needled

My attempts to refresh my summer wardrobe without buying anything are reaching interesting lengths. I seem to be spending all moments when not working, eating, or snoozing at the sewing machine. If my maniacal dressmaking activities are boring you, look away now (I fear that the thrill of my new clothes is certainly wearing thin on Mr B, who just mutters, ‘yes, very nice’ at each new item and goes back to reading his issue of ‘What’s Brewing?’)

Here is the fruit of yesterday evening’s labours. I had been looking at Mariko Fujinaka’s instructions for a ’summer top’ in The Crafter’s Companion and decided, with some modifications, to give it a go.
Again, I used another old top as the the template, and cut out front, back, and facings:

(old top, new pieces)

I sewed the facings to the front and back, then seamed it up the sides. Then I added the now-obligatory external pockets (which you have no doubt noticed are something of a theme with me). These ones are an obvious echo of those I knitted a few weeks ago for the kaari sweater

yes, and more buttons too . . .

I then made some running stitches around the neck and along the pocket (to separate off three different sections) with sashiko thread:

I am very pleased with how neatly I managed the seams and facings:

so here’s the finished top:

and me in it

Nice and simple. This was made from the remaining piece of dark indigo-dyed cotton I used for the top in the previous post, and two fat quarters (one with a wave, and one with a crane-fly print). Again, it’s a Japanese dobby-weave fabric. It has a linen-like hand and hang, both of which I really like. I only have a few more fat quarters of this lovely stuff left and am tempted to combine the whole shebang into some joyous all-over garment of Japanese dobby. I may look odd, but who cares? I really enjoyed Felix’s recent post, in which she talks about her forthcoming patchwork skirt as a ‘portable case of ideas.’ Brilliant!

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.

I have been making a start thinking about Belle’s quilts. She lived near Blackpool, and the first quilt will be a jolly sea-side-y affair, made up entirely of her stripey tops and T-shirts — of which she had over thirty. In the summer she was always in stripes. I’ve been looking at different methods of piecing and quilting striped fabrics:

. . .and getting lots of inspiration from the way that Jude makes — and writes — about the texture of memory.

Then yesterday I read Vladimir Arkhipov’s Home-Made: Contemporary Russian Folk Artefacts, and it completely blew me away.

Arkhipov is an artist, who, for the past decade and a half, has travelled all over Russia collecting and exhibiting ordinary and marvellous hand-made objects. The objects, and the human stories behind their making, are documented in this super book. The bigger picture here is Perestroika and Russia’s economic and political crises from the mid ’80s to the late ’90s — a period when not not only items of luxuriant or complex manufacture were difficult to get hold of, but when everyday commodities became both scarce and pricey. All of the objects in this book are useful, and the vast majority are born out of necessity — but scarcity and privation are only part of the story here. Arkhipov, and the individual makers whose work he brings to light, show how conditions of necessity produce a particular material grammar; a poetry of ingenuity out of the aesthetics of use.

Here is a poetry of mending quite different from those eighteenth-century darning samplers I wrote about a few weeks ago:

Lubov Arkhipova, Socks, Kolomna (1995)

Arkhipov describes his archive of hand-made objects as “socially responsible art . . . in which people are [authors] of their own histories, histories that have unique illustrations — the self-production of everyday things.” His collection shows individuals as creators not just of things, but of meanings, as each maker accounts for their object in their own words. These short texts and multiple voices often produce intriguing dialogues between the makers and their objects through the narratives, memories, and desires with which they are invested. For example Aleski Solomkin’s contribution to the collection is a doormat made of beer-bottle tops that his neighbour and drinking partner kept flicking over the fence into his garden. Forced to clear up the debris of several evenings’ drinking, Solomkin felt “it would have been a shame to just chuck them all away,” and created an object that, beyond its immediate function, is also a quiet celebration of booze, friendship, and neighbourly-ness.

Many makers also speak persuasively about the pleasure of everyday materials and the creative process. For example, this beautifully made leather cap is formed out of an old Soviet punch bag and a worn out pair of leather boots:

Aleksandr Yakimovich, Cap, Moscow (1993)

Aleksandr Yakimovich talks about how the leather of the punchbag softened up over fifteen years of hard use, and of the “great pleasure” he derived from “making something out of something else” and subsequently wearing it. “Its one of my masterpieces” he says of the cap.

In terms of my own thinking about piecing cloth and memory together, the object I was most drawn to was this quilt made by Galina Svistakova for her son, out of the clothes of his brother, his father and his grandmother.

Galina Svistakova, Quilt, Ryazan (c.1990)

Of this wonderful cloth Svistakova’s son says “I think that things possess the aura of their owners, of a person who may very well no longer be with us, that things all carry information and inform us, and harmonise with other people’s things. I believe they live their own independent lives and that we need to. . . harmonise with them and be sensitive to them, in order for them to work in our favour.” This is the sort of functional poetry I can only aspire towards.

Here’s a quick pic of the finished blanket:

In the end I tied it — theres no batting to move around inside it and the test quilting I did looked completely pants on top of the pattern of the fabric, which is already quite busy. It looks better lying flat though, it has to be said. It is tied in the corners of each square with dark red wool, resembles a futon from the back, and is very, very cosy!

Don’t get me wrong, I love our flat, but did I mention that it is berloody freezing? There is one source of heat in the living room, and we have the cooker in the kitchen, but everywhere else is baltic. In winter we wander around the place wrapped up like woolly mammoths. I have been tempted on a few recent occasions to get out our RAB mountaineering sleeping bags. These are guaranteed ’safe’ to minus five, so will probably do the trick.

I have been buried under a pile of marking for several days and have been rewarding myself between scripts by making a patchwork blanket to warm us and the bedroom up.

A few months ago I visited Hinnigans in Selkirk and bought several offcuts of thick woollen fabric. As I understand it, these are waste lengths, produced when the makers are testing different patterns and colourways on the looms. I bought three lengths — bluish, pinkish, and brown — all about a foot wide. Out of these I’ve enough fabric to patch together a blanket six foot square. Here it is partly pinned and partly pieced together.

I am going to attach a back to the blanket (a burgundy coloured old cotton sheet), quilt the top (in a basic geometric fashion, following the diagonals) and edge it with bias binding. The wool is very thick and warm and already has a quilt-like squashiness which means no batting is required. Each of the long lengths of wool cost me 50p, so, with the recycled backing and the notions from stash, the materials cost £1.50 in total, which really isn’t bad. The fabric reminds me of the Welsh tapestry capes one so often sees in charity shops. Well, I often see them anyway — most usually in lurid 1970s shades of bright green and orange. The colours of the patchwork are a bit less lurid, but the dense quality of the wool is equally pleasing. While I love the fabric, there is little to say about the simple design, and the less said about the execution the better (!), but I shall post a finished picture when the whole hybrid patchwork-quilt-blanket is completed at the end of the week.

In other news, I am veritably basking in internetniceness, having been tagged with one of these by four lovely fellow bloggers.

I would have tagged Alice and Kirsty meself, had I got in first: they are both enviably talented crafters with two very distinctive creative styles, and they also write uberblogs chock full of wit and smartness. Leslie and Mick’s blogs are new to me, but their tag has given me the opportunity to discover them. Many of the blogs I read regularly are, on the surface, very different from each other but, thinking about it today, they do have one thing in common — and that is a particular, often idiosyncratic, aesthetic that colours everything they do. This aesthetic can be something I identify with on a personal level, as is the case with Estyn, who has an incredible eye for the chance lovelines of the everyday, or Helen, a talented knitter who also takes beautiful, evocative pictures of the landscape of the Borders and Assynt. But there are also bloggers that inspire me because their culture and creative practice is very different to my own. Flor and Lene come into this category. While I have never met Ashley I sort of feel I know her very well because of the warmth of her writing, as well as the lovely things she makes and an, um ‘real life’ intellectual connection. There is an artist’s intelligence apparent in all that Kristen, Felix and Jennifer do, and finally, Jude is endlessly inspiring on all counts. Indeed, hers is less a blog than a lived poetics of making.