A Prize Book

I bought this book the other day from a used book shop in Wales.

It is signed by the author, Jean B. Lumsden, dated 1955.

According to the book jacket,

Miss Lumsden is a teacher of domestic science and has had plenty of experience in the practical field of stitchery. The result is an excellent handbook on all varieties of sewing which every housewife will want to have in the house. It should also be of considerable use in Training Colleges and Secondary Modern Schools. The book includes chapters on embroidery, the pricking out of a design and drawn thread work, and the use of sewing machines, but the greater part of it is devoted to all aspects of dressmaking, including a section on the choosing of materials and colours

All for 12s 6d net or, in today's used bookstore pricing, £4.50.

The book was presented as a prize for First Place in Form I to Veronica Pierce-Butler.



It could be that Veronica Pierce-Butler is a member of the English Peerage, where both a Charlotte Veronica Pierce-Butler and a Nora Veronica Pierce-Butler are listed: C. Veronica P-B was born in 1942 and would have been about the right age to have topped the First Form in Easter Term 1955.

I find all of this enchanting. I even like Headmistress Dorothy R. Thompson's penmanship. Also included in the book was an old pattern piece for a belt, with no printing on it, just little holes.

Sewing Machines

This is a store in Bath in England. Three floor-to-ceiling window-walls were decorated with rows of vintage sewing machines. Oddly, however, much of the clothing on display seemed to be coming apart.

On Sewing Us Together

and not tearing us apart.

Court Rejects Same-Sex Marriage Ban in California
By JESSE McKINLEY and JOHN SCHWARTZ
Published: August 4, 2010
A federal judge struck down a voter-approved ban on gay marriage, handing a temporary victory to gay rights advocates in a legal battle likely to be settled by the Supreme Court.

Yes, yes.

Assuming Enough Fabric and the Skillz,

Can I make this jacket (Simplicity 2570)


out of this skirt (maybe with the paisley lining also in the picture)?


It's a bad pic of the paisley, but it's this stuff.

Gimme a Tee!

I am awash in T-shirts. Sports fan T-shirts. Funny (and once funny) T-shirts. Loyal supporter T-shirts. Elementary school musical program costume T-shirts. Free T-shirts. Raggedy, much-loved T-shirts. Never-worn T-shirts. You get the picture. The recent room reshuffle that gave me my work room also stirred up the sediment of T-shirts at the bottom of every dresser drawer and they have now come to rest on every available surface. I have bagged and donated so many that all the local Goodwill stores now lock their donation doors when they see me coming. But many are not fit to be given away, and others are too precious.

So I decided to make a T-shirt quilt. I don't quilt, and I don't need a quilt, and I doubt it will be a very attractive quilt, but by promising to make a quilt of all the T-shirts with sentimental value to anyone in the house I can get away with reducing the bulk of what I have to keep from a pile of T-shirts to a pile of knit squares, one per shirt. Brilliant! But it seems such a waste simply to throw away three quarters of each shirt.

At this point the T-shirt presence was coming to resemble the Cat in the Hat's pink spot--every effort to clear it up was making it bigger. I decided to cut off the bands and bulky seams and shred the rest. A week of mindless cutting while watching TV and I have this:

Actually, a big bag of this, and more where that came from. Perfect for stuffing something--but what?

How do you recycle T-shirts? What would you do with this stuff?

Punitive Plus Sizing

I believe I have already confessed that I typically take an oxymoronic Petite-Large or Petite X-L in RTW. And I'm OK with that. I ride my bicycle. I'm healthy. If I can find my size in a store I don't really care what it's called. Or I try not to anyway. But my recent decision to switch to skirts and dresses rather than jeans as my wardrobe basics has mired me in the real undisguised cruelty of RTW sizing.

Bare plus-sized legs in skirts mean thighs that chafe. Every woman over a size 14 knows this. There is an easy solution: just wear pettipants, cutotte slips, whatever you want to call them. (Unpadded bicycle shorts under skirts also work, I'm told, and there are powders and creams, of which I am highly sceptical.) All you need is a layer or two of thin fabric between the thighs and presto! No more chub rub.


But try to find pettipants in a store in the RL. Or save yourself the humiliation and don't. The mercantile logic seems to be that anyone who suffers from chafing thighs must (or should be required to) wish she was much thinner, so the only readily available intimate apparel with fabric between the legs is "shapewear," which you can find everywhere. Granted, sometimes I like a little help in smoothing the ripples of me as they cascade toward my feet, but on other occasions I just want to eat, or laugh, or breathe without being ensausaged in lycra.

Even if I do want to encase myself in shapewear, why am I not allowed to retain some dignity while I do so? Why am I a 16 or 18 in dresses and pants, while I can't cram my blobby bulk into a size XXL Miraclethis or Flexithat in the same store? Is body dysmorphia such a pandemic that profits can be made selling Size XS girdles to sylphs and sprites?

/rant

Tearing Things Apart

I really want to get sewing and stitch up some skirts and tops and, maybe, pants to take with me to England, Wales, the Netherlands and parts east, but even more urgently I must weave together a text to present at the conference that makes the whole trip possible. I suppose I could be making more progress on both tasks. On the sewing front, I am held back by the fear that whatever I make won't fit. I know that the solution to that problem is to go ahead and sew, then alter to fit, and in the process zero in on my actual shape. Most likely, I don't actually want to know what shape my shape is in. As for the presentation, my fear is that it, too, won't "fit"--that instead of conveying an insight provoked by the call for conference papers, my contribution will simply illustrate that I didn't understand the question posed. I'm too old to be so insecure, but there you have it.

On a more positive(?) note, I've made some progress in tearing apart old ill-fitting and unattractive clothing so I can reuse the fabric in new projects. Here's a pretty bit of paisley I liberated from a wrap-around skirt that, despite being labeled a petite-large, was not large enough to go around me.