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.