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.

Time Travel

My pocket Oxford Mini dictionary from 1986 (name inscribed at the front in fountain pen, bless) defines fabric as cloth or knitted material.
That’s the mini definition. The maxi one encompasses texture, colour and – clasp those donnish mortar boards – time travel.
Yes. Like a Tardis, fabric sucks you into a twisting, swirling, musical kaleidoscope of madness before plonking you back in your past, in my case that usually being sometime circa 1980.
I got just such a nobbling recently. I was walking along, minding my own business when there was a flash of blue and white and whoosh, 25 years vanished and I was deposited back in the school playground.
What material could have such power? Gingham of course. Those blue and white checks that will forever be school summer uniform, heralding, with the first hint of warmth in the air, the end of heavy winter clothes and the arrival of short sleeves.
I never knew exactly when the changeover would happen – it seemed to be yet another of those adult mysteries – but it was always a moment of joy, the bringer of good things to come. Of sitting cross-legged in the grass slitting and threading the sticky stalks of daisies. Of playing outside in the long evenings when the sun never seemed to go down. Of the soft, distinctive squeak of rubber-soled sandals that you wore with white ankle socks.
It was the end of wool, the start of cotton; winter itchiness replaced by summer freshness; long jumpers giving way to bare arms. Only a matter of weeks until the long summer holiday and life couldn’t get any better.
There was one dress in particular, just a plain shirt dress with big white buttons down the front that I remember fondly. It was the days before uniform uniforms, when any gingham would do, and no one – absolutely no one - had the same dress as me. It was cool and comfy with something of the nurse’s uniform about it, making me feel like someone of importance as I doctored my daisies to death.
If I still had that dress, and was still age 6-7 clothing, I’d probably wear it now. I’m not sure the same could be said for our other time-travelling fabric of the day, which I discovered in my bag of off-cuts.
White cotton with a spattering of blue cherries – dum dum dum dum – peel back the years to unveil a little girl, all round red cheeks and shiny white hair in her version of gingham, with smocking down the front and thin straps on chubby arms.
Not me, my sister Nats, who, not yet at school, had her own uniform in the cherries, almost good enough to eat. I’m sure she wouldn’t wear it now, but back then it was the height of cuteness – and fashion. Life was so much simpler. Sigh. I’m going to start a campaign to bring back smocking. And gingham. And yes, I might even get a dog called Toto.

Patterns in Time

What’s the French for beanbag, I wonder? Surely not 'sac d’haricots', as google would have me believe, literally bag of beans. I think ‘fauteuil de poire’ (pear sofa) is more likely, or the universal ‘pouf’ – not that I think Mémé would ever have made one. She was born in 1898 and lived through two world wars. Googling would have been as alien to my great-grandmother as the details of her daily life would be to me and I suspect she had very little time for messing around with polystyrene balls. From what I can glean she didn’t have much time for anything – living with her very strict grandparents in Sidi-bel-Abess during the weeks while her parents Juan and Antonia Aguilar stayed on their farm in the Moroccan countryside, she and her sister Antoinette were forbidden to play, being taught to sew, knit and crochet instead.
It must have been a relief when she met Grandpere (she was Spanish, he was French – what language did they communicate in?) at a dance and married him on March 6th 1922. He was employed by the Chemin de Fer Marocain, and the couple moved around from Rabat to Marrakesh to Fes, finally settling in Oujda. Along the way Mémé gave birth to Mauricette, my grandmother and, needing material to make clothes, used to go to the fabric markets in Rabat. As this was before sewing machines were widely used, everything had to be made laboriously by hand.
Then, so the story goes, when Mémé was in Oujda in 1933 she won some money on the lottery and bought her first sewing machine, a Singer treadle. The same machine was used to teach her daughter how to sew, and Nanny still has it, sat downstairs in her house in south of France – just like I now have Mum’s Machine, sat, reassuringly, just across the hallway.