That SWAP thing

I am a SWAP dropout.


I think I have participated about three times and only finished once. That one time involved clothes that all matched and met the criteria but I never wore. The next two times ended prematurely because I became completely overwhelmed with trying to make it all coordinate and kept wanting to veer off because some new style caught my eye. 


It felt more like production than creation, but that is just me.


The trouble is the whole SWAP thing makes so much sense but it just isn't how I sew. No apologies.


It has taken me a long time to understand that you can't lead someone else's life, no matter how smart it is.


Just like I have learned you can't teach someone else's course at work. If I try to teach a new course working from someone else's syllabus it just doesn't feel right. You can't tell someone else's stories, say someone else's jokes, project what someone else thinks is the most important thing, when in your own heart you have other priorities.


You can't live someone else's lifestyle either. 


I received an e-Christmas letter today from someone I knew years ago who seems to have spent her life having lunches in Tuscany and visiting galleries. She looks elegant in the pictures. I am sitting here in a purple housecoat this morning tired from watching Chris Rock's Good Hair till midnight (which I loved - he is often as wise as he is funny - his old line that minimum wage is what an employer pays you when he wishes he could pay you less has always seemed to me to be profound) and knitting socks while trying to disguise a few stitches I had to add in to make up for not having cast on enough, with a copy of 101 homemade dog food recipes on the table beside me.


I am not sure that this particular traveling circus is ever going to make it to lunch in Tuscany.


Which brings me to SWAP at Stitchers Guild , a site I drop into every now and then.


This year I can do it because it fits me. My six tops are going to be six of my white shirts, and the four skirts I want to make to wear with them. I need a mid season "car coat" length coat and that will be my eleventh item. 


I may actually finish this one, in fact I know I will.


Now off to buy the turkey. DH is flying in from Tennessee on the 23rd and he only cooks fresh turkeys. He and I have agreed that I go off duty when he comes home and picks up the next shift.


Off I go.

Happy Valentine's Day!

I have had a week. First of all just let me say this:

Pinwale corduroy

Seersucker

Flannelette

Snaps

Bamboo knit

Prints

Pastels

Terry towel

Gingham

Swiss dot

Eyelet

Velour

Houston, we have heartbeat.

It has been confirmed. My daughter is pregnant and I am going to be a grandmother. My DD has had some problems in the past but it looks now like things are going to work out. I am delighted, she is too but not feeling all that great, but this too should pass.

I volunteered to do maternity clothes (they don't do that anymore apparently, just wear everything really tight, like T shirts with Baby printed on them and arrows) but have the OK for baby clothes.

Excellent.

I have realized, and my daughter is just understanding this too, that pregnancies are a community thing. It takes every woman back to where she was once herself, erasing all the years. Daily calls from my 81 year old mother who when she was pregnant with me was a public health nurse in the toughest neighbourhood of a tough town, a job she still misses by the way, "And then I got off the bus and threw up behind a lamp-post, and your aunt used to keep soda crackers in the O.R., and your mother wasn't sick but she ate all the time and was huge ..." Every day some new piece of family experience to recall and revive.

For me I am remembering my first SWAP.

I am realizing now that in all my sewing career the wardrobe I was most happy with was the one I made for my first pregnancy, with this daughter actually.

I was tall and I was working in Australia and at that time it seemed to me that all the maternity clothes were designed to make you look like a child yourself. All that was missing was the Choo-choo trains on the pockets, although I am not sure I didn't see those too.

Peter Pan collars, tiny florals (which might have been fine if you were a tiny flower yourself and I never was), puffed sleeves and lace trims and billowing gathers. And all way too short, so short that a person's belly showed out under the bottom of the tops, not a cool look at the time. This is now, that was then. 

So I made all my own clothes and I could tell you in detail what each garment was, the fabric, the patterns, how I altered non-maternity patterns to work for me.

I realize that this was my first SWAP. I made a complete wardrobe, every thing in it, and I kept it small and deliberate, and colourful and fun because I knew that before the year was out I wouldn't wear it again (it was all worn in fact by many other women on a rotating basis). There was a real freedom to sewing like that and I only made things that were fun to sew and didn't necessarily have a future. It is interesting to me that of all the hundreds of wardrobe builders, classics and good clothes I have made since then nothing has satisfied me like my first SWAP wardrobe.