scratchy cotton and generally acted the dutiful owner. The next time I switched the Machine on it purred like a pussycat.
Forgiven, I thought. For now…

On a Zip and a Prayer

I’m like a child in a sweet shop with sewing shops; nose squished against the window, breath frosting the glass, saliva drooling down my chin over the colourful, unattainable treats inside.
Then I remember the door.
Recently, I went to see Roz, at Sew Much Fun. You can’t just ‘pop in’ with her - once you cross that threshold into a land of fleecy cupcakes, flat-packed owls and cosy chaos it’s impossible to leave. I just wanted a couple of buttons and ended up staying all afternoon. Some, making whole outfits, have been there for years.
I love it. It’s not cheap, but you can always get what you’re looking for, or a good enough substitute. Orange buttons? Here’s a jarful.
As I rummaged looking for three identical ones (there were two of every single kind, just not three) we got into a conversation about cutting corners. Hard though it is to admit it, I’ve done with sewing what I always do with any new project. Learn a few basics, rush in, make a little headway and then hit a wall which I won’t be able to climb unless I slow down and learn to do things properly.
Like putting in a zip. I’ve been either winging it so far or avoiding the necessity of putting one in (nothing wrong with pulling something over your head, is there? Even if it does give you a flat face). I don’t even use the zip foot because it’s far too scary and, well, it’s just easier not to so I use the normal foot instead and it can’t get anywhere near close enough, leaving a huge margin.
Then there’s tacking. I know that, like pension plans and Brussel sprouts, the laborious needle and thread system is there for my own good. It’s just much quicker to skip the tacking and go straight from pin to sew. Who’s going to notice the odd bit of bunching here and there and, honestly, why would they even care?
The trouble is that I notice and I care. I know where the faults lie, and I know they’ll just get worse. Take the three orange buttons, and by extension the dress they were destined for. It had started off so well. I bought the fabric on a day out in a little shop in Brighton’s lanes, a lovely bright blue linen/cotton mix. For the pattern I borrowed a dress from someone at work that I’d always loved (the dress, not the person), made with triangles and hanging down to asymmetrical points. From this I made a rough newspaper pattern and a diagram that could pass as instructions.
The problem came when I tried to assemble it. Because my pattern was so haphazard the triangles didn’t meet up. The bodice was too wide and I had no idea how to attach the straps. Oh, and the zip was a disaster – one line of stitching far wider than the other, and such an ugly mess. It served its function, ie doing up and undoing, but was pretty shoddy workmanship.
You know how you always know when a cake is homemade because the top slopes to once side and you can see knife marks in the icing? Well, that’s what the dress ended up like, even with the addition of orange buttons. Surely the aim is for people at least to assume you bought the dress in the shops. If the dress quite clearly isn’t fit for sale then should you even be wearing it in public…
One comment made me laugh though.
‘You’ve done the zip really well!’. Ha! Which either meant the person hadn’t looked at it properly. Or they were being kind. Or they honestly thought that was the best I could do.
Whichever it was, it was time to go back to the drawing board. Less time staring into shop windows. More, shudder, zip time.

The bag lady

I’m really not much of a bag lady. Some ladies have hundreds, I have just a few and tend to stick to only one, small shoulder bag with enough room to squeeze the bare essentials and a book into. That was my bag lot and I was content with it. Then I was given the Cath Kidston ‘Sew’ book for Christmas which came with a free bag to make, complete with cut-out fabric, buttons and even label to sew on. It was practically ready made so, even though the prospect didn’t thrill me, I thought I’d assemble it and see what it was all about. The pattern was incredibly simple, but clever, and looked almost professional. It came out much smaller than I’d imagined, certainly not book squeezable, and with a distinctive Cath Kidston floweriness that isn't really me.
I wonder, I thought, bag lust suddenly seizing me. Perhaps I could make a bag similar to this, but bigger, and use fabric that I actually like…
I dug around in the material bag and pulled out some vivid, Fanta orange corduroy that saw brief light of day once in the antlers of a moose. It was quite flimsy fabric compared to the original, so I decided to add a green floral lining and, in a fit of daring, to incorporate an internal zip for valuables. The actual making of the bag was easy. Trying to slot in the zip was a nightmare that I quickly regretted, but persevered with anyway. I sewed the whole lot together, added a few woolly flowers for good measure, and hey presto. A bag truly fit for a bag lady.

The minty paradise dress

Gardens and Mazes

The last time I went to John Lewis to look for fabric I was disappointed. Then I heard that Peter Jones had a good selection and trotted down to Sloane Square to investigate. First impressions didn’t live up to the vast, Aladdin’s cave of floor-to-ceiling splendour that I’d imagined, but there were quite a few fabrics that I liked, and two that I just couldn’t choose between. Both were Amy Butler and both were green – one, Garden Maze, was an eye-boggling geometric pattern while the other, Paradise Garden Mint, was a psychedelic jungle of swirling hippy dippy flowers. Unable to resist temptation, I bought them both, thinking to make a dress from one or the other.
I thought, and thought, and then decided, scary though the idea was, to take the leap. The last (and only) time I had made a dress I’d had training wheels on, so to speak, as Mum was on hand with advice, Diet Coke and the Unpicker. Now I would be going solo with nothing to stop me spilling out of the saddle.
A daunting prospect but I leapt anyway, taking the whirly swirly material and unfolding it onto the floor. With so much going on, a simple pattern was best, and I dug out one that once upon a time yielded my blue haggis dog dress – just two panels, front and back, a zip and a couple of darts.
At the time it was just a disposable, tongue-in-cheek summer dress but I ended up keeping it much longer, so long in fact that the haggis dog, from being just a humble Scottie, had been adopted as the symbol of handbag-and-shoe-emporium Radley, giving my frock an unasked for expensive allure.
I digress. I hadn’t realised, when buying the fabric, that I’d spend quite so long landscape gardening it – trying to get a line of flowers dead in the centre on both sides. Having done that, I sewed in the zip first, still too nervous to use the zip foot and ending up with a much-too-wide margin. After sewing darts into the front, I tacked the two pieces together and by some miracle it was more or less the right size. The hardest, fiddliest, awkwardest part was the straps. Supposed to be about 2cm wide, I sewed them slightly narrower than that and was faced with the almost impossible task of turning them inside out. I had a long, barbecue skewer-like implement with a hook on the end designed to help, but the fabric proved too thick and resistant. In the end I had to pull it through by finger, millimetre by unyielding millimetre, a job which took several hours of my life that I’ll never get back and ruined my nails.
Done, in the end, the straps were sewn on, when, to my horror I discovered that one of the straps was thinner than the other. Fat strap, thin strap. And don’t say you’d never know, because I know. And so do you now.
But still, it could have been worse. Whilst not quite a utopian paradise, I’m still quite pleased with my minty garden. It’s not perfect, but it’s wearable, and I doubt I’ll ever see anyone walking down the street wearing exactly the same pattern-fabric-strap combination. It inspired me to keep up the gardening… now I just need to figure out exactly what to do with the maze.

My Own Label

Talking of labels, Mum gave me an envelope the other day with an excited expression on her face.
‘I couldn’t wait until Christmas,’ she said.
‘I’m glad,’ I replied, given that it was over six months away at the time, and, no matter what the envelope contained, that was far too long to wait to find out.
I tore it open and shrieked. It was my very own set of Moose and the Machine labels! Professionally made, just like the ones we used to sew into PE kits, strip after strip of of curly purple writing and even a little design of a sewing machine on the side! Much as I loved the Honour Original ones I’d inherited, they paled at the sight of these; mine, my very own precioussssss.
I sewed the first one into my new brown skirt, the second into my sister’s red skirt. The rest I’ll sew into other things, as yet unmade, unplanned, non-existent – yet no longer anonymous.