finish

I’m working on something at the moment that is relatively simple in design. Lots of plain knitting, but now the fun begins, since its devil is definitely in its detail. This garment is all about the finish, and I’ve re-worked the bottom hem and its edging several times to get it just right. Despite ripping out, and working back, and fashioning acres of time-consuming i-cord, this process has been a genuine pleasure — for there is nothing more pleasing than the perfect hem. The me of just a few years ago would be astonished to hear me say that: for I was once definitely of the mind that it really didn’t matter what your hem looked like, or how neat your finish was, as long as it didn’t really show too much.

My ma tells a story which combines one of my (many) fashion disasters with my generally slip-shod attitude to finishing. While a student away at college several aeons ago, I had found a 1970s wrap-around skirt in a charity shop: one of those nice, naturally-dyed Indian cotton hippy things with generic elephant design. I really liked the fabric, but I wasn’t that keen on either the mumsy length of the skirt, or the potential of the wrap-around to display one’s underwear in a breeze. (This last is rather ironic, since the use I later put it to ended up being far more ‘revealing’). I decided I would transform the knee length skirt into full length trousers. But they would be no ordinary trousers: they would be glorious, enormous flares. Indian elephants would proudly march around each of my legs and I would look the business. So I simply chopped the skirt in two, and hand-sewed each half into a gigantic cone. The top of each cone was the width of my thigh while the bottom edge was over a metre in circumference. These were going to be fantastic pants! But hang on, at the moment they were only fantastic pant legs: I had merely created two ankle-to-thigh-length leg cones with no actual trouser part. No matter, for I had an excellent idea. I chopped off the legs of an old pair of leggings, put on the resulting stretchy shorts, then, with a handful of safety pins, attached the elephant cones to the raw edges of the short-legs. My pants were complete! Brilliant! Now I just had to make sure I wore them with a nice, long sweater that disguised my unusual tailoring solution.

When mum and dad arrived for their parental visit, I was clad in a huge grey sweater, a pair of voluminous elephant legs, a ripped up pair of leggings, and 30 safety pins. What a fabulous outfit! Just the thing to buzz around town in with mum and dad! I thought my finishing secret was safe, but when I moved about or sat down, the sweater of course rode up, revealing several inches of my pinched, bare, safety-pin adorned thighs, and a hint of arse, uncomfortable in its torn-off leggings. The horror! I considered myself at the vanguard of style, but I was merely a figure of fun. I wore the elephant ‘pants’ just that once. I think they later became a headscarf.

Anyway, here is my hem from the right side. I wanted to have quite a plain, stark, i-cord edging, but found that the i-cord on its own wasn’t robust/ stable enough to stop the stocking stitch from curling. I am knitting top-down, so my eventual solution was to create a turned-up hem along a row of purl stitches, to pick up another row of stitches along the raised-purl bumps, and to bind them off in i-cord. It took a while, but I love it. So neat!

And just to prove that the wrong side doesn’t involve safety pins and raw edges:

I like the contrast slip stitches along the hem’s cast off edge — and keeping them at the same tension as the knitted fabric makes for a flat and a flexible hem. In fact, I have been foolishly admiring both the right and wrong sides of the fabric in equal measure.

is it possible to be drunk on i-cord?

out with the old

You may remember that a year ago I decided to stop buying clothes for the duration of 2008. My decision to do this was sparked by a couple of things. I had been reading a bit about darning and mending and wanted to think about what repairing and caring for one’s clothes meant. Also, since I heard this very-well researched series of documentaries on the BBC world service, I had been increasingly bothered by textile waste — the sheer amounts of it, as well as the complicated politics of its disposal. I then had a moment of utter revulsion after seeing Florence and Fred’s Affordable Elegance advertisements, in which the disposability of the 20 quid dresses they had designed for Tesco’s was “cleverly” celebrated.

(textile waste now makes up 30% of rubbish destined for UK landfill sites)

The year is up, and here’s my summary of the project: During 2008 I have fashioned or refashioned for myself 7 tops, 5 skirts, 4 dresses, 3 sweaters, 3 pairs of socks, 2 shrugs, 2 cardigans, 2 hats, 1 shawl, 1 coat, 1 maud, 1 tank top, 1 jacket, 1 pair of gloves, and 1 scarf. Additionally, I have repaired and re-repaired the sleeves of sweaters, the seats of pants, the hems of coats, the heels of socks, the tops of mittens, and the feet of stockings. I made lots of things from patterns and kits and in doing so, have participated, in a vicarious sort of a way, in the design process of some really talented people. I also designed several items of clothing for myself from scratch, and have encountered my own limits and shortcomings along the way. This year of stitching and knitting and learning has been both enjoyable and thought provoking. It has certainly changed the way I think about the making, consumption and meaning of worn textiles.

(clothing myself in 2008)

Despite the apparently prohibitive terms I set myself (“you will not buy clothes”) this project was never about denial. As you may have gathered, I am someone who loves clothes. I mean, I really love clothes. The things I wear are a source of tremendous pleasure for me, and I regard dressing up in them (however foolishly) as a sort of creative act. So I was not about to deny myself that pleasure or that creativity, but rather wanted to think about focusing it a little differently. One other thing that the project was not was generically anti-consumerist. For I am undeniably a consumer. I exchange money for stuff. I do not regard The Commodity as the root of all evil and in fact I think that commerce — of ideas and words as well as things — is generally a very necessary good. So I did not deny myself the pleasure of clothes, nor did I cease to be a consumer. I bought notions and fabric and quite a lot of yarn. I continued to cut pictures out of magazines, read about fashion history, and dream about the qualities of fabric, and the possibilities of different outfits, just as I had done before. Raw materials, ideas and images continued to be rich sources of inspiration and enjoyment to me. And I had many, many clothes already. To be frank, I had no need of any more. But if there was something that I wanted, as opposed to needed, I would have to think about how to make it, about where the stuff to make it was coming from, and then about how to sew or knit it up for myself. So, in fact, the only thing that I stopped doing this year was spending a lot of time in shops, and buying a lot of clothes in them. And I can honestly say that I’ve not missed this in the slightest.

(handsome Romney. Diamonds Farm. Horam, East Sussex)

What I started rather than stopped doing over the course of the year is much more interesting (well, it is to me at least). Of course, I made things, and I thought about what I was doing when I was making them. But additionally, I also visited farms, crofts, mills and other businesses where fibre is spun, dyed, and woven into cloth. I have learnt how fabric is produced from animal or plant to finished garment, how and where it is sold, to whom, and why. My love of finished textiles has developed into an interest in the process of their production, and the history of those processes. I’ve started thinking in a new way about the importance of textiles to different local economies; about the provenance of materials; about how Britain’s regional fabric is a very literal thing; and about the ways in which different national, local and global histories are all woven up in, and told through, textiles. I’ve also met and learnt from lots of wonderful people who live and work with fibre and fabric. Through this, I have also started to regard the value of textiles very differently indeed.

Clothes are not cheap. Time and care and labour are all expended in the rearing of a British sheep, but the three pence the farmer receives for the fleece makes it hardly worth the shearing. At the other end of the production-consumption chain, 2 million tonnes of largely man-made textile waste is discarded in Britain every year. The quality of this stuff is so low that charity shops cannot re-sell it, and laudable schemes like Oxfam’s wastesaver find it difficult to re-use or recycle. Our cheaply bought and easily discarded textiles swell mountains of domestic landfill, or are exported in containers for other countries to deal with. In the Czech Republic, for example, the outbuildings of former collective farms are now filled, floor to ceiling, with Western Europe’s abandoned clothing. Meanwhile, in Sri Lanka, adults and children suffer the indignity and poverty brought by brutal employment practices that we should more accurately term indenture or slavery. And all to make a mountain of transitory crap that is daily bought and thrown away.

(Antonio Ricci (Lamberto Maggiorani) exchanges his bed linen for his bike in the Bicycle Thieves)

Now, I am not making any great claims for myself here. I know that my 2008 make-your-own project was an exploratory luxury. While I could go on about how I have learnt new things about production, process, and materiality, I also know that fundamentally, this is the politics of luxury: of someone who has enough disposable income to spend on yarn and fabric, and enough leisure time to make things and (crucially) to enjoy making them. People do not have the time or money for such luxuries, and they certainly still need cheap textiles. But we also need textiles of durable, lasting quality. We aren’t pawning our good bedlinen (as in the Bicycle Thieves), we are chucking it out and buying another flimsy ten-pound duvet cover whose seams were sewn up by an impoverished ten-year-old on the Indian subcontinent. A recent consumer survey for Asda has apparently shown that supermarket shoppers now value durability as much as price where clothing is concerned. Asda is now changing its “George” ranges to reflect this shift in priorities. Wouldn’t it be nice if they added a guarantee of fair, non-exploitative labour into this mix?

I want to conclude with some inconclusive remarks about mending and representing mending. I’ve been doing a lot of darning this year, and have become very interested in the care and repair of clothes, as well as in the way that mended and re-made textiles are such rich repositories of personal and cultural memory. A lot of really good British artists are interested in this as well. I particularly admire, for example, Kirsty Hall, Celia Pym and Tabitha Moses, who all use the processes of mending or repair to explore the evocative and ritual nature of textiles. The work of these artists is rich with thought and meaning. But their practice is now one of the only ways, it seems to me, that contemporary audiences can look at made and mended things as public objects upon which to think and reflect. And sometimes, I am a little troubled by how the only way to approach the acts of women and men that were once quotidian and exceptionally ordinary is through extraordinary forms of representation, such as those that art affords. While the work of the three artists I mentioned is without exception, truly brilliant, there are certainly many other art practitioners whose work does little more than decontextualise familiar household textiles and the practices associated with them to very little end. I am naming no names, because this is something I am still thinking about . . . but I am wondering . . . could there be another way? Or if this is just a matter of there being Bad and Good textile art, as with any other form of art or practice. Anyway, there’s something to mull over further. (Any thoughts on this issue appreciated).

Scrap of linen check (1759) used to identify foundling number 13169. (London Metropolitan Archives)

Making and mending my own clothes will continue in 2009, as will the thinking about the making. But I might just have to buy myself the odd pair of pants, and also hope to have a bit more time for some other truly luxuriant crafty things that I enjoy and have not done much of in 2008 — in particular, embroidery. I also have a new and exciting year-long project for 2009. More on this — and on my lovely trip to Islay — anon.

collared

“Collars have played a very important part in the drama of fashion, and today command the attention of dress designers of repute, as well as makers of simple dresses. Each realises and appreciates the value of the right collar. Each knows the scope given by their use to the expression of individuality.”
Elizabeth McCaskill ‘New Collars for Old Dresses’, Odham’s Big Book of Needlework (1935)

Collars now seem rather underappreciated things. Reading eighteenth- and nineteenth-century women’s manuscripts, one becomes very aware of the importance of collars. They are one of the most frequently discussed items of clothing, and (sometimes) they also form a sort of manuscript themselves. What you see above is a pattern for a collar that I found, complete with several pricked holes and one rusty pin, between the pages of a nineteenth-century album held in the Library Company of Philadelphia. The album dates from the 1820s — the collar seemed to be of a later date — probably the property of a reader at a couple of generations remove from the album’s original writer.

One only has to think of the trials of Mrs Forrester’s lace in Gaskell’s Cranford to realise the importance women attached to their collars. And they remained crucial items in women’s wardrobes until relatively recently — my new Odham’s Big Book of Needlework*, which was reprinted several times throughout the 1930s and 40s, has a whole section on collars, including a long essay about the virtues of collars in updating and brightening up items of clothing that are otherwise old and worn.

(black textiles really are impossible to photograph . . .)

Here is an old and worn collar, attached to a coat that needed updating. I bought this nice velvet coat about a decade ago. It has a faux fur collar (100% acrylic — aigh!) — one of those things that resembles a worn out teddy bear after a couple of years wear in the rain and snow. Because of the woefully ratty appearance of this collar, I’ve not worn the perfectly good coat for five years or more. It was time to fix all that with a new collar.

I unpicked the old collar, measured it, then happily threw it away. Then I made a crocheted mesh to more or less the same dimensions as the old collar with some black 4 ply. Along the vertical lines of each square in the mesh I crocheted long triple trebles up and down, in waves. I used a bit of black kidsilk haze I had left over from making this sweater, and a couple of balls of black kidsilk aura I had hanging around from when the yarn first came out last year. Man, that stuff is hairy. The idea was to create a dense, plush bobbly effect. In practice, the yarn was much more hairy than I’d imagined, and less bobbly than I intended, but still, it worked out fine, and crochet really is very fast. The new collar was made up over a couple of evenings. And today I sewed the collar to the coat. This was enjoyable. I got up early, sat in the good light by the kitchen window, watched the sky shift and brighten and the curlews arrive. Things were very quiet and wintry, I stitched meditatively, and drank about a gallon of tea. A very nice morning was had. The collar was finished. Then Tom and I went out for a walk and I got him to take a couple of pics. Here is a shot of the back of the collar:

The frizzled effect of the crocheted waves reminds me of a rolled wig. In fact, the basic structure of the collar — with the ‘hair’ laid down over a mesh — is not dissimilar to that of an eighteenth-century peruke. Hence I have christened it the bagwig collar.

You’ll have to forgive my penchant for black and white, and my vacant peering into what appears to be The Void. In actual fact, I was staring very intently at a bright wee feller in a tree two feet in front of me, and hissing at Tom to get a good shot:

How wintry does he look on those bare branches?
He’s just out of shot in this next picture

I had to lighten the whole shot so you could see the fabric and the collar. Shall I say it again? Photographing black stuff is a mare

Pattern: Bagwig Collar by me
Yarn: Kidsilk Aura, Kidsilk Haze, and some miscellaneous yarn (it may have been 4 ply soft).
hook: 3mm
ravelled here

3 posts in 2 days? What’s going on? The truth is, I am starting to feel well again, after being terribly unwell for several weeks now. Though I’ve been doggedly getting on with the big project I’m working on at the moment, I’ve felt so damn rotten that I’ve not had much energy for anything much at all of late. Today, though, I suddenly feel physically restored and stupidly enthusiastic. Much more like my normal self again. Hurrah!

And an owls update: I have written up the pattern. Someone who is far more experienced in these matters than I has kindly agreed to cast her eagle (or owlish) eye over it. Then testknitting commences . . . and then it will be available!

*delivered at lightening speed by Marsden Booksellers in Doncaster. Thankyou, Nick.

bonus

More wardrobe refashioning: a few years ago, I knitted Tom a tank top (or vest, or whatever you like to call ‘em) which turned out to be too big for him: a (gulp) Kaffe Fassett pattern called “dotty” from the Rowan Magazine. It’s a nice, autumnal pattern, in felted tweed with the dots worked in tapestry (a yarn I hated to work with, but which turned out just right for the look of this tank top). Anyway, Tom loved the vest, but since it didn’t really fit, he rarely wore it. So I thought I’d have a go at shrinking and felting it a little down to my size. So I wet it, stuck it in the tumble dryer on the cool-ish setting for about 15 minutes, then took it out and stretched and blocked it to my dimensions. Bingo!

I love the new me-sized dotty, but Tom is now rather jealous. I have been told I have to knit him a proper fairisle-y replacement.

I like the way the slight felting has changed the colour of the dots, which now merge seamlessly from a sort of rust to a deep forest green. And the wool is not completely felted up: the ribbing still looks like ribbing.

Pattern: Kaffe Fassett, Dotty.
Originally made to fit 40″ chest on 3.75mm addis, now felted down to fit me.
Yarn: felted tweed and Tapestry.
Ravelled here

Mule took the pictures. Thanks, Mule.

all change

Today I put away my summer clothes, and removed the winter ones from storage. I always find it a bit depressing having to encounter the berloody tights again . . . but it is nice to see warm winter dresses, sweaters, and coats. Anyway, before I pack the summer stuff away, I thought I’d show you various garments I sewed and knit myself over the past few months which, for one reason or another, I didn’t get a chance to blog about. You will note that there is something of a red theme going on — this wasn’t intentional! And apologies for what’s going to be a rather picture-heavy post.

1. Dotty Dress.

I was finishing the lining of this dress when I wrote this post back in June. I was reasonably pleased with how it turned out, so don’t know why I didn’t blog about the process more. It is a “very easy” Vogue pattern (V8319) and was reasonably straightforward — as I recall, it only took a few evenings to make. The only downside about the dress is that it came out slightly large. I was nervy about the rep Vogue patterns have of running small, so made myself the next size up. And then the dress was difficult to take in after I’d finished because of the precise way the body and cap sleeves taper together. But I am being pernickety – it is not too baggy, and I like the pattern very much. I may use it to make myself a winter dress –in the right size this time. I bought the pleasing dotty fabric from here — a site that I try not to look at too often as their stuff is just too damn tempting. Heres another picture. You can blame Tom for the hysterical gurning and throwing of shapes.

next up we have:
2. Boat skirt

I made this back in early June, using some Cath Kidston furnishing fabric I’d been given and some lovely red grossgrain ribbon I received in the badge swap (thankyou, Philippa!). I followed the basic instructions in this book, adding lining and facings to the formula. Its a good fit, quite sporty. I like this skirt very much and have worn it lots over the past couple of months.

And another skirt:
3. Summer swallows skirt.

I bought this Japanese fabric as a birthday treat to myself from the wonderful Rosa Pomar, whose stock is always so lovely — top quality and exceptionally well chosen. I like skirts like this with a lot of fabric — the width of the bottom is about three times that of the top. To make it, I just followed the instructions for a basic pleated skirt in this book, adding facings to the formula to make the skirt hang a bit better. I spent a long time matching up the waves and swallows on the pleats — this was well-worth the effort I think. Finally, I found some wide, black, broderie anglais edging on ebay, and added this to the bottom. Bingo! A skirt for wearing with a sticky-out petticoat underneath. And though its perhaps more of a summer garment, these swallows are going to hang around for winter too.

And finally:
4. Mary Traynor

I knitted this little top while hanging around in hospitals, waiting for surgeons and physiotherapists to finish doing what they were doing to Tom’s hand. The yarn is so lovely to work with — it was quite a comforting thing to have in one’s hands. Mary Traynor was my maternal grandmother — a champion knitter who spent every summer in lacy tops of her own making. She is to blame for my knitting, and lacy summer tops remind me very much of her.

The top is my own design: bottom-up, in-the-round raglan; spiral shell lace pattern; crocheted edging. It took just one skein of ornkney angora 4 ply. That’s right folks! Just 50g!

I love this yarn so much — so light and sugary, and it knits up a dream. The finished top turned out well, but it is wee — almost too wee. My thursday night knitting comrades laughed heartily at the size of it when they saw me making it — the combination of the lace pattern and a 40cm circular needle meant it looked contracted and near-dollsize, but it blocked out nicely, and does fit me — just. Here it is being blown around on the promenade near Funchal.

ye gods, was that really just last week? The weather is so crisp and autumnal here that Madeira seems a world away. So, anyway:

Design: Mary Traynor (my own pattern)
Yarn: Orkney Angora 4 ply. Red. One skein. Ysolda, and her lovely beret, are to blame for my yarn choice.
needles: 4mm addi turbos
ravelled here

Swapping round the warm- and cold-weather wardrobes has reminded me just how many berloody clothes I own, and that, aside from the occasional pair of tights (groan) that I really do not need to buy any more. I’ve found real pleasure in making and wearing all the things I’ve sewn and knitted so far this year, and am looking forward to revamping my wardrobe with handmade items this winter — tweed suits and knitted dresses, here we come.

And for those of you who were kindly asking after Tom: things are starting to improve. Madeira really did wonders for the healing process: he was told the other day by the woman we call “badphysio” that he was doing remarkably well “for his age”. (Note: we only call her badphysio because she’s rather dour and hardchrist, not because she’s at all bad at her job). The poor hand is still incredibly painful–now the tendons have healed, they have to be stretched and punished to prevent him having a claw. He has no feeling in the fingers, and the injuries are still rather fragile. But the evil splint can now be taken off during the day, and he is allowed to go running and hill walking again. This is very good news indeed.

refashioning

This morning I refashioned an old dress from the summer wardrobe (the whole of which has now happily come out of hibernation). I have had it since 1995. I was a student then, and I remember I felt incredibly extravagant buying it. It was the fabric I liked — plain grey linen — and I wore it an awful lot that summer. At least, I think I did — unfortunately I can no longer find the photographic evidence. Nor do I have any evidence, in fact, of how this dress looked before I started messing around with it with scissors and sewing machine today — I forgot to take a before pic. Fool! (Ma, do you have any pics of me in this dress? I’m sure you remember it).

Anyway, there were a few problems with the dress, which is why I’ve not worn it for ten years or more: 1) the fit was large, and it hung sack-like on me 2) it had a wrap-around split front. This extended the whole length of the dress from the the empire-line waist to the ankles and had an unfortunate tendency to flap open in the breeze. As I recall, I had to wear a couple of safety pins in the front to prevent any unseemly knicker flashing. Finally 3) the linen creased like buggery. Not much I could do about the last of these, but I tried to sort out the first two to make it wearable again.

With my seam ripper I took the skirt off the bodice, sewed up the split from the wrap-around then re-attached the skirt to the bodice, sewing it flat across the back but taking in the resulting extra fabric on the front of the skirt by adding a few pleats. Then, in lieu of a waistband I sewed on a fabric cover with an attached internal cord to the front of the dress. This enables me to gather in the extra width of the dress thus:

As you know I like external pockets. So I added some pockets in the same fabric as the waistband, and trimmed them with the grey cord:

(note to self: you really do have weird bony thumbs)

The fabric is a fat quarter of Japanese cotton bought last winter at the Knitting and Stitching Show in Harrogate. The cord was a gift in last year’s fabric-and-notion-filled birthday box (thanks, Ma).
So here are my sewn-on additions:

and heres how the whole dress looks now:

Theres a seam right up the centre from where I sewed up the open edges of the wrap-around, but its now hidden in the folds. Not a terribly exciting dress, perhaps, but it is comfy, fits better and, most importantly, no longer threatens to reveal my underwear.