A hint of a tint
As I briefly mentioned the other day, ten days ago my white dupatta met with a fatal accident. It somehow got caught in the rear wheel of my mobility scooter (I can't think how, as it wasn't especially long and it was wrapped around me), ripping it to shreds. And since this is my sun protection in hot weather, I needed to replace it urgently; I'm well aware that sunblock exists, but my problem is I'm allergic to some of it, and I'm not sure exactly which. (Well, I know I'm allergic to Ambre Solaire, but there are a lot of them out there, and I have no way of telling whether or not I'm going to be allergic to one I haven't yet tried.) So the dupatta is what keeps the sun off my arms in hot weather, and I'm not 100% sure we've seen the last of that for the summer.
There are plenty of nice white dupattas around online, but there is a little problem. They're all in India. That means they tend to take a couple of weeks to get here, and I needed a replacement faster than that. So I ordered a couple of metres of very classy white cotton double gauze with a gold print (little squares, I think) and some white cotton lace to trim the ends, and I waited.
Alas, there was another little problem, which was that Minerva didn't have a continuous two-metre length of that fabric. They wanted to know if I'd like it sent as 0.7 m plus 1.3 m, or if I'd prefer a refund. The answer was, in fact: neither, I need the fabric, but I'm not putting up with a weird seam right across my dupatta, so I would like a replacement fabric, thank you very much. I had a look and found another gold-on-white print - at least, that was what they said it was - for less than half the price of the original (admittedly very lovely) double gauze. I said, OK, here's the link; please send me two metres of this instead and refund me the difference.
So they did. (Minerva are pretty good.) Unfortunately, when it arrived, there was... you've guessed... another little problem. The lace was indeed white. The fabric, however, was not.
Had I wanted it for more regular clothing, it wouldn't have bothered me. White, off-white, it doesn't matter; I can wear either, despite what the Colour Me Beautiful people reckon. (I don't know if they're still going, but basically this was a kind of a fashion movement that sorted people into different "seasons" according to which group of colours most suited them. To nobody's surprise I was quite emphatically a Winter. Which was fine, except that they were too rigid; yes, bright jewel tones tend to look good on me on the whole, and pastels definitely don't, plus I can do red/green/purple/fuchsia/turquoise but not orange/yellow/brown. So, for me, the Winter classification works well as a starting point; but they got so obsessive about sorting colours into seasons as far as possible that they sorted several neutrals that in fact anyone can wear, so if you were a Winter you were supposed to wear white/silver and not off-white/gold, and that is where I part company with them. Plus I look good in olive green, which is again not supposed to be my colour.) But this was for a dupatta, and there was the lace trim to consider. I mean, it could have been worse; at least it's cotton lace rather than synthetic, so it's white but it isn't super-bright optic white like you tend to get with synthetic lace. Even so, it does fidget me a bit. The fabric is ivory, not white. It's very nice fabric; I think I like it better than the original double gauze, barring that one thing. Nonetheless, I do feel quite strongly that they should have labelled it as ivory. It's not as if they don't have plenty of other fabrics that are labelled as that colour.
It's supposed to be a Christmas fabric, as a matter of fact; those triangles are meant to be stylised Christmas trees. However, in a dupatta the fabric is primarily seen sideways on, and sideways on they could be anything (and I do think they look vaguely Indian). Also, the colour scheme isn't really very Christmassy. So I think it works fine for high summer. Of course, in the unlikely event that I ever visit Australia it'll be just perfect!
Anyway, it looks as if I'll be needing it on Wednesday, and it'll be comfortably ready by then. Once it's finished, I'll be back to sewing the red top with the facing that's on the wrong way round. Fortunately, that fabric is so bouncy that the only sensible way to finish the seams (at least on a top - skirts are a bit more forgiving) is to blanket-stitch the edges and then catch them down to the fabric underneath; so it's all lying flat anyway, and I think I might well be able to get away with having two lengths of narrow toning ribbon along each shoulder just to hide the edges of the seams. That is still more sewing than I wanted, but it does do the thing I always like to do in sewing, which is to convert a bug into a feature. Oh, and the same fabric in the emerald green arrived with the dupatta fabric and it is all of the gorgeous; I had hesitated about buying it because it looks more of a teal on the website, but in the end I decided that if it was really the colour it looked they wouldn't have called it emerald green. (Though, in the light of the "white" fabric that turned out to be ivory, perhaps I should revise that line of thinking!) But it is, in fact, a true emerald green, and I'm looking forward to making it up into something that can be worn as either regular clothing or SCA garb, depending on whether I add a knitted jacket or my rectangular tunic.
With all that going on, I haven't yet had time to try out the new calligraphy pens... but watch this space, for it will be soon!
