Sewing and pictures, at last

I am thrilled the younger generation has taken to handcrafts in the past ten years or so. I have always loved making things, and I am happy that my daughters also like making things. Making things gives a richness to life that just thinking about things or just reading about things cannot do.

I have enjoyed sewing since junior high school home economics class had us make the cobbler apron. I continued to make the most appalling creations that were not (could not) be worn until the summer before 10th Grade when I made a shift dress from a pattern suggested in a Seventeen magazine feature -- so we can credit Seventeen as responsible for the achieving the first rule of thumb of successful home sewing: choose the right pattern. The second rule is to choose the right fabric for the pattern, and I did that myself this time for the first time. I still remember looking at myself in the mirror for the first time and feeling stunned that I was actually wearing something that could be worn in public. And I did wear it, and from then I sewed nearly all my own clothes until 1990. By then of course, we were all wearing jeans and knit T-shirts neither of which are particularly fun to sew. Although in the early 1980s, when Calvin Klein invented the must-have designer jeans, he did license a pattern to Vogue, and I made a Calvin Klein jeans skirt that I wore between the Megan and Susan pregnancies. What really happened in 1990 was that globalisation finally shut down home-sewing. I made my clothes because I couldn't afford the high quality clothing that I wanted (especially those Calvins), but by 1990, clothes were so cheap, there was no reason to spend time sewing. As the market contracted, fabrics and patterns became very expensive, and hard to find as fabric shops closed. By 1990, the cost of buying a decent outfit at a mid-price department store was much less than buying the bits needed for sewing it together yourself. And when the outlet venues began to spread across the land, sewing became the luxury option. After 1990, the sewing machine was always running, but for patchwork projects instead of clothes.

The other thing that happened around 1990 was that my little girls were no longer little, and sewing the cute girlie clothes I had loved making for them was no longer an option. When Megan was a baby, the baby and child clothes were awful. Remember there had been a monumental "baby bust" from 1964 when the "baby boom" ended until 1978/79, so there was no energy in the market. All the clothes were slimy polyester often coated with carcinogenic chemicals. I wasn't going to let my darling baby wear what was available on the market. Then when she became a child, what I called the Madonna years began, when the clothing available for children seemed modeled on sexy costumes worn by rock stars -- dubbed by Megan as prosti-tot clothes, and even more widely available for children now. Lots of bad things have been said about The Gap over the decades, but The Gap Kids shops that opened in the late 1980s were life savers. Classic, comfortable clothes in appropriate styles, nice fabrics, happy colours, and affordable. We were fans.

Children's clothes in the States are now quite wonderful, from the outrageously expensive designer lines like the French Bonpoint to the mid-priced Gymboree shops, and I have had fun looking at the former and buying at the latter, when I am visiting Megan. I'm sorry to say, the situation in England is much bleaker. The expensive French shops and The Gaps are here of course, and there is a nice Scandinavian shop at the local mall, and the fancy Rachel Riley boutique is quite lovely, but there is no affordable comfortable children's clothes line available here. Marks and Spencer and Next have cute baby clothes, then the size range leaps from Age 2 to Age 11, which is much too broad, and with the emphasis on the older end, often inappropriate for the younger end child. John Lewis (aka Peter Jones), everyone's favourite department store, usually have one line a season that is cute, but really do you want your child's clothes to all be hot pink or bright orange for a season. I imagine the dearth stems from the ubiquitous school uniforms worn by every child in the country. The fancy private schools have their distinctive uniforms which must be ordered from special suppliers (or traded second hand within school communities). State school students wear generic uniforms that can be purchased in most department stores. The better stores offer a more expensive line, the discounters offer a less expensive line (I wonder what parents will do without Woolworths this year?), but the point is they all look the same. They come in grey or navy, pleated skirts and trousers (Teflon-coated), with a white shirt, and a sweater added in the school's colour of red, or navy, or dark green. Socks are white and shoes are black and chunky. Voila, the school year is taken care of.

I always felt lucky that I came of age during the crafts boom of the 1970s. Remember macramé! I lived for the next American Home Crafts Magazine issue to arrive in my waiting hands. Patterns for every sort of craft appeared and they were both stylish and trendy. Historians count 33 years as a generation, and it has been about 35-40 years since the last peak of crafting, so hooray for the new generation who have taken up handcrafts as a cool pursuit: good for the planet and good for the psyche. Knitting came first. Susan, who had knitted a beloved pair of mittens as a child from a wonderful book titled Sunny's Mittens, picked up needles when she went off to Bowdoin College which culminated in a photo in the New York Times of the Bowdoin Knitting Club as part of an article on how college kids deal with stress. (And my favourite part, the Times website using Susan's face from the photo as the icon for National News for half the day!) And now sewing has begun to enjoy the same sort of revival. Trendy magazines in the UK such as Sew Hip! (a needle is the exclamation point in print), trendy businesses like Brooklyn's Oliver & S patterns for children's clothes, and new shops selling trendy fabrics from around the world, especially Japan, available everywhere on the internet. A new operation here in London called The Make Lounge, offers courses on making all sorts of crafts including needlework, sewing, candles, cake decorating -- and I think we have swung back to the pages of my 1970s magazine.


If you follow Megan's Sanctimommy blog, you have seen the fabulous clothes she is making for her children. When she formulated her school-clothes plan for Bibble, I was inspired to try my hand again, and it was so much fun this summer. My first project was the jacket pictured above. The pattern is from an issue of Sew Hip! I used a packet of fat quarters of indigo fabric bought years ago from the African Fabric Shop at the Alexandra Palace Stitching Show. Strips are sewn together for the outer jacket, and the flannel lining is so so old, a remnant bought perhaps in New Jersey to make striped legs for a doll that was never made. Perhaps for brief moments, you can live life over again, as I found when I was deeply engrossed in the jacket, and for a brief moment, a thought wafted through my brain that I hadn't heard the kids and should I wonder why? Of course the last time I was deeply engrossed in making something for a two year old, the answer would have been an emphatic yes. Sanctimommy's photos from yesterday's first day of school for Bibs show her wearing the jacket.

Then I pulled out my Oliver & S patterns and made this sweet little tunic from a very old fabric that never quite seemed to be right for anything else. I do love my red and yellow combinations, and can never resist buying them. The mustard yellow seems to be a big trend this year too.






For the matching trousers, I used the Oliver & S shorts pattern and lengthened the legs to more or less the length that is used in the sailor pant pattern. Bibs has been seen in Sanctimommy photos wearing the outfit, so they do fit.
Added bonus, I used up mounds of old fabric, another one of those New Year's goals like the Book Pile Project.
I have a few more ideas for outfits and have bought a few Boden knit tops to work off of the colours of the tops. Perhaps I will have some more finished project photos next week.