Crafty Caturday: the indigo shirt
One of life’s quiet joys for me is Crafty Caturday. That’s when friends come over to my house on a weekend for a peaceful, cozy day of company and crafts. Maybe it’s raining out and I make a big pot of soup. Later on, after it’s dark and I’ve finished the tricky parts of whatever I’m working on, we’ll have a few drinks. I have to make time for Crafty Caturday because otherwise my weekends tend to get swallowed up in admin, and whoever wished on their deathbed that they’d done more admin?
I’d promised months ago to make the Bloke a replica of his favorite shirt — a dark-blue tunic made of gauzy cotton that he bought on a trip to Turkey — in lightweight linen we’d dyed during an experiment with indigo. The original shirt was falling apart, so I dismantled it with my trusty seam ripper into its component parts and used them as templates to draw up a pattern on kraft paper. So far, so good.
I don’t have a hell of a lot of experience in garment construction, so without detailed instructions I was a little bit at sea as to what should go where and in what order. Fortunately, the pattern turned out to be very simple, and with a little help from Sue and her invaluable step-by-step tutorials, I managed to clear most of the major hurdles, like sewing the placket and attaching the sleeves, with no trouble at all. The Bloke was suitably impressed with the result.
It does indeed look pretty good, as long as you don’t examine it too closely.
Nothing gives me quite the same pleasure as making clothes. Shopping in London so often leaves a sour taste in my mouth because everything seems so overpriced, badly designed, ill-fitting and cheaply made. A lot of the stuff sold in high street shops is disgracefully flimsy, particularly garments whose original function, now seemingly lost in the mists of time, was to keep people warm — plastic sweaters and cheap “wool” coats are particularly notorious offenders. It wasn’t till the Bloke spent his first ever snug and comfy winter in a J. Crew wool peacoat with Thinsulate that he realized he, like most people in Britain, had spent so much of his life shivering in inferior garments that he’d taken being cold for granted. But with the ability to sew, I face the possibility of a neverending wardrobe of clothes made to my exact size and specifications (tailored wool suits! Victorian drag! custom corsets!), and the deep satisfaction of spending lots of time in the Craft Zone.
That’s why, after finally obtaining the right to UK tuition rates after 3 years of residence, I’ve scrapped the idea of pursuing further education in the form of an MA in something intellectual and have decided to throw all my firepower at learning how to make amazing clothes. I have an endless appetite for learning more, there are plenty of people willing to teach me and with a bit of strategy I can afford it, so why not? It’s not as though making sensible professional development choices has ever paid off.
