Toile and trouble
This is d'Artagnan. If you're not a fan of baroque/early music, you almost certainly won't recognise him; if you are, you'll be doing a huge double take right now, and asking yourself "is that really...?" Yes. Yes, it is. That's just who you think it is. And he's wearing the original toile for what was going to be an extremely ornate embroidered waistcoat, made by me. (For those not familiar with the terminology here, a toile is basically a mock-up to check the fit; and, as you can see, the fit was good here.)
And at the concert at the beginning of October, I had him measured up (didn't do it personally, since I was sitting in the wheelchair taking notes - in fact he'd conveniently brought his sister, who has some dressmaking experience, so she did it), because I am going to make a second toile. I've had to start the whole process all over again. So I'd better explain why.
It all started somewhere around fifteen years ago. I had the good fortune to win a trip to the Bath Fashion Museum (including a stay in a really nice hotel). The Bath Fashion Museum is all kinds of fascinating and I would recommend it to anyone; I could go on at length about the elaborate gowns, and the fabrics used (a lot lighter than you'd think to look at them), and probably write an entire post just about the display of historical gloves. But the piece that really inspired me was a Victorian embroidered waistcoat. I looked at it and thought, "I could do something like that. In fact, I'd really like to... but who would wear it? Oh, of course - d'Artagnan could wear it on the stage!"
So I made the toile as you see, took it to a concert with me to check the fit (it was in Ghent, as it happens), was satisfied, and when I got home I started work on the waistcoat itself. It was blue. I don't do blue at all for myself, but our d'Artagnan has the bluest eyes I've ever seen on anyone who wasn't a very small kitten, so blue was the obvious choice. And the embroidery involved a lot of beads and gold thread, and it went pretty slowly because at the time I had an extremely stressful job. And then I had to give up said job due to ill health, which was a blessing in disguise, really; and I pottered along until 2016, at which point my guts suddenly decided to mutiny on me.
In medical terms, what I had was acute bowel ischaemia. In two places (one in the ileum and one in the colon). In lay terms, two sections of my gut had literally died. As a result, I also had full-body sepsis, so I was really not a well bunny. Even with emergency surgery, my chances of survival were in single figures; and when I did survive, it became very obvious that I wasn't going to be able to live on my own for quite a long time. I was at that time living in a two-bedroomed house in Sheffield; I didn't especially like Sheffield (it was too big for me), so I wanted to get out in any case, and had for some years been trying to get a job in the Lake District so I could move back there and look after my elderly parents. So what happened in the end was that one of my sisters very kindly took me in for the duration of my convalescence, and the other one equally kindly took charge of selling my house.
My sister did her best, but she couldn't do it all on her own, so she got some other people in to help, and these people didn't know me. So they didn't really know exactly what to salvage from the house; had I been in a position at least to supervise, I would have said "for heaven's sake don't throw out that embroidery - I've spent years on it!", but I wasn't and they did. They put what they could into storage, but it was a very small storage unit, it was the cheapest they could find, and it turned out to be damp; so even most of the stuff they did salvage ended up unusable (in particular, my Zingarelli Italian dictionary went mouldy, and I was very sad about that - happily it has since been replaced). So that was how I lost the vast majority of my possessions when I was ill. I'm not complaining. I'm alive, and to be quite honest I wouldn't have had room for most of them in this tiny flat in any case. A few things did make it through - my laptop and camera, my Terry Pratchett collection (or most of it), some framed pictures including an original charcoal drawing by my mother, some of my favourite "fluffies and cuddlies" - but most things I own now have been acquired since 2016.
And then I didn't sew for a few years because I was worried about cutting out. Nobody knows if my balance problem is related to what went wrong with my guts, but it certainly started around the same time (about a month before my guts rebelled, my balance became so bad that I had to swap my regular shopping trolley for one that doubled as a walker). But when the penny finally dropped and I realised I could do cutting out in stages, that was it. I was away. It didn't take very long at all after that to decide to re-start the waistcoat project. Because I will get that waistcoat on that man if it takes me till he's 70 (by which time he will undoubtedly still be singing; he's not exactly so young now, but he's still a truly magnificent tenor).
His sister asked me what I was going to embroider on it. I grinned and said, "Nightingales, of course!" 😁
