Reinventing the Field Hockey Uniform

I borrowed this photo of a 1940's field hockey team from Fuzzielizzie, who found it at a flea market. I'm so glad Google served up this image for me, because I'm loving Fuzzielizzie's beautiful blog, The Vintage Traveler. Serendipitously, today's post at The Vintage Traveler features a photo of vintage cycling wear!

But I digress. Here's my new, nearly finished creation.




I'm actually quite pleased with my accomplishment here. I think this is what you guys call a wearable muslin. I could, and will, cycle in this dress (worn over cycling pants). It has some shaping at the waist but I can still get into and move around in it. Having traced and modified the bodice from Simplicity 3506 (the dress), I then figured out how to cut and attach a skirt to it. Next time maybe I'll cut the bodice and skirt in one piece so there's no seam at the waist, but I was so focused on getting the top to work that I didn't think about what would hang under it.

OK, so not very crazy yet. But it's a start.

Bonus learning--I decided just to finish the neck with bias binding cut from the same fabric (I have acres of this stuff--I originally bought it to make duvet covers with), so I decided to try making continuous loop bias binding following the Rachel's tutorial at Colette patterns. Magic!

Reinventing the Wheel

I want to be a wild and crazy crone. I want to wear beautiful fabrics in rich textures and color my mouse-and-grey hair some shade not found in nature or, rather, found in nature but not in hair. I want to embarrass my daughter.

But I haven't done any of these things. I have a deeply, deeply rooted sense that I am not allowed to. My therapist and I have spent years discussing where this inhibition comes from and why I find it so hard to flout, ever since my previous therapist was strangled by her husband (but that's a very different story--or maybe not.) There is literally no one to tell me what I am and am not allowed to do (unless we are talking about driving the wrong way on the freeway or robbing a bank, which we're not), but I'm hedged about with limitations imposed on myself.

I'm tired of holding up the bars of my own cage.

The only kind of crazy thing I do is bicycle. I often commute to and from work by cycle and subway, and occasionally go on binges where I cycle miles and miles and miles on city streets around my home. A few of my colleagues admire me but most of them think I'm nuts.

So. I want to use my crazy cycling evil twin persona to try to pry my goodie-two-shoes persona out of her rut or cage or whatever she's in. And I'm starting by dressing more appropriately for running riding riot in the streets. The other day I wore this dress over my cycling knickers (as in capri-length lycra pants, not undies) to work:



I probably looked awful, but I felt great! (Oh, by the way, say hello to my new old craigslist dress form--I call her Craig.) So I decided to copy this dress to make a cycling wardrobe.

Step one: try to make a pattern from the dress. I didn't get pictures of this, but I tried to lay the dress flat and trace around it on pattern paper. Then I made a muslin from the pattern:


Two of them, actually. The thing looked all right on Craig, but she has no arms--when I moved mine the top was very constricting. Experimenting with the muslin just confused me--the top became less confining when I pinched fabric out across the shoulders, which should have made the armscye smaller?

What to do?
Stay tuned for part 2.