Stories that make sense
This is a needlecord tunic sort of thing, from Fat Face via a charity shop. The colour of the photo is way off: it’s actually navy blue. I am not the first person to mend this. I think I did a neater job, though. (Mine’s the one on the right.)
I have caught up with all ten seasons of The Great British Sewing Bee over the last year, and, while it’s great fun, it does convey a somewhat distorted impression of sewing for fun, with an entirely artificial sense of urgency. After all, very few of us would deliberately set out to make a prom dress in five hours.
The exception, of course, is the “fancy dress costume for a child” transformation challenge; it is quite plausible that one might find oneself landed with the obligation to produce an outfit FOR TOMORROW and then cough up a quid for the privilege.
To be clear, this isn’t what happened here (apart from the charity donation bit). My child is not yet speaking and doesn’t know what fancy dress is. And I had rather more than ninety minutes warning. However, I did feel that turning:
into an ice cream, over the course of three lunchtime naps, was very much in the Sewing Bee spirit.
This was a couple of months ago, and I shouldn’t think any of it will fit any more even if it were the weather for T-shirts, however bedecked they might be. But I did find a larger, yellow, frilly T-shirt in a charity shop today, so maybe it’s worth taking some care in disassembling the thing…
This dress was originally meant for a wedding on 6 July. I sat up most of the night on the 4th (election night, you will remember). Eventually, round about the time the Labour majority was official as opposed to just obvious, I conceded defeat myself. The smocking was all finished (I’d made life hard for myself by doing the back as well as the front) but there was no way I was going to get the seams and the hem and the buttons done. I went to bed and was up again a few hours later for the drive to Exeter (not with me behind the wheel, I hasten to add). The wedding was the day after, and was a great success. The baby wore Smocked Dress 1.
As I remarked back when I finished that one, there were several things I did differently. The main one was making the pleats half the size, which instantly made the whole thing look tidier. The other thing about this dress is that it’s shaped entirely by the smocking. If you were to take all the pleats out (please don’t; it takes forever) you’d find that it’s made of three rectangles, one at the front and two at the back. The shape of the armholes is formed by judicious use of more and less elastic embroidery stitches. I smocked the whole thing then turned in the edges at the neck and armholes. In that sense it’s a zero waste pattern. I’m torn between feeling vaguely virtuous about that and a little bit sad there aren’t any scraps to use for patchwork.
I didn’t quite get it done in time for the baby’s birthday. But she wore it to her birthday party, then to mine, then to her great-aunt’s. Smocking is quite stretchy, so if only the weather holds up it might get a few more outings. For the moment, though, I’m attempting to knit a sock.
Summer! It’s sunny, but it’s not too outrageously hot. I opened up the new Ffern perfume at about seven in the morning on the summer solstice. Gorgeous.
OK, it’s a bit muggy.
A gallstone attack when I was out for a walk. Extremely painful and unpleasant. Had to retreat under a shady tree and be sick into a hedge in relative private. I am on the waiting list to have my gall bladder removed. I continue to wait.
I’ve been playing around with bullet journalling, in its original iteration as a glorified to-do list, and not bothering trying to make it pretty. It’s actually working pretty well as a way to keep track of the sixteen different mixed metaphorical plates I have spinning.
I devoured She Who Became The Sun (Shelley Parker-Chan). It’s great. It’s a historical epic with a little magical realism, and is particularly inspiring to me at the moment in that the author simply decided to have fun (I am paraphrasing what she says in her acknowledgements here) and created an excellent book. I should note that it’s fairly bleak and occasionally very gory, and a few months ago I wouldn’t have been able to cope with it at all.
Elsewhere, I got through the long long nights with the whole of the Chalet School series (Elinor M. Brent-Dyer). I have gone back and begun again at the beginning (just finished Exile last night), but I also took a little side-step and tried out the Crater School series (Chaz Brenchley). Also a load of fun: it’s a pitch-perfect homage and is, you know, a boarding school story on Mars.
Then I picked up Cinderella Ate My Daughter (Peggy Orenstein), which takes a look at the consumer culture surrounding children, particularly girls. It was published in 2011, and I couldn’t help wondering how different it would look post-Frozen, and after Britney-gate. There’s also barely any mention of trans identities, which in 2024 seems an obvious angle to explore. I should probably be grateful.
A little smocked dress. I finished the front and then decided that the back also needed to be smocked, so I’m back in the tedious gathering stage.
The Great British Sewing Bee. I am behind on Doctor Who, but having been spoiled for the last couple of episodes I’m not sure that I’ll make the effort to catch up.
Bridging the Gap, an exhibition by women textile artists, all members of EAST (East Anglian Stitch Textiles) at Babylon Arts. I was rather taken by a whimsical map of Bloomsbury embellished with quotations from notable women associated with the area, but my favourite pieces were probably Margaret Talbot‘s gorgeous landscapes.
Beef pot roast in the Instant Pot. It’s not exactly the weather for it, but at least the pressure cooker minimises the cooking heat.
We went out to Wildwood for our anniversary; I had bruschetta, seafood linguine, and tiramisu.
A very, very gentle run-up (ha) to Couch to 5k, beginning with a lot more walking even than that routine recommends. So far, so good.
Goldfinches!
Complete chaos, but this evening I have managed to take the compost out, water the passion flower on the front fence, and pull up a few weeds.
Suddenly having a little more time to myself.
Mostly clothes: four dresses from the Joanie sale, a sports bra, and ankle socks. Yesterday I took three books to the book swap cabinet at the top of the hill – and came home with two. Oh well.
From Cinderella Ate My Daughter:
While Zoe is cute, in a radioactive orange kind of way, her release fell short of expectations, the – ka-ching! – hope of creating a female Elmo. Even slapping a tutu on her did not help.
What’s become the regular routine – and will be for a few weeks more – and then a very busy weekend.
That’s it for the moment. I’m hoping to keep this going, but no promises. I hope you’re all keeping well.
This is not the finest garment I’ve ever sewn. It won’t be even when it’s finished. The pleats are too deep, the tension is irregular, the smocking goes closer to the left armhole than to the right, the bias binding is very slightly brighter than the main fabric, and the less said about my feather stitch, the better.
However, this was my first attempt at smocking, and once I got down to the Vandyke stitch and surface honeycomb on the bottom rows I was enjoying myself hugely. It’s also the first garment I’ve made for my daughter, and a trial run for a second little smocked dress. It doesn’t need to be perfect.
And it will be finished.
There’s something faintly annoying about having misjudged how much thread you need to finish a given seam, even when there’s plenty left on the reel. But it pales by comparison with the subsequent satisfaction of having got the thing done.
Well, I wouldn’t be posting if I hadn’t finished sewing.
I did it. I added gold ribbon to make the ripples in the fishpond. It’s a bit wonky but it’s the best I could do without getting up from the sofa and waking the baby. It’ll look fine when the skirt’s on and the fabric falls into folds.
Now I have just over a week to hem it. Which ought to be fine, but it’s a very long hem.
This skirt has a deadline: two weeks and a bit from now. There is still quite a lot of hemming to do, in limited sewing time. It’s very tempting, though, to add more decoration. It’s a question of balance.
Not much to report other than in the garden, but I want to establish the Monday format while I remember what it is I think I’m doing. I now have all the components for my big winter skirt. I also have ideas for a couple of quilts. What I don’t have, or not for long enough to get anything done, is free hands. I’m hopeful that a baby bouncer may help there…
In the back garden, chaos continues to reign. I am meaning to get out and pick the blackberries before the devil spits (or worse) on them at Michaelmas, but I have a nasty feeling that’s as far as it’s going to go. In the front garden, I co-opted my youngest brother to plant a passion flower to replace the two that died in the heat. Tony has cleared several bags’ worth of slate chippings and all of the membrane, and the next step is for me to order some more plants to fill in the gap. I have managed to put half a dozen bulbs in with my own hands while someone else holds the baby, or she takes a (very short) nap. It’s slow going, but then gardening often is.
My friend Maggie was ordained priest yesterday. I’d said a while ago not to bother saving me a ticket, because I might well be otherwise engaged, but in the event I wasn’t, so I watched the service on Youtube and then walked up to the cathedral to give her a hug afterwards. (I timed it pretty much perfectly: left the house during the distribution of communion; got there just as the bishop and new priests were coming out to have their photos taken.)
It was really lovely to get out and see people (there were others I knew milling around, because the Church of England is a very small world). It was lovely to get out at all, really.
Slow progress is still progress. Midnight alarums and excursions (don’t worry, everything’s fine).
Really, aside from a mild case of cabin fever, I have nothing to worry about. I’m not dealing terribly well with waiting, but then I never do.
Picking one thing to do, doing that, and then having a lie-down.
I finished the main run of The Comfortable Courtesan stories, got a bit weepy at the end, and decided that I wasn’t quite feeling up to tackling the extended universe.
I also read Along the Way: the journey of a father and son (Martin Sheen, Emilio Estevez, and Hope Edelman). My favourable impression of this began with the fact that the ghostwriter is credited in large letters on the cover, and continued more or less all the way through. It’s mostly a memoir of family life, but it goes into a lot of detail on the making of The Way. (Which is what drew me to pick it up in the library discard sale.) I was very surprised to discover that they were shooting The Way in September 2009, which was only a couple of years after I walked the Camino Frances. But then it takes a long time for a film to happen, and I didn’t see it on its first release.
I’ve written before, briefly, about where The Way fails to convey the sheer grinding physicality of the Camino. And it is the physicality that sticks with me: the texture of boots that have been left too close to the fire overnight; walking through period pain so intense that I was sick (never before or since…) I think it’s basically impossible to get across such a three-dimensional (four-dimensional, maybe: time is an important component) experience in a two-dimensional medium. What the film does capture is the power of encounter and relationship; what it skips over is the fleeting nature of most of those encounters.
But Along the Way wasn’t just a book about the film; it was about parenthood, and masculinity (toxic and otherwise), and acting, and the film industry, and faith, and what all of that looks like in practice. And it seemed honest, and it was a very engaging read.
I am not sure that I would walk the Camino again – certainly not in summer, probably not the Camino Frances – and a lot of that is feeling that I’ve had my turn and I need to make space for other people. And, of course, the less generous flipside, which is that there are now too many people on the Camino, and it would no longer be what it was. (Of course it wouldn’t: I’m not twenty-one any more. Or thirty-one. And I seem to do it at major transitions in my life, and the current major transition is one that makes long-distance walking a lot less practical than it was. And the pilgrimage-shaped hole in my life is currently filled with Cursillo. Although I shouldn’t be entirely surprised if I end up doing it again at forty-one, never mind everything that I’ve just said.) And I’m sure The Way had something, though not everything, to do with the increase in traffic. Even so, I came away from this book feeling in greater charity towards the film and towards the Sheen/Estevez clan in general. They seem like a good bunch.
I’ve been sewing two flannels together (very slowly) and will shortly add a popper as a fastening, so that I end up with a pouch that I can fill with ends of soap that have got too small and annoying to be in the soap dish.
Still almost entirely sports. Eastbourne, last week, and now the Tour and the Giro Donne. (A friend has suggested that we name the impending sprog after whoever wins the day’s stage. I am not sure that we will go with this.)
Pictures of London Pride on Instagram. I’m wryly amused that I ignored or turned down four separate offers of wristbands (the bisexuals, the Bond fans, the Christians, and work – not sure this really counts as intersectionality) on the grounds that I might be busy, and then was only very slightly busy. But actually I’ve never particularly wanted to go to London Pride, and the idea of going to London at all is mightily unappealing at present.
Roast carrots and parsnips with quinoa, from the Roasting Pan Cookbook. Either the timings in the book are off, or the fan function of our oven is not trustworthy, but an extra ten minutes on the standard oven function and with the foil removed did the trick, and the result was very nice.
Also a new potato, broad bean and feta salad. (Mint, thyme and bayleaves in the cooking water; chopped chervil, parsley and capers in the dressing. Really very good.)
And I think I’ve finally got the knack of yoghurt in the Instant Pot (use full fat milk, boil for an extra five minutes beyond what the pot thinks, incubate for five hours).
The peach shrub is done in theory but in practice needs to mellow more. Still, it has got me to learn how to use the Soda Stream at long last (it’s not at all difficult; I am just not that interested in fizz).
As above.
Hollyhocks! They seem to be a thing around here; they grow very tall and they are bright and cheerful. Maybe I should grow some.
And, as per picture at the top of this post, rooftops and rooftops of starlings. They are usually around, but not usually in such numbers. We’d had eight or so demolishing a suet cake on the bird feeder earlier in the day, but I wasn’t expecting to see this. This isn’t even all the relevant roofs. I don’t know if you can call it a murmuration if it’s mostly static, but either way, it was quite a sight.
Fruit is swelling. (I’m going to have to pull up some of the jungle under the plum trees in order to be able to harvest without being scratched or stung.) Lots of things could do with a trim. There are just a couple of love-in-a-mist flowers that have self-seeded from plants I grew… maybe our first year here?
I have drawn up a plan for the front but am not going to act on it until bending over becomes more comfortable.
People! (Particularly Tony.)
I’m missing the old days of LiveJournal, the way it used to be in 2006 or so. Most of the social media sites seem to be becoming unusable in one way or another. I just want to see what the people I like are up to! In such a way that I can find the posts again if I want to look back at them! And without having to look at the same one over and over and over again!
On top of the paper trimmer in the conservatory. I am glad she has moved on from the fridge; I can’t feel that having little clumps of black fluff float down into the kitchen was entirely sanitary.
Havi on screens and screening:
Nature abhors a vacuum, and goes wild for a door.
Your guess is as good as mine, honestly.
Anything you’d like to share from this week? Any hopes for next week? Share them here!
Kathleen Jowitt 