1. The finishing of the Birches and Aspens quilt. I’m putting in the last few stitches. I found a border! It’s really hard to sew! Oh, well.  It was the right thing, I think, so I’ll muddle through.
2. A decision to not allow myself to start on any of my three new sewing projects until I get the pile of mending taken care of.  For 3.5 years I have ignored this pile, which now includes 6 pairs of pants to hem, 3 torn seams, 2 shirts and 2 skirts to take in, 2 buttons to sew on and I’m sure other things I don’t remember. It’s pathetic, it takes up a lot of space, and this week, it is all going away.

Finally, I realized I’ve never mentioned my beloved sewing machine. So although the month is nearly done and the meme was posted on June 1, I’m going to use the Sew, Mama, Sew meme to talk about one of my most loved things.

Here we go:

What brand and model do you have? Singer 5830-C.  It is a model that was sold for home economics classes. Therefore, it was (a) relatively inexpensive but more importantly (b) built like a rock for hard and inexpert use by silly teenagers and (c) simple to use for people just learning to sew.

(My machine, above, with part of the base removed for hemming pants. When I sew, it always looks just like this with my pins and a pair of scissors resting there. My machine isn’t inset into a table, because honestly, I have moved too often to have a special piece of furniture for it!)

How long have you had it? I believe since 1995 (14 years!). My grandmother saw my fledgling hand-sewing efforts, and purchased this machine for me.

How much does that machine cost? My mom says about $100, but the prices online currently are more.

What types of things do you sew? I have sewn lots of home items but also quilts, clothing, handbags, paper…

How much do you sew? How much wear and tear does the machine get? Sometimes every day, sometimes weekly. I’ve used it fairly consistently except for the 2 years of grad school when I didn’t sew at all. Not sewing, incidentally, was one thing I really despised about that experience. There was just no room in my tiny NY apartment, and no time either.

Do you like/love/hate your machine? Are you ambivalent? Passionate? Does she have a name? Love my machine. Should she have a name? Velma?

What features does your machine have that work well for you? She’s well built, and is all metal internally. That’s the most important thing. Fairly heavy - stable. She has 10 stitches of varying lengths and widths, is easy to thread, she sews evenly, hasn’t any problem with thick fabrics or multiple layers, can sew very fast or pretty slow depending on my comfort level, she has never broken, only has tension issues when I do something stupid, has a convenient button-holer and a fair number of feet & whatsits. Oh, and she’s dead simple to use.  I need to get more of her special feet.

Is there anything that drives you nuts about your machine? Occasionally I wish for more arm room for quilting. And the bobbin threading can be irritating in the middle of a project if I haven’t pre-threaded enough.

Do you have a great story to share about your machine? I mentioned my grandmother got it for me. I guess what I’d mostly relate is that this machine is what really drop kicked me into crafting as a Thing Miriam Does A Whole Lot And Enjoys as opposed to Something I Did Once And Got Bored With Quickly. I love sewing and textiles in general, and I know I owe much of that to the speed with which I was able to teach myself to sew on this machine.

Oh, one more story. I didn’t know my machine had a thread cutter until last year when my mom said I probably did. I am almost an entirely self-taught sewer, and until I saw someone mention thread cutters on a blog, I just didn’t know it was a typical sewing machine feature! Lo and behold, my machine has one.

Would you recommend the machine to others? Why? Yes, certainly, if you can find one, because of its reliability. As far as whether I think someone would enjoy using the machine, I think it depends on what sort of sewer you are. Do you want to plug it into your computer and have 400 decorative butterfly stitches? Then this is not your machine. Do you just want a machine that won’t break to sew and mend garments, quilts and household items on a more-or-less regular basis? Then this might be your machine.

I have zero need for decorative hoo-ha on my machine, or a machine that does it all for me. I like machines and am not afraid of experimenting with them, and I like to know how they work inside and out. Thus a simple mechanical sewing machine I can take apart works perfectly for me. I like digital, but don’t like digital appliances. They break.

I find I still use the straight and zigzag stitches most of the time anyway, and I do appreciate owning something that’s what I actually need instead of having a bunch of stuff I don’t use. Plus, lord help any machine that requires high maintenance in this house. It would just stay broken. I just took my machine in for its very first professional tune-up the other week.  I’m not alone in my love for the beauty of practicality - my review of my machine here reminds me of the post that Irene of Mushroom Villagers article about the exquisite simplicity of her rock-solid 1950s Singer machine and how one might go about finding one like it.

What factors do you think are important to consider when looking for a new machine? I think it depends mightily on what your experience level is and what you want to sew. I’d look for peer reviews of people with blogs so I can see what they sew and how often with the machine they recommend. Find a professional seamstress or professional textiles crafter. I’d also take it for a test run in a store, see if I was comfortable with the controls, and try to sew something difficult or many-layered to see how it responded.

Do you have a dream machine? Not to replace my machine, I just want more specialization, machines that can extend what I can do.  One day, when I have space, I’ll consider a serger and maybe a long-arm quilter.

And that’s all she wrote. About her machine, anyway.

The Fit Part

I like this project, but remember how I said I was going to try to make this sweater more fitted?  Yeah, well, that part is testing my patience with making clothing.

Fit is the reason I don’t make clothing. It’s hard. It’s not easy to wrestle with your particular body type and its oddities. And the truth is that ready-made clothing is wonderful, but it leads to most people making do with a fit that is less than desirable. In my case, I discovered just how it is that I’m making up for the fact that most clothing is meant for women who are rather less generously endowed than I in the bust region.

So what really I meant by “making the sweater more fitted” was in reality my code for trying to give myself an adequate amount of bust room. The blue sweater that I made last year was great, mostly, but there wasn’t enough bust room, and it made for a weird fit. I wanted to fix that this time around.

I figured that I simply needed to add some stitches toward the top of the front.  I even added them in a clever manner that spaced them out.  I figured it was better to give myself extra room where, anatomically, I seem to need it most.  The red triangles are my increases from just under the bust to the top.

So far so good.  I held it up to myself and behold!  The edges came just to where they should!  It worked!

Then I pinned the front to the back and discovered a problem I had not expected. When I add room specially for the bust, it means the rest of the garment doesn’t have to try to make up for a lack of room.  It turns out I am not actually an extra large. I’m more like a medium.  I am just used to whatever extra fabric I have on the back of the shirts I buy making up for the fabric the manufacturer didn’t put on the front of the shirt. So when I made the back piece my “usual” (and wrong!) size it was just plain too wide.  I’ve got nearly three inches of room I don’t need.

But … how in the world do I do that without re-crocheting the whole thing?  Can I?  ::sigh::

I have decided, for the moment, to persevere with what I have.  I spent too much time crocheting the back to just frog it right now.  If it’s too awful, I will re-crochet the back, although the prospect does not delight me.  One thing I know, though, is that I will crochet my clothing projects differently in the future.

A bit over a week ago I ventured out to Blanco (west of Austin in the Hill Country) to go to their Lavender Festival. In recent years people have noticed that the semi-arid limestone hills of Central Texas are fairly Mediterranean in character, soil- and climate-wise. What that means is that we have a pretty fair time growing wine and grapes and lavender near here, and a number of people are actually making a living out of those things now.  It’s different from the usual ranching and farming operations that are traditional in Texas, but alternate crops (and animals like emu) are starting to take hold.

As the poster (from the craft fair)  indicates, that does not mean the area has somehow become any less, um, resolutely Texan.

This was, in fact, one of the best small town fairs I’ve ever been to (and I’ve been to a lot of them). It was even good enough for me to forgive the 100+ heat index, which I fought with copious bottles of water, frequent shade, watermelon gazpacho and a very liberal coating of sunscreen.  Whoever set this fair up actually found some good local crafters to come sell handmade things at the craft fair instead of what I usually see (which is resellers of crappy boring things made in China). All the local lavender farms were there selling things, plus people with everything from intricate handmade baskets to lovely strings of china chili peppers to inventive kitchen towels in the shape of dresses to spiralled handmade jewelry to … well, you get the idea. And of course my favorite is all the food vendors and their samples (I shall gain much weight now).

I bought a bunch of stuff. I got hot sauce, pasta and habanero honey mustard from Shayne Sauce, chili fixins from Blanco Valley Farms, lavendar bath things (oversized tea bags!) from Farm Fresh Soaps, and lavender linen spray and other things (pictured above) from one of the lavender farms, Heron’s Nest Herb Farm. My dad even got my pup Audrey special lavender and tea tree shampoo (which she tries to eat). Do you know how awesome it smells to be at a lavender festival? Where almost everyone has something lavender-themed?  Oh yes, it’s quite lovely.

Of course, it’s not really a proper festival without a Texas blues band, right? This guy is Bobby Mack and his band, and he was followed up by Zydeco Blanco.  They did an enjoyable job with the music. The organizers of this festival really knew what they were doing. And it is the first festival I’ve been to where everybody ignored the cheap not-really-beer. The Real Ale Brewing Company is located in Blanco, and it’s a great little microbrewery with a beer called Firemans #4 that you have to try if you’re ever here, and of course there was a whole bunch of wine tasting from the local vineyards that people seemed to be enjoying.

After the festival, we went to one of the lavender farms, the Blanco River Lavender Company, where they had a few more things to look at and a guy who was demonstrating flint-knapping.  All the farms were having special events, but mostly they were things on making girly sachets and wands or similar. I chose flint-knapping because my dad and husband were there. The guy was good. The farm was pretty. My dad, of course, found the owner and talked to him (my dad always finds someone to talk to and learn from. He is the king of 1,000,000 Facts You Never Knew Existed).

There was a painter there under the live oak trees by the hay storage, I believe the same one selling paintings there.  The tree grove was also housing an amazing collection of very old and rusted things, like a stove.  You could sit in the shade and have lavender lemonade. The farm had a sense of suspended time about it, which I guess fits because it’s been in existence for a century.

And then there were these Adirondack chairs, which sparked my imagination as a Connoisseur of Sitting Comfortably in Atmospheric Surroundings, and made me think that in spring and fall, when it’s not so perishing hot out, it’s probably pretty nice to sit out here when it’s cool in the dusk, overlooking the fields and pasture.  Needs footrests, though.

As a last stop to our day, we went to Luckenbach, which is purportedly a town of three that relies on the mythos of its Texan roots, and is where Willie and Waylon used to go to sing on the Fourth of July.  I say mythos because among other things, I noted that the roof of the rusted post office/general store was not really rusted, the paint was not quite the right color. However, it is still very modern Texan, and it was apparently Harley motorcycle weekend in the hill country, and the place was packed with bikers.  Squawking through all this were about a dozen chickens.  And this guy …

Who is my hero for riding a longhorn through the place, and yelling at the bikers.  Who, really, wants to mess with a guy who rides a longhorn?

It was a very Texas weekend.

So my MIL has a bay tree. A big one. So it was that one day, she gave me a gallon and a half of dried bay laurel leaves (and three more gallons of other herbs from her garden!).

I thought to myself, “Self, what ARE you going to do with all those? You cook a lot, but not nearly THAT much.”

And so I made a wreath.

It was one of those lazy Sunday evenings. The day was nearly done but it was not yet time to make dinner. I had reserved an hour or so to plant myself on the couch with some tea and a movie.

Supplies were simple. A green foam florist’s wreath, a thin needle, green thread, and some very tiny needle-like tacks.  And patience.

For an hour, it was (1) thread five leaves (2) tack to foam (3) repeat.

At the end the whole from was covered in a continuous stack of leaves, and I just tacked a few extra on the inside and outside to finish covering the foam.  Add a simple gingham ribbon for hanging, and there you go. Bay Laurel wreath for about $4.

Doesn’t Pottery Barn sell fresh versions of these things at the holidays for some ridiculous amount of money?

Did you know? Bay laurel wreaths, in the medieval period, were used in people’s houses because they were supposed to ward off evil. Pretty fancy. Bay laurel is really just a small evergreen tree, usually used decoratively in the Mediterranean places from which it hails. It’s also one of my favorite herbs, has various well-known symbolism, a common usage in architecture and a notable place in Greek history.  I also just learned it’s the 2009 Herb of the Year of the International Herb Association. I’ve read it has applications in witchcraft as well as in herbal medicine, but I’ve never tried.

I mostly think having a dried version around smells nice and looks pretty.

So this sweater is loosely - and I do mean loosely - based on a sweater in the May/June 2009 issue of Crochet Today called the Summer Breeze Cardi by Elena Malo. It’s a fairly simple 3/4 sleeve cardigan, but the part I’m truly using is the yoke. I can’t find a decent link/picture, so here’s a picture of the cardigan from the magazine.

The changes I’m making to the pattern (dangerous!) are:

1. I am not making a cardigan, I’m doing a single front piece with a back piece, and I plan to do some shaping to it so it won’t be just a straight sweater.
2. I’m cutting out the bubble stitch detail. It’s just not me.
3. No button (obviously).
4. I made up my own stitch pattern for the body and sleeves. The way the picture is shot doesn’t show you there’s extra detail at the waist and on down to the hem, and I guess that just turned me off of using this mostly plain pattern.
5. I will be attaching a simple charmeuse shell to the inside. It’s not a closed pattern at all.

My stitch pattern is simple:  Row 1 treble crochet, Rows 2 and 3 single crochet. Repeat.  This is what it looks like. The yarn I’m using is pedestrian. It was handy: left over from my flower blanket, the humble and yet pretty Caron Simply Soft in Autumn Red. I really love the color of this yarn, actually, and I have three extra skeins (I got carried away). So yarn snobs will just have to sniff at my acrylic, and I will itch tremendously at their wool. It’s a fair trade.

The things I’m keeping about the pattern are:

1. The open-stitch yoke. I like how far down on the shoulders it comes. I may even only do two rows. I do hate things that come up too far on my neck.
2. The split in the yoke. Although I’m not making a cardigan, I’m going to split the yoke in front. I like the detail.
3. The 3/4 length sleeves are staying. I will need to remember to make mine fitted like that.
4. The construction of the arm and body pieces. I think the pattern is fitted together pleasingly.

I am not very far along on this, so we will see.  If all goes well, I predict I will have a sweater to wear in October (what, you don’t think I’ll keep at this continuously, do you?). The timing is really fine, because no one in their right mind wears a sweater during the summer months here when it’s 95 - 110 F all the time. It would just be awful to sweat that much.

Lastly, I leave you with me and my coworkers from last Thursday. It is an odd pic for me to post, as it is of people which I have never done before, but I’m feeling a bit nostalgic (already) because the one on the far left is leaving us. I’ve spent a lot of time with these three folks over the past three years. These have been my friends and cohorts in fundraising and putting on that enormous 550-person lunch I talked about: Abby, Margaret-the-wonder-boss and Will. Yeah, and that’s me in black, with a small flower in my hair. Abby’s going to be so surprised to see this here! She sometimes ready this here blog. Hi Abby!

I’m going to go figure out what all of the projects I’m working on now really are.

My own thread-based jewelry has taken a breather because the thread kept taking the skin off my fingers, so I decided we needed a small break from each other. Never fear. I will finish.

Anyway, thread manipulated well is a beautiful thing. I often wonder how long these things take to make, and what kind of work was put into them.  Clearly none of these folks is a beginner at their task.  Enjoy!

The pieces: L to R and Top to Bottom

Textile Choker by kjoo.  One of my favorite pieces of jewelry that I’ve ever seen, made of crochet and felt. This must have been a ton of work. I like pretty much all of what kjoo makes. (Also in my favorite Etsy stuff there on the sidebar–>)

Soft Cotton wrapped bracelets by easternsky. These are much more practical for me than the choker, as they are cotton, and I am allergic to wool. Also: very pretty.  I love the look of wrapping, and it looks soft, and I like the way the color variations come through. (Also in my favorite Etsy stuff there –>)

The “White Gold Crochet Chain” from STITCHEDinMPLS is very tongue-in-cheek, and I love tongue-in-cheek. I also  love oversized crochet. It’s just a nice medium for a big chain, in my opinion.  For me, for some reason, this would be wall art. Don’t ask, I like things like this, it seems like wall sculpture to me.

The thread woven earrings made by FunkyLobez (pictured here in the Cozumel colorway) remind me a lot of parabolic line designs like those here and here that I learned in high school. I was quite obsessed with parabolic lines at one point (still am, I like intricate math). These earrings are much like that, but in color they are amazing, and some of the colorways look like peacock feathers.

Consider this Vive La Reine tatted necklace.  Now consider how awesome tatting almost always turns out. Like filigree, but with thread. I have not yet begun to learn tatting, but I have Ideas about it.

Sculpture plays a big part in Elin Thomas’ designs, which is easy to see from this crochet bracelet. Think that’s cool? Check out her crocheted sea anemone necklace for a bit of amazing … You still here? Go take a look.

Nice, eh?

So in the final analysis, the way I made it is supposed to divide the piece’s aspects in two.  The applique and piecing depicts the objects within the scene (hills, the patches of flowers, sky, lake, 2 kinds of trees) and the embroidery depicts the movement of the scene - the breeze, the leaves twirling down, the motion of waves on the shore.

The problem with the last part, the binding, is that I don’t know what fabric to use. The front and back pieces were sample pieces, I don’t have any more. I’m pretty sure that using fabric from the trees is a bad idea, and even the other solid cottons probably won’t work well because the backing fabric is a looser and thicker weave than the cotton. I think it would come out all wrong.  This is one of those times where I wonder where my forethought was, but that’s kind of the problem with this work.  It’s intended to be spontaneous, to foster that sort of creativity, and indeed if it weren’t I wouldn’t bother.  But then I run into a problem like this binding thing.

That’s the sky embroidery, it’s supposed to be a lazy breeze.

Anyway, if any of you have ideas about what will look appropriate, tell me!  I’m up for all sorts of suggestions.  I will make some sort of decision within the week. All that’s left really is to iron it, and bind it off, and add a hanging strip. And that will be that!  Seems funny the end is so near, after working on it off an on over these last months.

The final look of the waves on the shore of the lake. You did know that was a lake below the hill of trees?

I have two more quilting projects in the works when this is done. One is a jacket and the other one is based on a fairy tale.  The former is pretty planned out, the second is in its initial sketch details.  Meanwhile, I’ll leave you with a couple of photos of the crochet jewelry piece I’m experimenting on. It’s made of three colors of thread and the base is sport-weight yarn. It makes nifty shapes. It also takes forever to do this and is fairly hard on the fingers.  But no matter.  It’s definitely interesting.

So for this past Mother’s Day I decided to make my mother a gift of one of her favorite things, violets. I wouldn’t have thought of it except one of my favorite crochet designers - June Gilbank - provided a lovely pattern for a cute little pot of violets just in time to make them for the day.  It didn’t take too long to make it, it was fun, and it turned out so, so well!  June is one of my favorite designers because her patterns are deceptively simple, but just exactly right.

As you maybe can see from the picture, my mother loves violets, and as long as I can remember has grown lovely examples on her kitchen windowsill. So the idea was to make her a special, permanently flowering version of them.  I took June’s pattern and altered it just a wee bit, and it became not just a pot of violets, but a basket for jewelry.

I made sure to use fuzzy green yarn (Jiffy yarn in Avocado) for the leaves, because I always loved the soft velvet of violet leaves. Apart from that, the main difference from the pattern was that I split it in half to make a basket.  The original design is all one piece and stuffed with fiberfill.  In order to change it, I judiciously applied plastic cross stitch canvas, some matching stash fabric and a bit of fiberfill.

The first step was to cut out circles of plastic canvas to stiffen the flower top “lid” and the bottom of the pot.  Then I sewed a rectangle of the canvas into a circle shape to stiffen the pot sides.  I also sewed the circle for the pot bottom to the sides. I used plastic canvas because (1) I could sew it and (2) plastic doesn’t disintegrate over time like cardboard does and (3) it’s waterproof.

Next I got a large circle of coordinating fabric from my stash and stuffed it into the little basket made from plastic canvas.  I stitched the fabric to the canvas with yarn around the top, and then I tacked the fabric to the bottom of the pot with four tiny stitches, also using yarn.  That leaves you with a basket lined with fabric.  Then I trimmed some of the major excess off the outside, still leaving a considerable amount so it’s fabric-lined inside and out.  Here’s the lining basket after sewing (and a lovely picture of the Men’s Health magazine I was using as a table).

The final step was to stuff the fabric basket into the yarn basket and smooth the fabric down, and tack them together with matching yarn. Voila!  fabric lining inside and out. Creating a lovely, structured, lined basket capable of holding the most lovely of jewelry, if I do say so myself.

I did something similar to structure the “flower lid” by adding a circle of plastic canvas to the bottom of the lid. I also obviously added the brown lid bottom to suggest the dirt the flowers are growing in.  In the original there is no need for this bottom.  Apart from the canvas, the lid is mostly stuffed with fiberfill.  The crocheted bottom structured with plastic canvas is the lovely structural finishing touch that makes the lid match the bottom in shape and style. I don’t want to say more beyond that, because I don’t want to give away June’s clever pattern.

I also added a “lip” to the top and bottom of the crocheted pieces in white by adding two rows - I crocheted around twice in both the back loop and front loop of the last row of the top and bottom.  The point of the lip is to create a way to fit the basket together in a neat way. (sorry for the fuzzy picture below)  I did this before attaching the fabric.  You can see the bottom of the lid including the “dirt” bottom and lip in the picture of the two halves also.

So that was my Mother’s Day gift to my mom!  She loves jewelry and violets and purple, what better way to tell her her crafty daughter loves her than to make something out of the things she loves?

Numero 2: Outside this, one of my current /simultaneous projects has been to figure out options for fabric-based jewelry. I am still very much in the experimentation phase. There has been glue, thread, fabric stiffener, wood, lacquer, crochet, ribbon … just trying different stuff out. I like some of what I have, and don’t like other bits, and think some things could use refining. I really love fabric and am intrigued by the possibilities here.

I was curious as I began this to see what else people have done.  I spent some time on Etsy looking around at people who make fabric jewelry - not just one-off pieces by jewelry artists who otherwise deal in beads, but people who are really doing interesting things with fabric.  I found some really interesting stuff, so I’m going to split it into two showcases.  One (today) is for designs that showcase woven fabric, and another that relies on yarn as the textile.  Since fabric and yarn are not typical jewelry media, I found things that are unique.  Enjoy!

Fabric Jewelry: Textile Art

Top to bottom, left to right

1.  Repurposed fabric, olive jade and lucite necklace and earring set by Christine Kangas. Chosen because of those beads. Because I don’t know how she did that, but I’ve been trying, and I cannot. Yet.  Ms. Kangas makes many lovely combination bead-and-fabric jewelry pieces along with fabric loop earrings.

2. The Bloomin’ Oomph fabric statement necklace by Believe in Happy is quite a nice piece of a type I’ve heard described lately as sculptural jewelry. It is quite lovely. Most jewelry complements what you wear, this demand other things to complement it.

3.  The Autumn Dahlia from begurple designs is a beautiful adornment: a brooch, or it can be attached to a necklace, wrist band or headband. I just want to know how you make silk fabric do that exactly. Trust me when I say it doesn’t particularly like to hold a shape. This does. And somewhat resembles stained glass while it’s doing it.

4.  This interesting necklace of multicolored fabric loops brings to mind a fabric version of long pearl ropes, but I’ve never liked those, and I like this.  Other pieces from maker Etnyk are more dense, like scarves, others with embellishments.  I haven’t seen anything else like this exactly, though some designs remind me of layered beaded Masai necklaces, which I’ve always loved.

5. I had a hard time deciding, but I chose the pleated fabric choker from Boqinana. But the crescent fabric necklace is just as cool. Both sewn fabric jewelry in interesting shapes, and I haven’t seen anything else like these, esp the pleated fabric choker. (Though I confess I have not looked at all 316 pages or so of fabric jewelry on Etsy.)

6.  Miniature Quilt Block brooch! Hand dyed fabric and muslin under glass!  Just 1.5″ square! Wow!  (ok, i’ll stop.) These tiny gems are available as a brooch, here, but also in earrings. You should see the Flying Geese block earrings. I love this.  Really love this. Made by the talented Shady Grove Studio.

So there you have it. 5 interesting and unique and beautiful fabric jewelry designs using all sorts of techniques, some more traditional, some not. I’m still looking, and have found some really interesting thread-and-yarn ones for next time. There will be crochet, oh yes. And lace. And wrapping. And things.

On a recent trip I wandered through my usual sections and came to rest (literally, on the floor) in the craft section. And I found this antique book on needlework:

I have been paging through this book quite a bit lately. It was not the only elderly crafting book that was there, but I liked it the best.  This is a printing that quite succinctly describes the rise and fall of crafting over a century:  originally printed in 1882 when needlework was quite common, and reprinted in 1972, 90 years later in the midst of another surge in interest for handmade items.  Both times? Clearly marketed to women.  Being me, I LOVE seeing how people once thought of these things, and how they think of them now. Now, craft is often about the rather energetic reinvention and occasionally factually deficient musings of the young, when you consider

• the zeitgeist-intensive feel of Faythe Levine’s Handmade Nation, or
• the young hipsterish (it is! it totally is) coolness of Craftzine and Etsy or
• the in-your-face third-wave feminist (but craft-heavy) feel of Bust magazine (home of Debbie Stoller of Stitch and B*tch) or
• the tidal surge of youthful Japanese-and-Scandinavian-influenced design or
• the “craftivism” of eco-consciousness - reusing everything, redefining materials, considering the source, consciousness-raising and occasionally ever-so-slighly preachiness of this whole “green” thing or
• the “new domestic,” statement-making, tech-heavy leanings of author and craft icon Jean Railla.

I like them all, and think it’s an interesting movement, and one which certainly has personal meaning, given I’m still young-ish myself and started crafting at 19. In the end, though, reading things like this, I am afraid I’d have to opine that many modern craft skills don’t approach what they did 100 years ago.

I have half a mind to try out some of the crazy stuff in here. China ribbon embroidery?  Alencon lace? Surely it wouldn’t take too much longer than what I already do? I take that back, it would. Some of the examples I’ve seen with my own eyes are some pretty crazy complex stuff. Consider those examples of antique crochet I found and posted (which I’m now framing).  I know from just looking some of those would take so much time for such small decorative items. They are things I would barely have time for now, not being so much a lady of leisure as a lady of oh-my-goodness-how-am-I-going-to-get-it-all-done.  I persist, but … WOW.

There are a lot of things referred to in this book that are names and things I have never heard of before.  For example, a crochet tricot referred to as “fool’s crochet” (above.  Any of you ever heard of forfars?  I know gingham and linsey-woolsey, even, and various other sorts of cloth, but many names of cloth and other fabrics have certainly not stuck around.  Sometimes it’s the fabric itself which has not stuck around, and for really good reason - I found a reference to penguin cloth - which is, yes, penguin skin used for making ladies’ outerwear.  Lovely.  There are a lot of references which are NOT very, um, feminist.  Ladies are referred to as requiring delicate, dainty items at all times, and to being dainty and delicate themselves. So, how many of you are delicate and dainty and require handmade lace on your undergarments?  Not many? That’s what I figured.

So, how many of you would like to take on the task of open fibre in Honiton Lace (above)?  The instructions refer to bobby pins, a process that seems sorta like tatting but isn’t, and knotting of fine silk fiber.  A bit of netting work, obviously, and some tricot from what I can see. How long do you suppose this would take, for just a few inches of intricate lace?  I bet if you had to make this, suddenly you would (a) use this as a removable piece instead of something sewn in, (b) be very careful with it, (c) not have a lot of it, (d) treasure it like you would jewelry.

Aha! The recent invention of elastic!  What did we all do before our pants were made of elastic, allowing us that extra bite of dinner?  It doesn’t sound that common, or that durable, in 1882, and it seems all to be made of India rubber. Pretty rare stuff.  I do love the reference to “narrow frilled cotton” cords of elastic “employed for underlinen.”

Another example, this one of Tambour Work.  I should mention I don’t know what that is, but it seems to be sewn-on cording with embellishments. One last thing here - many of the drawings in this book are woodcuts. For me, that is amazing, because that takes SO MUCH TIME, and this is a THICK book, and there are A LOT of illustrations. Not to mention the book was probably typeset by hand, in a quite lovely and readable typeface. Some, like the Honiton Lace, appear to be a reproduced photograph, which given it was 1882, I haven’t any idea how they did that.  Not sure where exactly reproduction technology was at that time, but the whole project of illustrating this book, I can guarantee, was a feat. That tells you the popularity of needlework craft, that so much time and expense would be put in to producing this thick book. But what else could you do?  There was no (gasp!)… internet.

I hope you’ve enjoyed.  I’m still going through the book, I read bits of it at a time and try to figure out how stuff was made, or just sit there and chuckle, gasp and look oddly at the various entries, depending on what they are.  I learn a lot about what craft once was, as opposed to what it is today, and how it was viewed.  I find, in so many cases, that peope don’t know how women and their work was truly viewed, and assume the negative incorrectly, and that sometimes we are the ones responsible for downgrading and despising our forbears handiwork far more than they did.  I can see easily the value that was placed on this work from the expensive resources devoted to it in materials and time, and the research into new materials and techniques, and the effects of long-valued traditions, and other things. I know from other sources the high prices this handiwork commanded, and the elite circles to which it sold,and the profitability that it generated that kept many families afloat and attracted mechanized industry’s interest.

Okay!  End soapbox before I really get going on twentieth-century misogyny and how it colors our view of the past. Gee, I wonder what I used to write about in graduate school? I should go teach women’s studies classes just so’s I can get it out of my system sometimes.

Ta for now Miriam