String Revolution » sewing

Very Secret Mysteries, no 6: Making Clothes

leannich — Sat, 26 Sep 2009 22:49:13 +0000

OK, people, let’s drop the pretence that this is a Wednesday series, shall we? I am not, nor ever will be, Havi Brooks, the indisputable [pirate] queen of ritual blogging. Be that as it may, here is the sixth post in the series, which so far has covered knitting, sewing, crochet, embroidery, and quilting. As ever, if you do these crafts I’d love to hear how you got started!

“Making clothes”, of course, is a subset of the “sewing” category. But it is also a distinct craft of its own. (And like so many of these crafts I write about, it’s been far too long since I did any. All to change on foot of the glorious dawn of String Revolution, says you. Quite.)

Making clothes, once you strip away the cultural connotations, is simply about turning planes of woven string into three-dimensional containers for the human body (or, well, canine or equine or whatever, I suppose, if you’re into that sort of thing), usually by sewing of some kind. Two things make the task trickier: (1) the body’s irregular shape, and (2) its inconvenient habits of stretching, shifting, bending, and similar.

To get around the first issue, you manage transitions between areas of more or less fullness with shaping techniques – such as curved or sloped seams, pleats, darts, gathers (or simplest of all: a belt). This shaping can mean you need fastenings – zips, buttons, ties, etc – to allow for dignified entry and exit, or just as a feature in their own right.

To address the second issue, you generally add a little extra room, known as “ease” – a term knitters may recognise – unless you’re working with very stretchy fabric.

That said, stripping away the cultural connotations is a bit daft, really, because cultural connotations are what clothes are all about. (Barber is brilliant on this, by the way, in the book I’m not at all obsessed with, honest, Women’s Work: The First 20,000 Years.) Clothes are the supreme cultural performance, a complex communication about status, allegiances, preferences, intentions: a language we all understand without even thinking about it.

Now. Pardon me for a moment while I digress to talk semantics. (Because I’ve just spent ages thinking about this, and I’m damned if I’m letting you lot off the hook.)

You’ll notice that this post is about “making clothes”. In fact, what I usually say is dressmaking – a term generally defined as “making garments for women”. Don’t know about you, but when I consider that word, it conjures up quite a particular range of images. Wholesome, full-skirted sun frocks in floral cotton, for instance. Or matching velvet party dresses for matching little girls. Coffee-coloured satin blouses made by dressmakers: perfumed and whiskery ladies who wear their glasses on a chain and never quite straighten up. All of which suggests that the word could do with some political reclamation, at least in my prejudiced head.

Contrast dressmaker with tailor. Tailors are worthy businesspeople; they possess gravitas and command respect and all that good stuff. They have agency. Dressmakers have some agency, maybe, but not much. Their influence does not extend far out into the world. You don’t hear about things being “dressmade to your needs”, do you? (Mind you, they have more going for them than seamstresses, who don’t even get their own verb.)

Actually, I should note that my dressmaking endeavours have so far produced, overwhelmingly, dresses. (My one attempt at trousers so far was an abysmal failure.) And apart from my father, who got a tie in 1994, and a small stuffed-toy frog called Rhadamanthus, whom I kitted out with a formal suit for the Trinity Ball in around 2001, I have only made garments for women. Perhaps I should put my shingle out as a dressmaker who only makes dresses.

That’s my 1996 Trinity Ball dress up there at the top (sorry about the photo quality – it’s a full-length dress, in case you’re wondering). My friend brought me the silk from Beijing, years before I made this. I was experimenting with a curved empire line and dart-free princess-line bodice, and I seem to recall wanting to show as much breast as I dared. I was particularly pleased with the silver hand-embroidery – although I’d originally planned that it would wind all the way around the dress to the hem.

I’d been making my own patterns for several years by then. In fact, I used only a handful of commercial patterns before buying Pattern Drafting for Dressmaking,which convinced me that I could do anything – anything!

Most of the things I made are still hanging around in various wardrobes. For this post, I went hunting and came up with a small selection. Here’s a cotton summer dress from 1993, which I made after trying on something similar that was far beyond my means:

It didn’t turn out anything like the commercial version, but I loved it dearly nonetheless. (I wonder if it still fits?)

I started another dress later in 1993, but didn’t finish it until the evening of the 1994 Trinity Ball – I remember frantically sewing the hem as I waited for my taxi to arrive:

This is also made of Asian silk (I think my aunt bought it, but I don’t know where), and it was so scant that I designed the pattern to squeeze every square inch out of the fabric – above-the-knee hem, three-quarter-length sleeves, deep neckline. I had enough scraps left to cover the buttons, but very little else.

I was pretty comfortable with the pattern drafting by this stage. The best fit I ever got was with this blouse, which I made for a wedding in early 1995. The sleeves hung just so, the finishing was beautiful (the patterned buttons all face the same way!), and I was delighted.

Pity about the colours. I’m a total summer-colours person, but for some reason I convinced myself for years that I looked best in autumn colours. (I think it was a handy way of giving myself a hard time. Let’s not dwell on it.)

Then just as I got into my stride, I stopped. I altered a silk dress of my grandmother’s for my 21st birthday in 1995. Those disastrous trousers I mentioned were from summer 1997. And as far as I remember, I haven’t sewn any clothes since.

It’s funny – I still think of myself as an enthusiastic dressmaker. Dormant, I suppose. Stirring, perhaps.

Very Secret Mysteries, no. 2: Sewing

leannich — Wed, 29 Jul 2009 21:42:55 +0000

It’s Wednesday! Here is the second in my series of personal introductions to the crafts I do. The first one is about knitting. If you do any of these crafts, I’d love to hear about how you got started, too.

Sewing: joining together planes of woven string (fabric) by stitching through them with fine string (thread). That’s all. The fascination, of course, lies in turning the essentially two-dimensional fabric into a three-dimensional object – and all the marvellous refinements you can make to that, in terms of shape, colour, style, embellishment, and so on. (It doesn’t even have to be fabric that you stitch – we started out with animal hides, for instance.)

Look, I know this is a bit gawky and unsophisticated, but I am hopelessly in love with sewing. Shining eyes and girlishly clasped hands and involuntary little gasps of pleasure – the whole shebang. My pulse quickens when I so much as think about it.

I’ve sewn curtains and cushion covers and draught excluders. I’ve made evening dresses and waistcoats and Hallowe’en costumes. I’ve smocked and piped and quilted, darted and boned and buttonholed and bias-bound. I’ve done French seams and rolled hems, welt pockets and covered buttons. I’ve made the flag of an imaginary country as a birthday present for its creator, and I once stayed up all night making a tuxedo (with evening tails, I need hardly add) for a small stuffed-toy frog named Rhadamanthus, so that he could decently accompany his owner to the Trinity Ball.

My introduction to sewing came when I was around five years old. Two of my best friends (sisters) were in the habit of arriving at my house to play and announcing before they got in the door what they’d been doing recently. One day – I remember this so clearly – they advanced up the front steps announcing, “We can sew!”

Anything they could do, I wanted to try. So my mother found us some material – brown with a slight sheen – and needles and thread, and we went upstairs to my room. My friends showed me how to thread the needle and knot the ends of the thread together, and how to do “in-and-out stitch” (aka running stitch). Later the same day, I “invented” backstitch – I even called it that.

I was hooked. Soon I was making clothes for my stuffed animals. I remember making a skirt for Mrs McKenzie, my kangaroo, cutting out pieces and sewing them to each other as I went. I sewed on a button, making a straight cut in the fabric for a buttonhole.

It wasn’t long before I discovered refinements like hemming and seam allowances. I studied my own clothes and other people’s. I got bags of scraps from my great-aunt, a demon dressmaker, and made soft furnishings for my dolls’ house and clothes for my Sindy. When Prince Charles married Lady Diana in 1981, I made Sindy a blue skirt with a five-foot train (this on an eleven-inch doll, you understand), with a lace frill at the end and multi-coloured embroidery all the way down. It was a tour de force – and quite astonishingly ugly.

I graduated to larger-scale sewing when I was maybe nine. My mother and I went to Cassidy’s and bought a skirt pattern and some cotton in a cheerful patchwork print. The skirt had deep pockets and a semi-elasticated waistband. We used the family sewing machine, which I then commandeered until I inherited another one.

I made cushion covers. I made clothes. I made bags. I read everything I could get my hands on (which, without any sort of budget and before the Internet, was a pretty eclectic mix of stuff). I haunted haberdasheries, wistfully. I became mender-and-alterer-in-chief to my family. My first commission – when I was around eleven – was a baby quilt for a friend of my mother’s, made of pre-cut square patches from Laura Ashley. As a teenager I made eccentric patchwork waistcoats and cloth caps. I made my Debs dress – princess-line boned bodice, puffed sleeves and a full, ballet-length skirt – in deep blue silk all the way from Beijing.

I did all of this in isolation. I knew nobody else of my own age who was into sewing (or any needlecrafts, really). My great-aunt was mistress of these arts, and I knew that another great-aunt, whose multiple sclerosis was by then advanced, had been even better in her day. My aesthetic was formed independently of my generation. I read 1940s booklets with titles like “Make Do and Mend”. My aunt gave me a history of fashion when I was ten or so, which I read cover to cover. Sindy’s wardrobe blossomed.

I still feel just a little bit private about sewing. There are few things I enjoy more (I’m really looking forward to my younger son being old enough that I don’t have to worry so much about dropping pins), but I do oddly little of it these days. I haven’t hooked up to the Web scene at all (hence the dearth of useful links in this post – sorry about that). I’ve never bought fabric or notions online, or even patterns. Sewing, for me, seems to be rooted in a golden 1980s childhood idyll. I’d quite like to pull it into the here and now, but I need to be gentle with it. It’s very close to me.

If you’re interested in some more practical tips to get started, Alicia Paulson over at Posie Gets Cozy has two recent posts about sewing, which I urge you to read. She covers the basic what-to-do parts very succinctly in Tiny Yellow Dress, and a Few More Thoughts, which is a sequel to I Sew, where she talks about how she got into it.

Meanwhile, as recent posts here attest, I’m mostly knitting at the moment. But I do have one or two sewing projects in mind. You’ll be the first to know.

Strawberries and Dust

leannich — Sat, 04 Jul 2009 21:18:26 +0000

Guess I picked the wrong week to start blogging! We’re in the thick of a huge home extension project, and everything is in a state of utter chaos. Witness me last night, groping in the dark hall through box after stacked box, looking for the iron.

No joy. I have no idea where the iron is. Which is … sorry about this … ironic, don’t you think, for a crafter? Get out of my house, builders. (Actually, wait. Finish the job first.)

Anyway, I had to make these cushion covers for my mother-in-law without an iron. Which was OK, once I reminded myself that she’d undoubtedly prefer to have them with the seams unpressed than not have them at all. But it was a twitchy experience: sew-a-bit, press-a-bit, sew-a-bit, press-a-bit is such a familiar rhythm.

She’d bought this delicious Cath Kidston fabric back in March, just before our works began, and I’d agreed to make the covers to replace her old green-and-white gingham ones, which were getting a bit dingy. But I didn’t manage to make them before the builders invaded, and it’s only in the last few weeks that it’s been even vaguely possible to contemplate getting it done.

I cut the squares for the covers earlier in the week, then last night I cut and pinned the piping. This morning I sat down to the sewing much later than I’d planned, less than four hours before we were due to leave for my mother-in-law’s house with the finished covers.

Celebrations

I did it! I made pretty cushion covers when I could barely see my sewing machine through the swirling clouds of dust. (This is an exaggeration. But I did have to wipe every surface before putting the fabric anywhere near it.)
I allowed myself to declare them finished even when I wasn’t totally happy with them – I simply didn’t have any more time to fix the glitches. They look great from a few feet away, which is really all that’s required in a cushion cover. I’ll do better next time.

Lessons

Next time I make piped cushion covers, I’ll attach the piping first. With these, I attached the zips first, and I wasn’t very happy with how the piping on the zip-side corners turned out. And let’s not talk about the piping seams.
My pins are old and tired, and I need a new blade for my rotary cutter.
Oh my god I LOVE SEWING! I rarely do any at the moment, because knitting and crochet are so much more compatible with toddlers, of which I have one. But it’s SO GOOD, and I must find ways to do more.

We were invited to my mother-in-law’s house for a buffet meal today, with her sister and niece and grand-niblings. A lovely time was had by all, with lots of eating and chatting and running around. And my cushion covers, though I say it as shouldn’t, went down a treat.