Gallimaufry

Every now and then, there's going to be a post made up of little bits that aren't really enough individually to make a whole post, so I'll just throw a few of them together and we'll see how it develops. This embroidery, for instance.

I'm a rather modest dresser. It's not that I'm in any way ashamed of my body; it's just that I get to determine who sees it (unless, of course, I am in hospital, in which case dignity pretty much goes out of the window - to give them due credit, they try very hard, but it is just the nature of the situation). I'll go sleeveless in the summer, but that's as far as I go; I'm not even one for very low necks. And my legs are always fully covered. I have every respect for people with stomas who proudly walk around with the bag hanging out of their trunks or bikini bottoms; if they want to normalise the beastly things, great, and more power to their elbows. It's just not me. So I usually wear black trousers, but just sometimes I want to wear a skirt - and it's always ankle length.

Well, at the time I bought this one (and a few others) I was in this job, about which the less said the better, because it was incredibly stressful; and the thing was, I didn't have time for concentrated sewing. If I wanted four decent skirts, it was a question of buy them now and then titivate them later if they required it. And, in fact, they all did require it, because it turned out that if I wanted a good sturdy ankle-length skirt with deep pockets, the place to go was my friendly neighbourhood Muslim outfitter's. I dare say a few eyebrows were raised, but when you're selling things you are generally not too sniffy, so they got my money and I got the skirts, and we were all happy.

The only thing is, Muslim skirts are... a bit plain, shall we say. One could even say austere, in fact. They were really good skirts - tough medium-weight cotton drill, the best pockets I've ever had on a skirt I didn't make myself, flared enough for striding about in but not so much they got caught in things - but stylish wasn't the word. Well, that was fine. I could style them.

You'd get more detail here if I could remember it, but it was a long time ago and I'm hazy. I think what I did was to draw and then trace the original half pattern repeat, turn the tracing over so I had a full repeat, then trace that several times onto a long piece of greaseproof paper and transfer it from there to the skirt; but I'm not certain. The one thing I do recall for sure is that I didn't explicitly mark the position of the bead flowers. I embroidered the lines and then put the beads in by eye. And, actually, if I could get some more of those petal-shaped beads it would be really useful. I hope the resulting design was abstract enough not to offend the nice Muslims who sold me the skirts; I'm not entirely sure what the rule is on bead flowers, but they are at least very stylised.

I can't even remember what this was from; but, given the construction, it must have had to take quite a bit of strain. I would not have bothered faffing about with twine otherwise. It's fair to say I've made quite a lot of button loops in my life, largely because I don't much like making buttonholes (especially not on satin fabric like this), so if I can get away with making a loop instead I will. And, for most purposes, just using the sewing thread is quite enough. It's still the same basic principle - loop the thread through the fabric several times and then blanket-stitch over it - but even half a dozen or so loops of regular sewing thread will make you a loop that won't break in a hurry. This one? I'd have a job to cut through it.

Anyway, in either case, the secret to a good button loop is getting your base loops as even as possible so that you don't end up with any lumps or bulges. A useful trick is to wind them around something cylindrical, if you have anything the right size; for shirt buttons you could probably get away with winding round a pen, or for something slightly larger a round chalk marker or a tube for seed beads. For this one I was clearly using sewing thread for the blanket stitching, but these days I think on a loop this size I'd use embroidery cotton (as I generally do for large buttonholes). Since it's so much thicker, it covers your loop faster.

Ah, yes. Tassels. Again, I can't recall what these were for, because whatever it was hasn't survived, but the interesting thing is that the technique is exactly the same as the one I used to make Orpheus' mane (remember Orpheus the little unicorn?). However, since Orpheus' mane was both a lot longer and a lot wider than these little tassels, what I did in that case was to wrap the yarn around a piece of card, like this, and then carefully tape the top.

It's a quick and simple way to get a lot of strands about the same length, and if I ever needed to cut my own yarn for latch hooking, this is what I'd do. For the tassels you wind over a length of thread so that you can tie the top before you slip it off the ruler (or whatever you're using); I like to do it double, as shown in the photo, so I can pull the ends tight through the loop, then bring them down and wrap one of them round all the threads before cutting the ends (the other end of the loop just becomes part of the tassel). But that's very much a matter of personal preference. You could just as easily tie a reef knot. The only really important thing is to do all your tying before you cut the ends at the bottom. As for Orpheus' mane, I'm pretty sure I sewed it through the tape and then carefully removed the tape on each side, rather like sewing through tissue paper. I'm not yet sure what you do for Orpheus II, who has a different pattern, but what I do know for certain is I'm not using Goldfingering, no matter how pretty it is. It's too thin for a mane. I have some King Cole Glitz yarn in gold, which is a DK weight; it's not as glittery, but it will work a lot better.

Oh, and finally, there's the first piece of clothing I ever designed for myself. By the age of about 14 or 15 I was allowed to spend my pocket money without having to have every prospective purchase okayed by my parents first; so I bought a couple of metres of ultra-cheap fabric - it was a fuchsia pink rayon shantung, so not the easiest stuff to sew with, but it was something like £1 a metre and I loved the colour - and I made a dress. I don't even remember what it was like now, apart from I think I did give it a contrast bias binding trim, but I do recall my mother saying she wondered how I had the nerve to wear it.

I'm still a little ashamed of the fact that by that point I didn't care.

See, she wasn't ever going to say anything positive. She wasn't going to give me any active help, support, or encouragement. That wasn't what she did. She did - credit to her - give me a couple of old sewing books for which she had no further use, and those were pretty helpful, although they were full of bizarre 1950s concepts such as "figure faults". So I just thought, all right, you can sew but you're not going to teach me; I even have to wrangle to get you to give me fabric remnants rather than putting them in the bin; fine, OK, that's how you are. And in that case I will teach myself, and that means I will make mistakes that I wouldn't have made if you'd been prepared to help me, and therefore you will just have to put up with that. I wasn't quite such a horrible child as to wear the dress just to annoy her; but I did wear it, nonetheless.

(Footnote: she's now 86 and we get on very well these days. She doesn't have dementia, but her short-term memory has been shot to bits for quite a long time now, and she does get occasional bouts of confusion, so dealing with her now requires a good deal of grace and tact. She also causes at least one amusing anecdote almost every time we talk on the phone, so the tables are turned... but very gently, which is how I like things to be.)

So that's the gallimaufry, at least for now. I hope to bring you my current sewing project soon; but all I'll say about it for now is that there are 29 separate pieces and every single one of them has to be backed up with calico to stop them all stretching, so it's... something of an undertaking!