Distractions

Lots of things have been keeping me from writing recently. Not just boys, but work on the house - I'm trying to avoid renovation posts in this blog but you can intermittently follow our progress over here. Another distraction has been that the computer has been out of action with hard drive problems and then logic board issues, then I was back to the shop yesterday with software problems. All very time consuming for those precious free hours.  I did snatch some sewing minutes over the past week or so, and dedicated them to making yet another hat.  The repurposed jeans that became a sun hat last summer did not survive the chaos that ensued when Jack was born - I think it was lost at school and by the time my brain was functioning enough to ask the teachers about it, it was winter and raining and no-one had seen a sun hat in weeks.  Earlier this year I hastily made a Christopher Robin style one - call it speed crafting - it's floppy and suits our resident AA Milne fan, but then I found the perfect pattern and had to give it a go - even though it talked about poplin and involved interfacing. But for the $2 cost of the interfacing an old shirt became a hat...

It turned out to be for Oli and his larger than average head circumference. He seems to love it and I'm sure it's because he helped with the sewing. He was controlling the stitch of my sewing machine saying 'red light', 'green light' as I stopped and started the foot pedal. He was also adjusting the stitch size and tension when I wasn't looking which was a little less helpful.

Make Do...

Last night I had my geometry set out; compass, set square, protractor. I was trying to design a pattern for a sunhat.  Send Max out for a minute in the sunshine without a hat, even if he's slathered in factor 50 and his ears start bubbling. It's not pretty, let alone healthy.  The past few years have seen lots of sunhats grace our home, but they seem to go missing with alarming frequency.  So rather than buy yet another one to lose to the wind, it seemed only right to turn to my bag of fabric scraps and my trusty geometry set.
Various parts of my super soft Seven jeans that ripped at the knees (and elsewhere...) have now been reincarnated in my attempts to patch up my childrens' clothes, and I thought I'd use the last remnants to test out a hat pattern.   And so the Recycled Seven jeans sunhat was born.
While I was pouring over my tracing paper and trying to remember some rusty facts about circumferences and radii (is that the plural of a radius?) it occurred to me that making clothing patterns would have been a much more sensible use of my GCSE Maths class than struggling with vectors, which always alluded me.  What about it Mrs Scott, in your apricot pencil skirt?
Turns out pattern making is, in fact, a lot harder than actually just sitting down and making a hat. 3D is somehow more meaningful than 2D. I cut a beautiful circle with a 16cm radius (yes, it is radii, but you don't need it in the plural) and then I fairly quickly abandoned the paper and mathematics and just got on with making the hat.

I think the finished article still needs some work but it's hot these days and we are in need of the hat, so it is prematurely off the production line and being put to use.  It was actually meant to be the 'test' hat that I would then remake in nicer fabric, but then Max gave me a hand at the sewing machine while Oli was sleeping, and decided he wanted that hat, his hat and no other.  Working at a sewing machine with a four year old is both enlivening and infuriating. There were lots of questions about the mechanics of the machine, particularly about the foot and the little jagged bits that help feed the fabric under the needle.  It reminded me that there are parts of the machine I still don't fully understand or know the names of, and it is especially useful having the very person you are designing for so close to hand.  His head was almost permanently in my way.  Less useful is it, when you look on the floor for a dropped pin and find your stitch and tension adjusted by the time you sit back up again.  Luckily the spool ran out half way through so we had the very exciting diversion of putting thread on a bobbin.
And now I'm feeling like quite a hat-making veteran.  Last Christmas my dad got a home-made version of a Breton fishing cap to replace an old, ripped, rotten one that had blatantly been loved too much. I stole it from his fishing cellar and set to work on a replica.   Today, recycler of old jeans; tomorrow, milliner to all the family...

Mending

Miss Harvey.  Imagine a woman with a full waist, a full floral skirt and a chin full of whiskers.  Mrs Tiggywinkle, in fact. In my mind she wore sensible laced shoes and nude tights, probably stockings, and a cardigan even on the hottest days.  Her chin fell off her face to her ample chest and wobbled when she talked.  It seemed that she was always smiling, or chuckling, at least to us kids and calling us 'ansome'.  Did she wear glasses? I feel she must have, she was surely in her seventies and spent most of her time sewing. The combination must have resulted in the little round spectacles I remember.  Yes, she wore them on a string, like a necklace. The fact that she came to sew for my mother for a week in the summer seems alarmingly antiquated, but there you go.  Thinking about her brings back some of the magic of the summer term at school.  What was it that made it so special?  The summer uniform, a turquoise cotton tunic which meant we didn't have to wear a tie.  Or was it that we were allowed to play in the school garden rather than on the concrete parking area? There was a tyre swing at the bottom of the hill and endless shrubs to hide in.  Maybe it was athletics and the build up to sports day.  Or that when we came home it was still light for hours and the combine harvesters rumbled on past bedtime.  Was it knowing Miss Harvey was at home, perhaps even sewing something for me, for one precious week? My mother will say she mainly hemmed curtains and mended bedsheets. But I know she sewed me a tutu, with candy pink voile. I remember posing for photos in it, standing on the hot slate outside the kitchen windows.  I think I might have insisted on wearing it til bedtime. I have a horrible feeling it was too tight for me. Not so Cinderella after all.  I think Miss Harvey had to let a seam out.  I do remember that I got my pet rabbit's claw stuck in the trim and blood on the shimmery silk.  I wonder if I wore it again, I was no Darcy Bussell. I have a vague memory of an actual ballet performance - just the one - I was the marshmallow at the back.
In her youth, I think Miss Harvey had worked for my paternal great grandmother - as a full time seamstress? The luxury of it! Surely I must be in line to inherit a mansion somewhere. But perhaps I have it wrong.  I know she was proper Cornish and by the time I was observing the detail of her chin and wondering if I too would grow whiskers, she had decided to never again leave the county.  I think it was she who announced 'I don't go abroad no more', meaning she wouldn't travel north of the Tamar.  Beautifully put.  My mother tells me that as a teenager she was advised by her aunt not to marry her sweetheart or she'd be 'dead before she was 21.' We are only left to wonder whether the aunt was particularly vicious or especially insightful and wonder too about the boy and what became of him.  Miss Harvey never married.  All this has come back as I sit mending endless pairs of boys trousers.  Dom's been away this week so it's occupied my evenings - what a riveting life I lead - but I admit the idea of sewing for an hour is a lot more appealing than a morning out shopping, with or without a boy or two.  And you know, I think I've found the method for a near perfect patch...Miss Harvey would be proud.