Two years later

I see that the last entry was August 2011… nearly two years ago, ahem. Which, for an explanation, I can only offer that I was three months pregnant at the time. Shortly afterwards I acquired carpal tunnel syndrome – appropriately, like having pins and needles stuck in your fingers. I did make something in January 2012, shortly before Jack was born (a child’s apron), but it was more pain less pleasure. And then of course, the sewing table made way for the cot, the sewing machine was shoved under a chair and the long, lazy hours of leisure vanished in a flurry of nappies. Even if I’d had a moment, I was too scared he’d hoover up any debris I dropped on the floor, as he had a wont to do, prompting our first trip to A&E . Only when he was 14 months did I feel the time had come, and booked in a sewing weekend at Mum’s, only for Sam to ring to say they were on their way to A&E once again. Fortunately all was well, and I get round to the business I’d come for. It felt weird switching on the machine. I wasn’t even sure it still worked. But of course it did. And it felt great to be sewing again. I hadn’t realised I’d missed it, but found myself relaxing as I was cutting out a pattern I downloaded from the Internet for some ‘shortalls’ – short dungarees. Partly that could have been because there wasn’t a boisterous toddler in the background. But mostly it was doing something I enjoy, with no time pressure, no need to worry about dropping pins on the floor – and the pleasure of having something to show for it at the end of the day. In this case, a pair of trousers covered in horses and cows and pigs that would have suited Old McDonald in his yoof. I brought them home, and only just managed to shoe-horn Jack into them, despite the pattern saying they were for a three-year-old. So there we are. Twenty-four hours of work for an item of clothing he’ll wear for twenty-four hours. Worth it? Absolutely.

A Bib for S

And again the time slips by and the machine lies dormant. It had to come out this weekend though; the arrival of a new baby rapidly getting not-so-new and still I hadn’t made anything for it. Which, admittedly, little ‘S’ probably wasn’t that bothered about, but I was. The trouble was I couldn’t think of the right idea. Before he was born – and before I knew the full extent of his name – I wanted to make him a hanging mobile of the letters of his name, which I thought would be cute. Then, when I realised he had a seven-letter name, I thought that that had passed the point of cute and was now a bit clunky – and I suddenly thought that, regardless of little S, his very fashion particular mother might find it a tad ‘du trop’ . So I dithered and procrastinated and ended up not doing anything at all. Until I realised that I was overthinking the whole matter. What does a baby really need? A bib, of course. And his mother is obsessed with Biba… Bib, Bib-a… The answer was obvious. I had just the right fabric for the job and the machine, pleased to be in use after all this time, ran it up in no time. All that was left to try it out on that certain ‘S’ and see what the reaction was…

Sixties revival courtesy of Amy Butler

Collared

Bank holiday morning dawned and I pulled out the pattern, slightly dismayed by the immensely complicated drawings and instructions. It quickly became apparent that my measly metre of fabric would never yield the big collar, two sleeves, front and back with extra button-hole allowance that the pattern called for.
I didn't have a back-up fabric or a back-up plan. I'd have to make do - if I got rid of the sleeves, made the collar from a different fabric and replaced the button-holes with a zip it might just work.
By breathing in hard, I managed, just to cut out the pieces I needed - noticing the tiny tears on the pattern where Mum's pins had been, once upon a time.
Next I got the machine out and could see immediately that the needle was blunt. Which isn't surprising, as I haven’t changed it in the time I’ve had it - worried that if I took it out, I’d never get it back in again. It was actually surprisingly easy. Until the brand new needle crunched down onto the metal of the zip and shattered.
With another new needle in, I ploughed on - six long tucks at the front of the dress, zip at the back, then joined at the shoulders and sewed down the side before putting facing in where the sleeves should have been. The trickiest part was the collar. I cut out two giant white bat wings and sewed them together, then tried to figure out how to attach them.
Use bias binding, the pattern said. What bias binding? I realised they expected you to make your own. All I had left was a long, thin offcut of fabric which I eked as best as I could into a semblance of bias binding. It wasn't cut on the bias though, something crucial, as I realised when trying to attach it to the collar and finding that it wouldn't bend or stretch to the shape of the neckline.
On the inside it was more like a dog collar. On the outside, it looked like a gigantic pair of wings - all set to whisk us off for Never Never land.

The Pattern that Never Grew Up

I’d been a bit dubious about going back to the machine, haunted by memories of the horrible noise it made before freezing up on me. Not wanting it to happen again, I put off using it. And put it off. And put it off. Even with two long bank holidays coming up I still had the fear. Then Mum turned up on the doorstep with a clutch of old patterns and an expectant look in her eye.
Why don't you try one of these? she asked, hopefully.
I had a quick browse to keep her happy and, amidst the puff sleeves and flounces, found a shift dress with short sleeves and Peter Pan collar. I know the jury's out on whether a collar named after a boy who never grew up has a place in grown-up fashion but I liked it in combination with the short dress.
'I could use the Amy Butler fabric...' I thought, remembering the green and yellow geometric patterned fabric stashed away for a rainy day and starting to feel a teeny bit excited.
Funny though, I mused, fingering the 6 shilling pattern with its Army and Navy store stamp on the cover. The pattern dates back to when Mum was my age, probably to before I was even born. It, like Peter Pan, is frozen in time - we, on the other hand, have both grown-up.

Pirates and Pigs

Why are pirates called pirates? Because they arrrrrrrrrrrrr. For a little boy’s second birthday I made a cushion using pirate fabric for the 2. For his third birthday, an apron using the same fabric for the 3. Sadly there’s none left to make him a 4 – but perhaps that's just as well, as what he actually loves most in the world is Peppa Pig.

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.

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.