History comes alive...

It would seem the last tango is for Stella McCartney. This is in her Paris collection as featured in the Independent today... it's the orange dress reborn!

The Last Tango

As a teenager, having outgrown the poncho and needing something else to hide behind, I adopted a uniform of the plainest, dullest clothes I could find. Black jeans, man-sized black T-shirts and a green cardigan that had been washed so many times it was see through, its cuffs frayed and chewed hungrily - the chocolate cake that formed my staple diet apparently not sufficient.
Thank goodness for editorial control. All photos of those dark years have been destroyed. When one surfaced, like a black, brooding blob, at my 30th birthday party it was quickly shoved down my trousers and then on into the bin.
In the knickers of time.
Not that I didn’t like colour; I did. Just not on me. I loved colour for what it was, pure and uncomplicated and mood-changing. Purple was always my favourite, majestic, chocolate-flavoured purple. I longed for something purple. But no, back to black it was, day in, day out. Which made the bright Tango slap at the back of the cupboard even more dangerously fascinating.
A sleeveless mini-dress hand-knitted in orange scratchy wool with a ribbed turtle neck and marmalade satin lining. Many, many sizes too small for me, it truly was the forbidden fruit.
Sigh. Who could wear such a frivolous, beautiful thing?
Mum, that’s who. It was her mini-dress, made when she was a slender size eight teenager by her grandmother, my great-grandmother, the formidable Meme.
Which was odd in itself. Elegant old ladies, especially devout Catholic ones, were supposed to crochet doilies weren’t they? Perhaps frilly head rests at a push. Not glorified boob tubes.
It made me wish I could have known her properly, been old enough to have a proper conversation but she died when I was still a child. I only had the bare bones of family history to work with - the story of how one Trinidad Bonifacia Aguilar, of Spanish descent and one Rene Devise, a Frenchman of lugubrious face and twirly moustache, met and married in pre-war Algeria and, by the circuitous hands of fate, ended up with five modern English great grandchildren.
Our lives couldn’t have been more different. Yet there were some common threads. Black, for instance.
In every photo of the tiny elegant Meme with her fine cheekbones and salt and pepper hair she is wearing black. OK, so hers was crepe and lace and she was in mourning whilst I was just in hiding but still, it was a thread nonetheless.
A thread that if you tugged on, might unravel more secrets.
‘She had immaculate taste,’ Mum told me when I quizzed her. ‘All her clothes were beautiful.’
Before Grandpere died, what did Meme wear I wondered. What beautiful dresses did the young Trinidad dance the tango in whilst war rumbled in the distance? How long were her hemlines and sleeves, before children or grandchildren or even great-grandchildren came on the scene?
The dress can’t tell me. One day I actually managed to squeeze into it, hoping perhaps for clues to the past. But the wool was itchy, the orange unflattering; more than anything it wasn’t my dress. It was made by someone else, for someone else and I had no place wearing it.
Back in the cupboard it went. Whoever the last tango is for, it's not for me.

Out of the cupboard

The orange dress hangs on a lemon door

Elegant detail...

Look at the detail in the skirt. And the woollen belt that pulls it all in. Amazing.

The Jar of Buttons

I've always had a button fetish. Chocolate buttons of course, mmmmm. More especially though the obsession lay with the small round objects holding our trousers up, keeping our straining shirts closed and our chattering lips shut.
It all came flooding back when I saw the glass jar sat on Roz’s counter, filled with bright orange, green and pink sweeties just begging to be licked and sucked and gobbled down. But not so hasty please.
Connoisseurs of buttons will know that it's not pear drops, lemon sherbet or rhubarb and custard that will hit you. Pop a button into your mouth and your Masterchef flavour sensation will be flat, plasticky with a cold, hard edge. Not sweet, but wickedly moreish – ask any child - and all with zero calories.
Not so much the taste; it is the sound of buttons that is so evocative. Most sewing mums will have had a button jar. Ours was an old Birds Eye custard jar with a screwtop lid. I remember the chinking sound of ceramic on glass when you shook it, then the thundering rain as you poured the contents onto the carpet into bright, twinkling mounds. How many hundreds, thousands, millions? Impossible to guess, but if you did you won a goldfish.
Some buttons came in pairs, others in threes. Mostly though they were single, unique, leftovers from long ago sewing projects.
There were exciting buttons, shaped like umbrellas or toadstools. There were vivid red strawberries with raised edges you could run your fingers over. And there were cloth-covered buttons for blouses, soft and spongy and indolent.
On top of that there were big round buttons for coats, translucent, boring buttons for men’s shirts and a few clumsy wooden toggles kindly donated by Paddington Bear.
I’d play with the buttons for hours (yes, I was a special child), feeling the knobbly edges of some, the shiny metal of others. Dividing them into snow drifts, building great pyramids before knocking them down again. Scooping handfuls up like dragon treasure, like sand, like a Willy Wonka bonbon factory before letting them trickle slowly through my fingers back onto the carpet.
Sweet, innocent joy… and now, guess what? I have my own button jar! A Nutella jar, fittingly - into the pot of sweet stuff go the sweetie-like things. Not many yet, a goldfish estimator might say less than 100, but the humble beginnings of a new generation of umbrellas and toadstools.
Chinkety-chink, scoop, mmmm.

The Old Woman Who Lived in the Shoe

‘I need to buy some flesh-coloured felt,’ I announced one Saturday morning.
‘OK,’ said S. ‘Why?’
‘I’m going to make an old woman. To put in a shoe.’
I’d decided that, as a reward for many years hard sewing labour, the least I could do was dedicate my first project to Mum. Not that she’s an old woman. Or that she lives in a shoe. But she likes shoes, and has many, many of them.
I visualised a large, red stiletto taking pride of place and then, tucked inside, a little pepper pot doll. Realistically I knew I wouldn’t have time in the lesson to make bag, shoe and miniature mother so thought I’d ratchet the homework up a notch.
‘Swot,’ S said as we trawled first John Lewis and then Kilburn High Road fruitlessly. We eventually found a square of rather spray-tanned WAG coloured felt in Shepherd’s Bush Market, tucked amidst rolls of garish golden braid and trays full of glistening sequins and feather boas.
A happy afternoon followed, cutting out felt shapes, feeling like a contented child on a rainy Sunday. Then, like an overgrown teacher’s pet, I took the finished result in on Monday.
‘Ah, Vicky made a dolly,’ Roz said, holding up my teeny tiny offering clad in ‘60s shift dress and with matching bouffant hair.
The others had made flowers, flip flops, ships. Flip flops – what a great idea. Practical and funky.
Clutching my dolly sheepishly, I rummaged in the hanging baskets filled with rainbow fragments of fabric until I found what I was looking for. A piece of crimson red velvet screaming courtesan boudoir, with pile as soft as cat fur.
Stroking it hypnotically, my blood rushing at the discovery, I began to realise how sensual fabric can be; how exhilarating to find the exact colour and texture you hadn’t known you were even looking for.
We cut out our shapes and ironed interlining onto them to make them stiffer before zig zagging them onto the squares – in my case of calico – which would become our bags. Then, adjusting her hem to decency length, the shoe’s inhabitant was eased into her new home and her legs mercilessly sewn down. Property boom or bust, this is one dolly who won’t be relocating, relocating, relocating.
After that the sewing of the channel for the crimson red ribbon, and joining the two sides of the bag together was child’s play. No longer so scared of the machine; it, perhaps, not so scared of me.
And there we have it. A draw string bag. Possibly a little small for three-inch stilettos and rather unwieldy – the slightly overstuffed doll leaning forwards, rather as if she wants to jump out of the shoe and back into sanity. But it does what it says on the tin – string drawn open, string drawn closed – and Mum can rest safe in the knowledge that the next time she goes to PE class, nobody is going to take her bag home by mistake.

French seams and Pepper Pots

I started looking forward to Monday evenings. The secret knock on the shop
door and down the rabbit hole into a world of colour and chaos.
Roz would always be behind her desk with a big smile, sewing away at
something or other. Fairy wings for a dog one week, felt dolls in cute
‘60s shift dresses another. Is it freaky to covet the clothes off a
doll's back? Surely not. How could you not want a mini-dress the size
of a pepper pot?!
The next week’s class was all about seams. Open seams, closed seams,
French seams. Not the sexiest part of sewing, but as I've discovered,
you need the basics to build on. Otherwise you end up with the hat.
Maybe one day I'll understand the nuances a little more, perhaps it’ll even become instinctive but right now it's all part of one big jumbled puzzle that needs to be worked out. Every day a new piece of jigsaw slots into place which is exciting but also worrying; sooner or later I’m going to get stuck on the sky.
Valuable Sewing Lesson Number Three. As you sew, so must you iron. I’d had a horrible feeling that might be the case when I saw the ironing board in the corner of Roz's workship, the iron always switched on.
I hate ironing. Never seen the point of it – so what if clothes aren’t entirely flat? The world isn’t flat either.
Unfortunately, in the case of sewing, it would seem that flatness is desirable. Hems, seams, cuffs, all have to be prepared properly before being sewn, and that means being ironed - often many times over – during the course of the making. Fiddlesticks.
So it was to-ing and fro-ing, iron and machine, practising our seams before finishing the edges neatly with the trusty zig zag stitch, getting into good habits. The bits of calico we experimented on we took home to jog our memories the next time we had a mental block about what, alors, is a French seam.
Then onto the fun stuff. The two girls who’d done the course before had told me it was coming. The draw string bag! I haven't laid eyes on those since I upgraded my PE kit into a rucksack, sometime in the last century. Surely this was even more exciting than a pin cushion. Until Roz mentioned the H word. Homework? Aged 34?
Our mission, should we accept it (one of the joys of being an adult: choice) was to make a design for our bag, to be appliquéd on. It could be a flower, a pattern, an animal. Whatever it was, it shouldn’t be too complicated. I mulled it over as we packed away our scissors for the night. Then, perhaps inspired by the precocious little pepper pot dolls, I had a brainwave. It would take some preparation. But then preparation is what sewing is all about.
See… I’m learning.