Thank you for the thread!
I have no Fiber Arts activity to report, for several months now. Including I have not fixed the strap on the dress for my daughter-in-law. My bad.
But my daughter got moved 1,500 miles away last week, and one other “life-changing” situation is expected before the end of July...
So maybe I will try to get back to some sewing in a few more weeks. I think she’s going to need new placemats, at least....maybe some covers for throw pillows....
Thanks for the ping. Hope you don’t mind another story from me which I call “Seam Stressing”:
I have incredible respect for people skilled in the fabric arts and I know just enough about it to ensure my opinion of those folks is knowledgeable and sincere. That is why I feel a little bit like an imposter coming on this thread. I am mostly a wanna-be thread artist but perhaps I can elicit a smile or happy memory in these trying times from another story which I call “Seam Stressing”:
I grew up in the fifties and sixties in a small agricultural town, not to brag but it was the “potato capital of the world.” At any rate, the next larger towns were about half an hour by car north and south, weather permitting (weather not permitting they may as well have been on the moon). What might be considered by some as an actual city was 200 miles away. Self-sufficiency was absolutely necessary so boys grew up learning to be mechanics and girls learned sewing.
The 4-H Club (Head, Heart, Hands something else I have forgotten) program was ubiquitous there. I think I was nine when I joined, my major being sewing. By custom, the first sewing project was an apron. I enjoyed the meetings although they had little to do with sewing itself and what there was focused on club members working on dresses and other advanced projects. I did manage to pick out a yellow cotton print fabric and a pattern and I might even have advanced to cutting the pieces before the County Fair sneaked up on our club leader. The night before the fair, the 4-H leader summoned me and the other first-year girls to her house and told us to sit quietly and look at magazines while she took our fabric pieces into her inner sanctum. Fifteen minutes later she handed me my yellow apron which I might have hemmed but don’t hold me to it. I still have the apron but modesty (and perhaps conscience) preclude displaying the blue ribbon it earned in the County and State Fair 4-H competition.
The following year, with a different leader, I actually did some sewing. The project was a nightgown and robe set. This was during the time of glamorous Hollywood when stars like Audrey and Katherine Hepburn, Ava Gardner and Grace Kelly swanned around in gorgeous loungewear. With visions of sophistication in my head, I scanned the books of Butterick and Simplicity patterns which were filled with drawings of women whose body dimensions put Barbie to shame and certainly bore no resemblance whatsoever to my prepubescent chunky body. I finally found my dream loungewear: a flowing sleeveless full-length nightgown and a robe with mandarin collar, long-sleeved with buttons from waist to bust had I possessed those features at the time. The nightgown was easy but the robe was much more complex with darts and sleeves and covered fabric buttons fastened with loops, part of that higher skill set I had little talent for and much envy of others that do. I did manage to get a red ribbon, I believe for the set. I tried swanning around my house whenever I could but in my house if you were awake, you were doing chores and swanning doesn’t go well with washing the dishes or dumping the garbage. My nightgown tended to turn into a body tourniquet long before daybreak so the outfit mostly hung in my closet until I outgrew it.
I pushed on. There was no more 4-H but I figured I had learned enough to get by. My grandmother was an accomplished seamstress but she worked fulltime in the town fabric store and had little time for granddaughters who were sewing learning impaired. As is the story today with my computer and daughters, grandma simply did whatever was needed without teaching me the ropes. I scanned the magazines, stores and patterns to find trendy clothes to sew by kitbashing and plagiarizing mostly, all the while hoping my Butterick Body would eventually show up. I limited myself to simple projects like shorts, skirts, sleeveless tops and shifts but even so my darts usually failed to hit the bulls-eye, my crotches were too short or too long and my zippers were truly hit or miss, mostly miss with repeated #*@! seam ripping. The last time I seriously sewed clothing for myself was in college, I went to a northern college where women were not allowed to wear pants, even on the coldest days. One winter, full-length dresses suddenly became popular and I scrambled to make a few to protect my frozen knees. They were mostly jumpers, all pull-over so I could avoid sleeves, collars and the #*@! zippers.
For the next several years, I spent several years getting education and establishing my career which, by recommendation of my advisors, involved nothing artistic, fabric or otherwise. I was therefore out of practice when my daughters came of age to want Halloween costumes and other play outfits. Plus, by then fabric had morphed into mysterious natural and unnatural blends which defied my sewing skills and sewing machines had evolved from slide rule to computer levels of complexity. A few years ago my husband bought me a state-of-the-art sewing machine which I am afraid to touch. I’m told these machines can do anything but, if I have to enter my body measurements, it ain’t happening because my Butterick Body never bothered to show up. Once my daughters got old enough to be embarrassed, I mostly stopped sewing anything for them. Even sewing for myself was a challenge with the stretchy fabrics in which I prefer to swan these days. So my clothing sewing projects are mostly minor alterations like hemming pants for my vertically-challenged body. I did learn a mean blind stitch in 4-H.
I noticed I am not alone in being frustrated with today’s fabrics. At a second-hand store I found a pair of stretchy rayon pants where the legs had simply been whacked off by a hedge trimmer from the looks of it. One leg was a couple inches shorter and both undulated in several points. I considered getting them anyway just to hang around the house but with my luck I would get caught dead in them and that would destroy my Audrey Hepburn act.
So, as I said, I have enormous respect for those who have mastered the seamstress arts and I am hoping you masters will not mind helping me if someday I run across a dreamy outfit to sew, especially if it has a #*@! zipper.