Sewing as Spectator Sport

      Back when I was in high school, I wrote the screenplay for a movie set in Philadelphia in the late 1890s. I went on to design all the costumes for the leading lady, and I even sewed my own version of one of them for myself.

    I knew nothing about how to structure such garments, nor anything about the foundation pieces necessary to make them fit properly. I just liked the look. I liked it so much my career goal was to make it to Hollywood to work for one of the big costume shops, whichever one was the go-to for historical films.

    I say this to show I've always been interested in historical dress. But I didn't go into fashion design, I went into Architecture. And once I was out and working, the only people into that sort of thing were the Society for Creative Anachronism and those who worked at the annual Renaissance Festival. I had no idea how to break into either, I just knew it took a lot of time and money. I had neither. So I let it slide.

    But now the Internet, especially YouTube, abounds with creative people who specialize in making historic clothing, from all periods. Bernadette Banner, Morgan Donner, Cathy Hay, Izabella Pitcher (Prior Attire), Zack Pinsent-- they all do gorgeous, well-crafted, historically-accurate garments. If I had anywhere to wear the sort of things they produce, I'd join right in.

    Alas, there are no balls in my foreseeable future. But they have inspired me to purchase a dress form, pad it out, and get going on some everyday sewing. Even now, I've got the pieces for a flannel nightgown cut out, having sized it up from a cotton gown I bought in 2000 or so that no longer fits me through the bust. It involves the velvet insets I spoke of in my previous post, plus lace that will need mitering and all the rest of it. We'll see how I do, with no instructions to follow.

    But here's the thing: I've gotten so used to watching my favorite CosTubers go at their projects, it feels I'm leaving something out or letting the side down by not filming the process to post on my own YouTube channel (yeah, I have one). Is it really creative sewing if I'm not documenting the process to teach and encourage others? Where are my camera, my tripod, my lights? Where's my care to show each step, including the ones I mess up and have to redo? Where's my script for the final voiceover, and where is my software for producing this video and getting that voiceover on?

   Nowhere. I have none of the necessary equipment, and it isn't in the budget. Neither do I have the time to learn to use them or to figure out how to get the best angles and so on. Woe is me, I have entered into the arena of creative sewing, and haven't let in any fans.

  It can't be helped. The best I can do is post occasional photos here or on Facebook or Instagram. In that spirit, here's a picture of the pattern layout, which you see uses about every last square inch of the flannel I bought in November. I guessed at how much I'd need, and was off by half a yard. But piecing is historical, right? I can pretend I'm sewing right along with my favorite CosTubers, whether I am or not.

Time Capsule

 Tonight I had cause to open a storage trunk containing fabric remnants, uncut lengths of cloth, used patterns, cabbage--- all the detritus of a life of sewing that goes back to junior high school. I was looking for some black velvet to eke out a piece I'd found already, as I mean to use it to trim a red plaid flannel nightgown I'm making for myself.

    I didn't find any more black velvet. I found some brown, and some dark blue . . . and something else. I found that that old trunk was a kind of time capsule, and not necessarily one that made me look back on how things used to be. It made me feel they should be as they used to be and seized my heart to protest that they no longer are.

    All those remnants, so bright and unfaded. A lot of the garments I made with them, I still have. Can I fit into them any more? Not for a long time. Are they shabby and worn? Yes. But the smooth, unmarked material in the trunk was calling me back to the days when they were new. 

    What was I doing then? What was I looking forward to? Whom did I know and love, whom I no longer see, and never will again in this world?

    I shook out the uncut lengths of silk, cotton, and wool, and recollected what I'd intended to make of it. Is that all in the past, too? Have I enough future and enough creativity left so it won't go to waste?

    Like a heady and bittersweet perfume, hiraeth rose out of that trunk like a mind-altering drug. I'd never before thought of it as a time capsule, still less as a faulty time machine that could wrench me into the past, while at the same time leaving me here. But that's exactly what it was.

   

My Cut-Rate Grand Tour, Day One, Part One-- Introduction

I'm breaking my entry of the first day of my 1988-89 Christmas holiday journal into two parts, because the first of it happens entirely at the college in Oxford. I have the fanciful idea that it would be amusing for you to see the helter-skelter way I began my trip, and what I was, for a month, departing from.

The contemporary record doesn't include an account of the weekend immediately before the start of vacation, and a few words on it might provide illumination both on my state of body and mind and on some events later on in my European trip.

Saturday the 3rd I took part in a performance of the Berlioz Te Deum with a group known as the Oxford Classical Chorus, but it was really the Keble College choir. Our conductor was the Keble organ scholar at that time, Charles Hazlewood, who has since gone on to do a thing or two . . . but I still say his greatest act of musical daring was attempting to put on the Te Deum with only thirty or so singers (Hector wrote it for, what, 400?). The full rehearsal that afternoon went magnificently. Inspired, I went home to Coverdale College* to hurriedly finish my charcoal gray wool dress with the white lace collar to sing in-- I'd started it the previous summer at home in the States but it still wasn't hemmed and the buttons weren't sewn on. I made it back to Keble in good time to sing, but as I mention in the Paris portion of my diary, I did not do well at all. I'd been getting by all term with following our lead 2nd Soprano and hadn't actually memorized the notes. But on the night, my friend wasn't in good voice and our tenors (all six of them) wimped on the "Tibi Omnis Angeli." I could feel the choir's confidence plummet all around me, so I decided to give my section a strong lead. And I led them straight into destruction, wrong notes everywhere, especially in the "Tu Christe Rex Gloriae." Mea culpa! mea culpa! mea maxima culpa! As things got more and more ragged, Charles slowed down the tempo, thinking it'd give us the chance to find our places and catch up. More like run us all out of breath, especially on the "Judex Crederis." Total disintegration! Mortification on wheels! Perverse thing was, the Coverdale* principal, whose son was playing in the orchestra, said that was the best the Keble orchestra and chorus had sounded in years. Yes, I know. Their previous performances (under previous student conductors) don't bear thinking of.

I may have gotten some sleep that night; I don't remember. I know I got only one and a half hour's worth the Sunday night, since I was desperately trying to finish the last two Michaelmas term essays for my final Medieval Architecture History tutorial on Monday. Miraculously, I managed to get them both done in time. I use that adverb on purpose, because I hadn't even started the research on the second one; in fact, I fell asleep over my books and dreamed of a good line to take on it, and woke up ninety minutes later and wrote it down.

So I survived my double tutorial Monday the 5th, and biked back to Coverdale* not to relax, not to pack for my Europe trip, not even to clear out my room to make it ready for the American conference guests who'd be coming in. No, I had to help set up scenery and get ready for my bit part in the college Christmas pantomime, a brilliant (in my opinion!) topical parody on Aladdin penned by one of the Coverdale* ordinands. I and my two female American fellow-lodgers had a singing turn as Three Little Maids, as in The Mikado.

After that, there were not one, but two dances, and after that . . .

Well, I'll let the diary tell the story.

But I think this is long enough for one post. I'll get us on the road in a post hereafter.

Trying to Do What Matters

I picked up my repaired sewing machine late yesterday afternoon. But with all the errands I had to run, I didn't get home till nearly ten o'clock at night. No time to sew more than a couple seams in the lining of my new Easter skirt.

Tried to get it done today. But around 8:30 PM, when the zipper was in, all the side seams done, but the waistband and all the hemming and handwork yet to do, I decided the project had crossed the line.

It's a lovely and Christ-honoring thing to wish to wear a new white outfit to preach the good news of the resurrection in on Easter morning. But not when that means appearing in a crookedy hem because I didn't have any of my friends handy this evening to pin it up for me. And especially not when a new suit of preaching clothes means staying up all night finishing it and showing up at the church late and rushed and out-of-sorts. Then it's no longer something I'm doing to honor God, I'm doing it for my own ego.

So while I've gone ahead and basted on the waistband, I've decided finishing this skirt can wait. I'll wear a white blouse with my dark turquoise lightweight wool skirt. Hey, it's a festive, Easter-eggy color, right?

Besides, I've got something else to deal with tomorrow that I believe really does matter:

I just checked the email the church secretary sent me the other day with the order of worship for tomorrow. I wanted to see whether I needed to be prepared with a Collect (no, I don't). But for the first time, I noticed that they've got the Children's Sermon before the Call to Worship! Like the kids and the word I'm offering them aren't part of "worship" at all! I didn't expect to see it in such a place, and therefore, I didn't.

Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear. If it's at all possible, this will have to be tactfully but firmly changed. Because the children matter. They matter a lot.

Sidetracked?

Last July, when I was back in Kansas City, I bought a few yards of some beautiful off-white wool fabric from Kaplan's Fabrics on the Country Club Plaza.

My intention was to make myself a new preaching outfit from it, for those weeks from Easter on when it's too cold and early to wear white linen, but just wrong--liturgically, in particular--to wear black.

Not that I don't already own a winter white suit; it's just that I bought it back in 1997 and I've, well, kind of outgrown the skirt since then.

Yes.

Anyway, this weekend it hit me how close it's getting to Easter. So Sunday I found the fabric and the pattern, and preshrunk the material in the washer because there's no way I'm paying for dry cleaning every time a speck of dirt falls on it. Monday, I cleared and extended my dining room table, and started cutting the skirt pieces out.

This morning I attached the three front and the three back sections (it's a six-gore skirt), using French seams.

I'm debating whether I'll put a pocket in it; the pattern doesn't have one, but it's handy in case a church wants me to use a radio mike. Trouble is, when I made this skirt before, the seam over the pocket didn't sit straight. That skirt is black, so there I can kind of get away with it.

In white, not so much. But a pocket is so useful. I'm still trying to decide.

One thing that's not up for debate: The skirt needs to be lined. The wool fabric is too fine and lightweight not to. Last evening, I drove over to JoAnn Fabrics and got some matching lining material. Preshrunk it last night, and this afternoon I cut it out and started attaching the pieces.

But what on earth--? My sewing machine will not let me sew a straight seam on that lining! The feeddog catches it (or maybe, doesn't catch it) and the needle inexorably veers in a mindless diagonal off to the edge. I tried completing one seam, then another. Hopeless. They both look like a work of a crazy drunken fool: meandering all over the place, starting and stopping and restarting again, the stitch length long to tiny to back again, the tension too loose or too puckering tight.

I just can't make that machine sew my lining evenly and straight!

Why now, Lord, why now?

And why, at all?

. . . Well, yes, I did notice this morning that the sewing machine presser foot isn't dropping smartly into place. Rather, it sort of moseys its way down onto the fabric, like it hasn't quite made up its mind whether it wants to get to work or not . . . And this afternoon it was so slow and lacksidaisical about it, I thought it would never descend at all.

My theory is that it's just not holding the fabric down to the feeddog the way it should. The wool was just thick enough to make do with the pressure it gave, but the lining acrylic, no.

All very nice to have an idea of what's wrong. But I could have gotten so much more done on this skirt tonight! And now I've been sidetracked. There's no point in doing anything more until I can borrow or rent another sewing machine until mine can be fixed. Or until I can figure out how to clean up my old machine, a 1951 Singer, so it won't get oil and crud all over my nice cream-colored fabric.

How am I ever going to get my new suit done for Easter Sunday!? I'm as sidetracked as my crookedy lining seams!

Unless-- Unless this is God's way of telling me to work on my sermon for Easter Sunday before I work on my clothes? Like, maybe, this is His way of getting me-- maintracked?