As satisfying to page through as Vogue in its own homely way, Woman is a typical women’s weekly magazine of the day, serving up a mélange of starchy advice columns, knitting patterns, fashion and beauty tips, household hints, schmaltzy short fiction and recipes — all with an unmistakably British stamp.

It’s absolutely impossible to read these issues and not be acutely aware there’s a war on. Nearly every article and ad is saturated with the realities and the mood of war — changed lifestyles, separation, extra work, rationing, shortages, challenges, anxiety, duty.

Rather unfairly, manufacturers of beauty and fashion goods advertised their wares even when there was depressingly little chance that women would actually be able to buy them:

But some things never change — in this case, the barrage of remedies for the bewildering profusion of digestive problems from which the women of Britain apparently suffer. (Seriously, am I the only woman on this island who doesn’t struggle with the mysterious affliction known as bloating? Probably not, but you’d never know it from the countless female-targeted ads for antacids, probiotic yogurts and, yes, laxatives.)

But I digress. Here’s an interesting insight into the received wisdom on personal hygiene in the 1940s. Remember, ladies, deodorize every few days and floss once a week! (James, wandering past the bathroom one night: “You floss?“)

Here’s a great example of what fashion editors had to contend with during the years of austerity restrictions, clothing rationing and shortages galore. “Here, love, pin a bit of dustmop on that butt-ugly frock!” I’ve left the image uncropped so you can also see a sample of the tepidly torrid fiction favored by Woman.

Finally, a sweet and innovative touch — colorful motifs for women to embroider to show in what branch of the forces their husband or sweetheart was serving:

Brazenly you can proclaim where your interest lies by working the emblem of your choice on the pocket of your dress, on a lapel, or on a scarf. More secretly you can decorate a slip, or work his emblem in the palm of your glove.

I was charmed by this tutorial at CraftStylish into making a travel sewing kit, but although an Altoids tin is handy for emergency supplies, it’s too small to store everything I need for regular sewing and embroidery (especially crewel — the wool takes up a lot of space). So I biggified mine. I love the two travel kits — one for sewing and one for embroidery — I made from sweet tins and fabric scraps. They fit easily into a handbag and contain everything I need to work on my projects in spare moments away from home. Idle hands and all that.

Embroidery kit

Sewing and mending kit

It’s ridiculously easy to make your own with a similar tin and scraps from your sewing room. Then, when you want to take your project with you (even just to the couch) it’s just a matter of grab and go. My kits are stuffed with my favorite sewing and embroidery shinies and include a needle-polishing pincushion and a magnetic needle keeper… because you don’t ever want to have to wonder whether the person who sits in your seat next will “discover” the needle you mislaid.

I started by cutting out a felt bottom, as in the tutorial. A felt bottom is a great idea. It stops me rattling like a gypsy dancer every time I run to catch a bus. I made mine by tracing around the tin and cutting out on the line with pinking shears.

Using pinking shears prevents me from obsessing about how the felt isn’t absolutely! perfectly! fitted to the bottom of the tin every time I open it. I hot-glued it in place.

Then I made the pincushion. I traced around the lid of the tin on to a fabric scrap and cut out as before. Then I cut a smaller version of the same shape out of my piece of card, making it a little over 1/2″ smaller on all sides to give a seam allowance plus a little extra room for stuffing.

Then I ran a line of gathering stitches all the way around the fabric, well within the seam allowance.

I put the cardboard back in the middle of the fabric, held it down and gently pulled up on the ends of the bobbin threads to gather the edges slightly…

…then removed the cardboard and stuffed some steel wool into the hollow. Steel wool apparently polishes your needles and keeps them sharp.

I stuck the cardboard back on top of the steel wool, pulled up the threads until the fabric sat snugly around the cardboard, smoothed out the gathers evenly all the way around the circle and knotted the ends to finish the pincushion.

And then we hot glue!

Now for the needle keeper. Super easy. I just took a 1″ badge (this one’s from Wool & Hoop) and pried out the pin back, then stuck a 15 mm neodymium magnet inside instead.

Neodymium magnets are super strong and fun to play with! The needle keeper lives inside my sewing kit, but when I sew I stick it on the lid to keep my needle from roaming when I put my work down for a moment. The curved surface of the badge makes the needle easy to grab.

I also keep one on the knob of my sewing machine to keep my basting and tacking needles handy.

Now the fun part: stuffing your sewing kit full of shinies! Skeins of embroidery thread get hopelessly tangled up. Why not wind them neatly on some vintage-style thread cards from Sajou?

You’ll need some scissors, of course. I don’t know about you, but I find that scissors, like needles, vaporize whenever I put them down for more than 3 seconds. So I use a scissors holder that hangs around my neck on a chain. I got mine from Des Fils et une Aiguille in Paris, but I’ve also seen them online.

Add a couple of needle threaders and you’ve got all you need for embroidery!

My sewing and mending kit contains slightly different supplies. I keep my needles in a wooden needle case (again from Des Fils et une Aiguille, but take a look at these), and I stash scissors, a thimble, a few pins in a scrap of felt, safety pins for emergencies, a seam ripper, buttonhole twist, darning thread and whatever hand sewing thread my project requires. I also carry a measuring tape, in addition to the one I keep in my handbag. I never knew how many things in my life needed measuring until I started carrying a measuring tape.

With this kit I can hem a garment, sew on a button, mend a rip or darn a hole (wool tights are £30 a pair!). I am Ready for Anything that can be tackled with a needle and thread.

As far as I know, everything in these kits is airplane-safe. Actually, I’ve flown with them several times within Europe and nobody’s so much as asked to look inside. Those who have to negotiate TSA screenings may have a different experience.

I’d love to know what you stash in your kit for craftiness on the go!

Tagged: embroidery, gifts, how to, shinies ]]> http://cargocultcraft.com/2010/01/11/travel-sewing-needlecraft-ki/feed/ 8 Susannah Embroidery kit Sewing and mending kit Tracing the felt bottom Sticking in the felt bottom Cutting out pincushion Gathering stitches Gathering for the pincushion Steel wool in pincushion Pincushion Pincushion Badge and magnet Needle keeper back Needle keeper Needle keeper Sajou thread cards Embroidery kit Sewing and mending kit http://cargocultcraft.com/2010/01/03/blokerchiefs/ http://cargocultcraft.com/2010/01/03/blokerchiefs/#comments Sun, 03 Jan 2010 15:32:10 +0000 Susannah http://cargocultcraft.com/?p=804 ]]> How I love hand-embroidering handkerchiefs. As a project, it’s fast, portable and easy, and a great way to give myself a quick hit of accomplishment when I haven’t got time for anything major. It’s also a stylish and simple way to say (e.g.), “I love you, you dashing hunk”, or “Stop mooching my kleenex.”  Hankies make great stocking stuffers or thank-you gifts.

I made these hankies for the dashing hunks in my life, which is how they came to be dubbed Blokerchiefs. There are a couple ways to handle the hanky itself: make your own or buy plain hankies and embroider. Frankly, I prefer to make my own, as it’s a good way to use up scrap fabric and I have yet to encounter a shop-bought handkerchief that doesn’t punish the nose.

For the handmade hankies, I did the embroidery before cutting out to make it easier to hoop the fabric. Then I cut and hemmed. I’ve tried a couple different hem finishes: a machine-stitched narrow folded hem and a hand-rolled hem. I favor hand-rolled hems for lightness, elegance and neat corners, although they do take forever until you get the hang of them. Colette Patterns has a handy tutorial on hand-rolled hems I wish I’d read before attempting my first. Claire Schaeffer’s invaluable Couture Sewing Techniques also covers hand-rolled hems (along with many, many other techniques) comprehensively.

My first hand-rolled hem. Well, A for effort, at least.

Blokerchief #1: Circles

This was my first Blokerchief. I made it out of so-so quality handkerchief linen I bought on eBay. The Bloke wanted a monogram that looked a bit modern, so I browsed through Fontfreak until I found one called “Circulate” that fit the bill.

I traced the monogram on to the linen by using my laptop screen as an ersatz light box. This meant laying the laptop on its back so the screen was flat, stretching the fabric taut over the screen, securing it with masking tape and tracing the design on to the linen with tiny dabs from a water-soluble fabric marker with a very fine point (if you’re not meticulous, fabric markers tend to bleed too much for precision). Then I embroidered the monogram in Anchor cotton, using split stitch for the outline and satin stitch for the lettering.

The finished Blokerchief

Lessons learned:

- Handkerchief fabric for embroidery should be as finely and tightly woven as possible. You can see from the close-up photo above that the weave is pulling a little along straight lines of stitching, such as the vertical of the letter N. Fine weaves are also more nose-friendly. Vintage hankies are the gold standard, of course — deliciously thick and soft. Sadly, nobody seems to make cotton or linen that fine and strong anymore… although I’d love to try the handkerchief linen from William Booth, Draper.

- If you’re doing lettering in satin stitch, it’s a good idea to run an outline stitch first to provide a guide and give the lettering body and firmness.

- Hand-rolled hems turn out better if you avoid the temptation to make the roll fat and sturdy — the hem should really be as narrow as possible and feel a little flimsy.

Blokerchief #2: Laser Geek

Like any true geek, the Bloke likes lasers. So I decided to incorporate the international symbol for LASER DANGER! into my next Blokerchief.

For the lettering, I found a Blade Runner-esque font on Fontfreak called, appropriately enough, “Laserian”. I traced out the design on to linen, using my laptop as before. I outlined the lettering in split stitch this time, and then filled it in with satin stitch.

The laser symbol was a piece of cake to embroider — I outlined the circular center in split stitch and filled it in with satin stitch, then used (slightly wonky) stemstitch for the rays, finishing off with French knots.

The finishing touch was a split stitch border around the hanky. I put a narrow machine hem on this one.

Still a bit damp from where I removed the marker lines with water.

Lessons learned:

- Don’t attempt a narrow machine hem on anything square until you’ve done your research on sewing mitered corners.

Blokerchief #3: Scrabble Enigma

Although I mistrust people who take Scrabble seriously as covert language-haters, I do enjoy the occasional game with James. His 2008 Christmas present included an elaborate treasure hunt involving the Enigma cipher, and this hanky monogrammed with his initials acted as a clue while incorporating the Scrabble theme.

Where’s the Enigma connection? Well, sharp-eyed Scrabble fans might have noticed that the point values for the letters are incorrect. This is a clue that the 3-letter, 3-number combination is an Enigma key. Combined with an encrypted text and plugged into this online Enigma simulator, the key yielded a topical Valentine’s Day message — yes, that is how long it ended up taking him, even with hints.

Enigma Valentine

Decrypted: CRACKING IT TAKES MORE THAN INTELLIGENCE.

Lessons learned:

- Most treasure hunts start going wrong at clue #1.

Blokerchief #4: We Seek Him Here

James and I enjoy reading books aloud. One of our favorite shared literary experiences to date is The Scarlet Pimpernel, which combines a sensational plot — intrigue, blackmail, unspoken love, betrayal, heroism, chases, the shadow of the guillotine — with cheap jingoism and flamboyantly terrible writing. Bosoms heave, eyes flash, dialogue is peppered with comedy French accents and a single character is compared on various occasions to a fox, a rat, an eagle, a lion and a ferret. Also, the hero, while concealing his secret identity behind a reputation for brainless foppery, uses as his calling card a motif which just happens to be an ancestral device of his family, and which is thus depicted not only on a seal he uses regularly but in a family portrait hanging in his study.

I decided to make James a Blokerchief worthy of Sir Percy himself by embroidering the Scarlet Pimpernel in Madeira silk embroidery thread on a cotton hanky. I copied the flower from an image I found on the internet and used crewel techniques I learned from Katherine Shaughnessy’s The New Crewel to fill it in.

Embroidering in silk is a luxurious experience I recommend wholeheartedly — the fine threads slide effortlessly through your fingers, and the shimmer of silk embroidery thickly laid has the sumptuousness of a former age. I only wish the quality of the shop-bought hanky had matched the quality of the thread.

Lessons learned:

- Buy top-quality fabric if you’re going to spare no expense embroidering it.

Bonus: The Twin Peaks not-technically-a-Blokerchief

My friend Gaia has spent a sizeable chunk of the past two years of her life on a seaside-karaoke film homage to  Twin Peaks, shot and produced by her and featuring nearly everybody she knows. This was my tribute to her dedication. I hope to see her dabbing her eyes with it in 2010 as she weeps tears of joy at the film’s long-awaited premiere. I drew the lettering freehand and embroidered it in stemstitch and satin stitch, with French knot accents.

Lessons learned:

- Embroidery goes a lot faster and more smoothly if you use a frame and two hands, keeping one hand on either side of the fabric, instead of using one hand and switching up every stitch. I use a floor-standing embroidery frame like this one.

The ball itself was a bit disappointing. The whole absinthe-and-burlesque aesthetic was tired three years ago, possibly because underneath its pretensions to decadence, it tends to be curiously prudish and joyless. Also, the featured act was a band of ghastly boy-men strutting around in hairy paunches and ironic headwear, sneering openly at the audience. Two of the things that repulse me most in a man are 1) preoccupation with own personal appearance and 2) negligence about hygiene. He-hipsters, being both vain and dirty, unite these two polar opposites in one horrible, insanitary hybrid.

However, the mask now hangs proudly on my wall.

This Caturday I also managed to finish a cross-stitch piece I’ve been persevering with for weeks, even though it has been apparent for most of that time that it was going to end up looking basically like an MS Paint drawing on aida cloth. It’s a thank-you gift for a coworker of mine who took me under her wing when I started in my job — a wry, jaded veteran reporter who smokes like a chimney, swears like a trucker and has a heart of gold. I’m pretty sure she won’t mind that what I’ve given her is basically hideous tat:

Cross-stitch is fun. The very prissiness and homogeneity of it as an artistic medium spark creativity. And there’s something about curling up with a G&T, an unabridged audiobook of To Kill a Mockingbird and an embroidery stand and patiently picking out the word “fuck” in Anchor stranded cotton that soothes my soul.

I realize with a shock that I’ve come to the end of my craft backlog for the moment. I’ve finished a project and don’t have another to start on right away? Panic! Head for the Crafty Caturday Treasure Chest!

I had had it in mind for years to make myself some Victorian underwear. (Hell, who hasn’t?) My new sewing machine and the interweb made it possible at last to realize that dream, and now I sleep like a true princess (or, if you want, like a Sarah Waters heroine about to be corrupted) in linen and lace.

TV 102 -- Victorian chemise

Tucks and lace. Trims from FarmhouseFabrics.com.

After I finished the chemise, however, I had a lot of yardage left over — about 10 yards, to be exact, of handkerchief linen. So, after my train of thought had been chugging idly along for a few days, I decided it might be fun to try on some Dark Ages kit. Don’t ask me how I arrived at this idea. It was late and I have broadband.

Despising the SCAdian approach (stitch up some stretch velvet, slap on some Leia buns and a circlet over your glasses and proclaim yourself Marchioness Eowyn of Thropshire), I did some heavy research, discovering to my surprise and delight that turning the clock back 1000 years would probably yield me an outfit whose comfort, warmth, fit and grace would make high-street fashion look like, well, bits of plastic stitched together by children. I decided to start from the skin out with two undertunics — the simple linen garment known by various names and worn almost universally next to the body. I made one with embroidery based on a 10th-century archaeological find, and one without.

On an impulse (I get a lot of those), I decided to dye undertunic #2 blue with indigo, which is quite authentic for the period, as the pigment is the same as that found in woad. Indigo dyeing is a fairly fiddly process (it involves keeping the vat alkaline, anaerobic and temperature-controlled, which at least sustained the Bloke’s interest), but highly rewarding, mostly for the magical moment when you lift the fabric from the dyevat greenish-yellow and watch the blue develop, Polaroid-style, as the pigment oxidizes. I was immediately hooked.

Natural indigo

The Dark Ages were brighter than you think — probably brighter than modern-day London, at least in January. People enjoyed wearing as much color as they could afford — blues, pinks, greens, purples, browns, reds, oranges. The modest sorts dyed with native plants like weld (which yields a startlingly bright yellow); the better-off used labor- and land-intensive dyes like madder (red) and woad (blue), or imported dyestuffs like kermes. (A piece of trivia: history’s really insanely wealthy, such as the Roman emperors, wore clothing dyed with Tyrian purple, a pigment extracted from the crushed shells of the mollusc Murex. A synthetic substitute, the first aniline dye, was invented in the Victorian era, sparking the mauve craze. True Tyrian purple is still one of the world’s eye-wateringly costly luxury items, weighing in at £1734 a gram, or 144 times more expensive than gold.)

There’s a fair bit of sartorial overlap between Anglo-Saxons and Anglo-Vikings, at least as far as foundation garments go. My undertunics will do equally well for both, depending on what I put on over them. I’m currently working on an wool overtunic, or cyrtel, suitable for a moderately well-off Saxon lady of the late 10th-early 11th century.

I bought white wool fabric on Goldhawk Road in Shepherd’s Bush (London’s fabric paradise) and decided to dye it myself using madder. How complicated could it be? Well… fairly. Most home dyers are knitters who work with dainty little hanks of wool, which can be easily mordanted and dyed in a stock pot on the kitchen stove. By comparison, I was dyeing a monstrous 4-lb. swath of wool 3 yds. long by 60″ wide. I needed a lot of dyestuff, a lot of mordant and a lot of room for my fabric to move freely in the dyebath. I ransacked my brain for weeks for a way to heat 20 gallons of water to a simmer, preferably in a stainless steel container, and found myself rummaging through the online equivalent of the attic of the catering industry for steam-jacketed kettles, monster stockpots, field kitchen setups and the like. All too expensive.

Hope dawned in the form of an article by British dyer and rug-weaver Nest Rubio chronicling her experiments with cold-water madder dyeing, a method that makes much more sense when you consider all the eras in history when fuel might have been scarce and time plentiful. In the end, I bought a £10 plastic garbage bin from the pound shop around the corner and resolved to work with that.

I prepared the mordant bath at ordinary domestic hot-water temperature (about 130°F, or 55°C), added alum at 25% the weight of fabric, dropped in the wet, scoured fabric and put the lid on. Then I went to the Bloke’s parents’ for Christmas and left it there to soak.

Twelve days later, I came home, removed and rinsed the fabric and prepared the madder dyebath. I did this outside. There was a lot of madder — nearly 4 lbs. of powder — and it flew everywhere, including into my mouth (like a true cowgirl, I wasn’t wearing any kind of mask). I don’t recommend eating madder, notwithstanding the robustness of Maturin’s rats. It tastes like stevia, the New Age Nutrasweet (*shudder*). I added about 12 gallons of water from the hot tap again.

I read that bran is supposed to absorb the yellow and brown tones in madder for a purer, bluer red, so I added 1 lb. of bran tied up in cheesecloth bags. It was Fresh and Wild’s best organic wheat organic bran, so it’s bound to ensure superior results. Madder loves calcium, and London water is hard water, so I thought I’d fare quite well, but it also loves alkalinity and my tap water has a pH of between 6-7 (I have litmus strips!), so I added some baking soda to raise the pH slightly.

The dyebath frothed. Evil, sinister froth:

It looked as though I’d made a Countess Bathory-style beauty bath.

Eighteen hours later, the wool had turned a deep, fast tomato-red. Apologies for the poor image quality.

At T+ 48 hours, I removed the lid of the vat to find the fabric had floated to the surface in a soggy mass and was full of gas pockets, presumably because the madder and bran had begun to ferment.

Progging it with the BS (that’s technical dyer jargon for Big Stick) yielded satisfying blurping.

The dyebath has turned thicker and more viscous. I tested the pH today and added the barest sprinkling of lye to return it to 8, but the fabric keeps floating to the top. I’ve put my great brain to work on a Macgyver for weighing it down to keep it immersed. A large, shallow and hideous glass fruit bowl belonging to my housemate would do splendidly, but I fear it would lead to tensions. I’d better not tell them about my plans for experiments in fulling, a weatherproofing treatment for wool traditionally involving clay, stale urine and trampling the fabric in the bath with bare feet.

My housemates are lovely people, God bless ‘em, but fearfully square. This is what comes of growing up in sivilized England, where everyone’s jammed together and it’s impossible to remain unaware for long of How Things Ought to be Done, rather than in redneck America, where people have the odd broad-mindedness of peasants and mostly leave you to simmer happily for years in your own eccentricity until you come up with a new religion, a militia, a world-changing invention, a doomsday device or a new dance craze. Fortunately, England has its fair share of weirdos, albeit many self-conscious, defensive weirdos, and if you don’t mind mingling with weirdos instead of lethargic 20-somethings in skinny jeans, you can have a cracking good time. For instance, if I wanted to wear my cyrtel out of doors, I’d have plenty of places to do it. Seriously… re-enactment! Grownups who spend their weekends doing what I spent my whole childhood doing, but with better clothes and weapons and more friends! I must send a postcard to my 11-year-old self.

“Oh boy, sleep! That’s where I’m a Viking!”

From what I can make out, Nest Rubio’s wool samples took 7 days in the dyebath to get to the shade of deep garnet I’m trying to achieve. In the meantime, I’m making the Bloke a shirt. A nice, ordinary 21st-century linen shirt, with buttons and everything.