This top is pants!
I mentioned in passing the other day that Stroppy Sibyl the Cranky Colostomy requires a pad held over her at all times, in case she blows. (Which, in fact, she has just done; I will spare you all the gruesome details, but suffice it to say the pad helped a bit but not as much as I would have liked it to have done.) And that this pad is held in place by a rather nice suspender belt - one of the wide ones, not those little strappy things, which are very pretty but useless for this particular purpose. The belt doesn't suspend anything. It attaches to a pair of elastic garters just to stop it from rolling up.
It was not ever thus. I used to wear massive pants. Not only that, but they were men's... well, think about it, a colostomy bag has to go somewhere. And while I have to say that those trunks Charles Tyrwhitt used to make were very comfortable, they did nothing at all for my self-esteem; but I wore them for quite a long time because I couldn't think of anything better.
And then, all of a sudden, I got the suspender belt idea, and that was a game-changer. Now I can wear any kind of knickers I like, and, believe me, I do. However, I was now left with several pairs of humungous pants in black and various shades of grey, mostly in good condition, which I was never going to wear again. What do you do with a lot of old thunderpants?
As it turned out, I also had a bit of bright red tubular ribbing left over from another project; it's a bit heavier than the pants material, but it gave me an idea nonetheless. I decided I was going to make a patchwork top, and, given that I was using knitted fabrics, I thought it would be nice to use a shape with curves rather than the traditional hexagons. After a bit of playing around I decided on the one shown here; I believe in quilting it's normally called an "apple core", but if anyone showed me an apple core shaped like that I'd tell them they were wasting half the apple, so I refused to call it that. However, I do also play D&D, and in my last campaign we had a half-orc barbarian who wielded an impressive double axe, and I thought... that's what it is. It's not an apple core. It's a double axe head. But the thing with this shape, whatever you like to call it, is not only that it tessellates (which is obviously essential for patchwork); it's also extremely easy to draw on a square grid. You just put the point of your compasses in the centre of a square and set it so that the pencil is on one of the corners, draw two arcs connecting two facing pairs of corners, and repeat around the grid until you have the pattern shown above. (I used some quilting graph paper I got on eBay; it's American, so it's marked in inches, but since all I needed to be able to do was plot out the design, that didn't matter. The pieces themselves are based on a 5 cm square.)
The way it worked out, I had about as much black as grey, and a little bit of red; more precisely, what I needed was a design with equal amounts of the two darker colours and one-eighth of the shapes in red. So I plotted out the design on the paper, inked all the lines so they were clear, photographed it, put it on the computer (now you know why it has perspective lines), post-processed it to wash out the square grid underneath as much as possible and whiten the paper, and flood-filled all the horizontal tiles in black and all the vertical ones in grey. Then I experimented with placing the red ones till I had something I was happy with; this is where the Undo button is your friend.
Finally, I began the lengthy and arduous task of cutting out a vast number of little axe heads in cardboard, then the same number of slightly larger axe heads in the various fabrics (being careful to ensure I was cutting them in the right direction), and then tacking the latter onto the former. Let's just say this isn't going to be finished quickly. I'll be lucky if I'm wearing it next summer. I have, in fact, sewn a few of the pieces together, and that is not quick either, since a great deal of care is needed to line up the junctions as neatly as possible. Nonetheless, it's a great thing to be able to pick up in odd moments, and the result is going to be truly unique... not to mention it keeps a whole lot of old pants out of landfill. What's not to like here?
To be fair, when I originally bought those pants I never dreamt I'd end up wearing ten pairs of them at once. But then my life has been one long tale of the unexpected, so I shouldn't be at all surprised!
