Good fabric, good family

When I was in university I once did a course in theatrical costume design. It was one of those cases where the elective was a course I really wanted to take.

I remember two things about that class.

First, one assignment I had was to make a men's 17th century frock coat from a pattern derived from a draft of museum coat - original measurements of course and methods of construction. It took quite a bit of work and I was so disappointed when it was finished to find it completely unwearable - you couldn't move in it at all.

My instructor explained that in those days it was a sign of a gentleman to wear clothes that made it impossible to move, lift your arms even, as this implied you were capable of doing manual labour, or of even carrying your own books.

The second thing I remember was having it explained how important lighting was in pictures, or on the stage, and that only silk really came alive and showed a colour in either situation. I remember the prof telling us of a production that made evening dresses out of lining polyester, which looked the right colour and was shiny, and how faded and unsubstantial the dresses looked under the lights.

When I made the four flower girl dresses I used silk satin, at a good price from Mood much to my surprise, and when I saw the pictures I was glad I did.

Here are some shots:

The bride and her relatives with the two flower girls from her side.  I love this picture because the little girls are so cute and because you can really see the effect of the fabric here.

Here are my two grand-daughters with the sewist on the left

And now some more random wedding photos, ones of me in my dress will be coming along but right now here are my family. They really are my whole life and I am so proud of them:

My beautiful daughter-in-law and my son. I like this one because they really look like themselves. 

My niece Sophia and my 88 year old mother dancing with the boys from Halifax. It was a very elegant DC wedding but when you bring down a bunch of Canadians, well you bring down a bunch of Canadians. We shut the place down, my mother included.

My three children, the groom, Nat, and Ben and Katrina. My life's work and they all turned out, pretty happy about that.

Sew distracted

My oldest grand-daughter just turned six. She is a smart girl, good at school but lately there have been some reports of daydreaming, that and folding her math assignments into paper fans, but that is another, creative story.

Of course her parents had The Talk and her response was this:

"If it seems as if I am not paying attention and listening it is because I am thinking about sewing."

She has booked me off for two after schools next week because she wants to start on her Christmas projects. She has it in her mind that she wants to make her new aunt a skirt.

I know where this leads.

We had a wedding : the Esme top one review

My apologies for the lapse in blogging. We had our wedding in Maryland and I am still in the recovery phase. Bear with me while I ease back into ordinary life with random subject posts.

It was beyond wonderful, a beautiful, beautiful wedding with all my family together. 

There are so many pictures, these ones are of the morning after brunch. Below are my husband, oldest grand-daughter and me, with my daughter and little grandson in the back.

I made a ponte Esme top from Stylearc and a knit skirt (more on that later) for the breakfast. The top was great but as you will see the longer part at the back stuck to the skirt in a way that has put me on a sugar free diet since I got home. There are always pictures like that and I probably should have worn Spanx, but I think they are cruel to body parts that have already been through a lot, like producing grooms.

More of my family and my rear end, oh well. However there is a sewing educational point to be made here and I am making it

Here are shots of the Esme at home so you can see it more closely. A basic T shirt with a collar split at the back and cap or full sleeves. A good basic if you have the sense to wear it over a woven. The designer picture has the collar standing up but my ponte was soft and it folder over just fine.

I am returning to blogging, not to worry, but needed to catch my breath first. Much more to come.

I feel some flypaper thoughts coming on.

On girls

Several thoughts.

First thanks for your comments, they have me thinking.

Before I get into that I want to share a something a colleague said to me recently.

He told me that, surprisingly, his early teen daughter had really got into sewing her own clothes and was more or less obsessed with it. He told me this because I was the only person I think he had ever met in his life who sewed.

He told me about his daughter's sewing with a tinge of embarrassment. He and his wife are intellectual and very professionally engaged. It was as if her interest in sewing was a detour down.

So I went on long and loud on how sewing is, on the contrary, a highly empowering activity for a young girl.

Let's face it the teenage years are usually not the best for most girls, even worse now I imagine with social media comparisons. Most of us feel better, and feel better about ourselves and look better as we get older.

I was a teenager in a time when you were supposed to be small, blond, and perky. That was it. If you weren't you were falling short of everyone's expectations and you sure knew it.

I was 5'9" in grade seven. My skin broke out. A teacher once handed back my class picture and laughed. My mother discussed my hair and my skin about eight hundred times a day with members of the general public, trying to figure out why I didn't look like my next youngest sister, who had gorgeous hair, skin, and yes played sports well too. My dad bought me golf clubs and hoped maybe I would take up a quirky sport at least (he was about 30 years too early on that one), he liked the young crowd that hung around the golf club, who of course were the same kids who looked right through me at school.

It was not my prime time I can tell you.

I know, as I am sure most of you do too, how acutely a young girl feels judged by her appearance at that age and how much her sense of self is defined by how she feels other people are seeing her.

Of course the gawky part of being a teenager is largely because of things you can't control, but you are not that fair to yourself at this age to understand this.

However I could sew, or at least was learning to. I could decide what I wanted to look like, what I looked good in, what I felt good in, what I aspired to be, and I had the power to make that happen myself. Somewhere I knew that I was a person who was going to do just fine and have an interesting life, even if no one else seemed to believe that, and I sewed for, and dressed that person.

Sewing taught me the most valuable of life lessons - if you want something to happen, make it yourself.

So even if I was tall and gawky and never going to be small and blond and perky I had something to show the world that could be admired, that could make me proud of how I looked. 

When folks came to the house I would be trooped out and displayed "Barbara made this herself." Grown women would tell me, sometimes even accurately, that they could never make anything like that. In Grade Ten and teacher said to me "are those really bound buttonholes?"

Well yes they are.

Sewing took what could have been a painful time in my life and turned it into one of my life's most creative periods.

It taught me to create my own substance when that isn't exactly being delivered to the door with a bow.

Again and again through my life I have been able to turn to sewing for the strength I have sometimes needed to recreate myself.

Anyone can learn to golf later.

And I did.

Whatever happened to home economists

I finished the last wedding event outfit I am going to make a few days ago. A knit top and skirt for the breakfast the next day.

I had of course planned on all sorts of other sewing but when I downed tools on that one I knew I was done.

Like a dinner.

My mojo never leaves me but right now the sewing tank is empty. I counted eight dresses/outfits for myself and other folks in the last six weeks and that's it for me for a bit.

I am also contemplating the first fall, I am taking this term right off except for some grandchild childcare, that I haven't gone to work in a million years. 

I have a backlog of life to catch up on and a house with many projects to do. I've gone domestic to cleanse the work palate and even though my husband won't be home for a week, doing a lot of cooking for myself. I will flypaper to follow.

But I have one other longer thought.

Who here remembers home economists? Or is one?

I am probably the last generation that recalls this as an academic discipline, the Mrs. degree my dad used to call it. In fact my own university had a very well regarded home ec. program but that became sort of embarrassing and it was morphed into human ecology or human nutrition etc. and the sewing part quietly phased out. Folks who want to sew are now directed to art schools where they go right from textiles to designers skipping the part where the neckline fits.

Listen I get it.

In the old days smart women where supposed to apply their minds to the current location - rather than become a macro economist they were directed to the economics of menu planning. Rather than running countries and corporations they were supposed to run households instead.

You could see glimpses of what this meant when you watched home ec. grads in action. They were the women who actually measured and weighed when they cooked, who never eyeballed it in sewing, and wore dress shields with silk blouses. Nancy Zeiman.

Of course this was not a good fit for so many women, my highly intelligent mother having to suffer the 1950s and 1960s with zero interest in things domestic, a woman who could debate politics and yet was judged by the dust balls.

And of course this culture denied the world cardiologists and yes macro economists and corporate CEOs who maybe would have said yes tobacco caused cancer.

All this is true but I wonder about the women who are doing other things who really would have liked home ec. and now have no where to go. Except maybe Pinterest, mommy blogs, and indie patterns produced, sometimes with more hope than skill, on desktop printers in the spare room.

Lost home economics grads who are DIY taking beautifully lit photographs of first projects on rail fences. GOMI is not the same as useful assessment and teaching.

Somewhere in the back of my mind there is a project here, a sort of distance program in home ec. free like Kahn Academy that my generation of women should get going so it is easier to get the basics, the intermediate and the advanced - the 100, 200, 300 and 400 level courses. Going to think about that. I am sure many of you could come up with the units.

Is this making any sense to you? 

Dress sorta done

Well sewed hard since I last posted and with the help of my sewing friend Trudy yesterday got this dress done.

Trudy took pictures of me in it but of course I erased them by mistake so here are some lovely back of the bathroom door shots of the dress finished but yet to be finally pressed.

Of course I pressed as I sewed but handling it again to hem etc. inserted a million wrinkles and it will need a careful going over.

I am not going to do that now, I need a little distance and a break.

My luck held, no major disasters, and it would tempt fate to put it to the iron tonight. 

Best both the dress and I have some time apart before that happens.

I think I managed to interpret the instructions that were not there fairly well and on me I learned a few things.

That weird hanging down part actually looks fine folded up and secured with a brooch like in the design picture on the website. I need a pin that matches the dress pretty well but fortunately when I went into a nice little shop today they told me they are expecting a shipment of many hundreds of 40s and 50s pins from an estate. As soon as they arrive I will tear down there.

So if you have a good imagination, and squint a bit to blur the wrinkles, here is the dress. Proper shots of me in it to follow when I have everything, including my nerves all smoothed out:

Flypaper thoughts late Saturday night edition

• My dress for the wedding is a day or two away from finished
• Took everyone's advice and think it is going to be OK
• Hard to sew though when you are saying "shit, shit I better not blow this"
• Every seam
• Forgot what hyper careful sewing felt like
• And I mean hyper
• Makes a real difference but could only do this every once in a while
• Oh my nerves
• As they say around here
• Got shoes with giant bows on them
• Different colour
• My daughter is on match-matchy alert around me
• But my people, we were brought up to match
• She doesn't get that
• Causes me pain not to wear the jewelry sets
• But she can spot those from across the street much less from across the room
• I am not sure if Miss Daisy is recovering fast enough
• Check-up Monday
• How do you put someone on light duties whose only duties are walking around and sniffing the floor?
• Have a dog sitter organized but are still on standby to see if we need that operation
• Wedding in three weeks
• Oh my nerves
• Miss Scarlett is learning to sew at nearly six
• If you are born to do it you can start early
• By instinct she knew to turn under the raw edge on the hem
• Burnt her fingers on the iron
• We are not telling her mother
• Part of the initiation
• Went silent when we were out
• "Babsie I can see hems everywhere"
• Waited my whole life to hear something like that
• When you make a dress in silk dupioni you realize when you are done
• That first time you sit down you will make it all wrinkles
• Nice to sew though
• Presses well
• Why can't dogs talk?
• Maybe because they are too busy listening