Category: writing

Small World.

This week I am in love with the seemingly random interconnectedness* of things.

The other day I joined Twitter.

Havi Brooks sent many people my way with her tweet (thank you!), one of whom was Randomling. She turned out to be the housemate of Miss Alice, who’d put me on to both Havi and Twitter in the first place!

This morning I came to update my Etsy shop with the brooches I’ve been making, and discovered that a few new people had chosen to “heart me” while I was away.

One of those people was Little Alouette. I didn’t recognise the name at first, but as soon as I clicked through to her shop I recognised the little fellow above. “Harper” is a wooden hippo teething ring, and I’d seen it featured by both Soule Mama and Dooce.

I may not have any particular use for a small wooden hippo, but several of my friends are having babies soon, and will be needing teething toys at some stage. So, I’m passing the link on to them… and the small world shrinks just that little bit smaller.

 

 

*It’s a word now.

Tweet tweet!

2nd February 2009 - Snow Day!

Yesterday I met a duck, and today I learned how to Tweet.

The duck in question is not the fancy Mandarin pictured above. It’s Selma, able assistant to Havi Brooks.

Miss Alice realised that I was in serious need of some help with “destuckification”, and sent me a link to Havi’s website, The Fluent Self. I may have had a little cry when I read Havi’s Is This You? page, and have since been rummaging around her blog, and downloading the destuckification sampler. You can find the sampler on the right hand side of Havi’s web pages, and I heartily recommend it. (I’m saving up for The Procrastination Dissolve-o-Matic.)

I’ve been making things all my life, but I do have a terrible problem with actually selling the things that I make. I feel pushy, trying to sell things to people, and I don’t like to be pushy. (Apparently “nice” and “pushy” don’t really go together, and I do so want to be nice.) But if I don’t tell people what I’ve made, they’ll never know that they can buy it, and that’s not really a good way to run a business. In fact it’s not running a business at all, it’s just pursuing a really expensive hobby.

My first step towards doing a bit of something vaguely resembling “networking”, is to find out how to use Twitter in a productive way. As it turns out, it’s so much more than overhearing half of a million private conversations, or finding out what the internet had for breakfast. It’s a great way of spreading little bits of news, passing on interesting links and meeting people all across the world that you wouldn’t have been able to reach in any other way.

You can read my Twitterings over in the sidebar there, or you can come and follow me. I’m eternalmagpie, of course.

Move over Facebook – Twitter is the way forward!

“There’s always a certain irresponsibility about hats…”

I was browsing through the BBC iPlayer this afternoon, looking for something to watch in the background whilst doing a spot of hand sewing.

I hadn’t realised what a lot I was missing!

 

The title above is a quote from a wonderful 1950s programme about fashion history. The series is called Men, Women and Clothes, and this episode is Fashion in Faces and Figures. Look out for a fabulously moustachio’d Benny Hill, and some lovely shots of corsets. This one’s only fifteen minutes long, and well worth watching! Unfortunately it was broadcast yesterday, but it’ll be on the iPlayer for a week, and there’s another episode on January 15th.

There’s another series just started called Style On Trial. This is a seven-parter, looking at the fashion of various decades, beginning with the 1940s. The first episode is on the iPlayer now, and episode two airs on January 14th.

Another programme that I’m particularly interested to watch is Ozwald Boateng: Why Style Matters. This one’s repeated on BBC Four tomorrow (January 10th) at 9pm. I’m quite a fan of Boateng’s menswear, and given my current interest in men’s shoes and tailoring, I think this one will be brilliant!

Complex Curves.

So far I have made a grand total of seven and a half corsets. Two for me, four for friends, and one which is still under construction. The first one I made from a commercial sewing pattern, and it was such a ridiculous shape (even for a ridiculously-shaped garment like a corset) that I decided that drafting my own patterns was the best way forward. This plan was also borne out of two abdominal operations and an ongoing stomach-ache, which means that I don’t like to be squished too much around the middle.

Now I appreciate that seven and a half corsets doesn’t make my anything even faintly resembling an expert! But eleven years as a dressmaker, plus a year of fitting bridalwear, does give me some sort of clue as to the range of shapes and sizes in which the female form can manifest itself.

Here is a work-in-progress picture of the corset that I’m making at the moment:

Rhona's corset - in progress

You will notice that it has peaks and troughs, where it doesn’t lie flat on the table.

This is because (shock, horror) people aren’t flat.

I frequent a number of online communities for corset wearers and corset makers, and time after time I see pictures of completed corsets, often beautifully made, lying completely flat on a table.

Of course, the primary function of a corset is to reduce the size of the wearer’s waist. The best way to make this reduction very apparent is to do this by taking all of the reduction out of the side seams of the corset. This results in an extremely dramatic silhouette, and a very flat corset.

The trouble is, once again, people aren’t flat. They don’t squish only at the sides. My back, for example, has an exaggerated curve. If I were to wear a corset where the sides had been reduced but the back was straight, there’s no way it would be comfortable for me to wear. I also have a rounded stomach, so I need to make allowances for that in the shape of my corset, even if the intention is to make it appear as flat as possible.

My eight-panel underbust corsets are about the simplest style it’s possible to make whilst still taking into account the curves of the wearer. If I wanted to go for a much more precise fit, taking into account the shape of the wearer’s ribcage, or the curvature of their spine, I’d probably be looking at doubling the number of panels, in order to accommodate the complex curves.

(Complex curves is also the reason I don’t take orders for overbust corsets, by the way!)

 

Of course, the principle that people aren’t flat doesn’t apply only to corsets.

Kathleen at Fashion Incubator, for example, has two extremely interesting articles which explain why your trousers don’t fit.

And because most “industry standard” (as if there were any such thing) clothing is made to fit a B-cup, a great many of my customers are either women with larger breasts, or smaller women with curves they’re not “supposed” to have. Oh, and plus size women who don’t have shoulders like a weightlifter, which is what a great deal of clothing apparently expects from them.

 

When I become a Proper Fashion Designer (stop laughing at the back!), I can assure you that my clothes will be designed for, and modelled by, a whole range of different shapes and sizes of woman.

Believe me, this is going to be much, much more difficult than buying a set of slopers or a grading scale or some pre-set CAD software. If I use those, my clothes will come out the same shapes and sizes as the ones you see in the shops. And that rather defeats the object of making clothing from scratch in the first place.

Apparently I’ve never been one for doing things the easy way…

A little light reading…

I think it might be safe to say that my bedside reading mountain is getting a little out of control!

Bedside Reading...

As you can see from this picture, I don’t tend to read a lot of fiction these days. This makes the book on the very top of the pile a bit intimidating.

I signed up to Blog a Penguin Classic, and this is the one I was assigned – Hell’s Angels by Hunter S. Thompson.

Oddly enough I had rather been hoping for a “proper” classic, rather than a “modern” one. I feel as though I could have quite enjoyed a bit of Herman Melville or Alexandre Dumas. Now that I’ve looked at the website I see that I’ve read more of the Modern Classics than I’d thought – and I’m quite grateful that I didn’t end up with Jack Kerouac. I read On The Road because I thought I ought to, and found that I hated it.

I’m trying to stay open minded about Hell’s Angels but the subject matter of drinking, violence and motorbikes really doesn’t appeal to me in the slightest.

I need to start reading it soon though – I only have a couple of weeks left before it’s time to submit my review for Penguin!

This Is England

We finally got around to watching This Is England last night. I’ve been wanting to see the film for a long time, even though I already knew that it would be very difficult for me to watch. I’m not a big fan of racism, violence and extreme right wing politics, and those are the main topics of the film.

I’m not well-enough informed, socially, politically, or historically, to be able to talk about the film from those points of view, but what I do want to talk about is the clothes.

This Is England

If there was one style of clothing which I truly wish I could wear but never have done, it would be this. Probably with jeans rather than mini skirts, but there’s something about this style which really appeals to me. I do own two Ben Sherman shirts, although they’re both prints, not checks. I’ve owned countless pairs of Doc Martens over the past twenty years, and despite the fact that Paul makes a face every time I show him photographs, there’s something extremely appealing to me about that hair cut. I do remember going out in the 1980s wearing a white shirt, black braces and a trilby, but for all the Doc Martens I’ve ever worn, I’ve never even been tempted to buy a tall cherry red pair.

When I was a Goth, dressing was easy. Everything black, lots of eyeliner, pointy shoes or the most enormous boots I could find. For all the protestations of “individuality”, what I liked best about being a Goth was having a group that I demonstrably belonged to, and I demonstrated it with my clothes. I like dressing up, I like the music, I like bats and skulls and books about vampires. It was easy for me to be a part of that group.

But dressing like a skinhead? That’s much more problematic. When I was reading The Way We Wore, last year, it touched on a lot of the things I’ve been trying to think about coherently while I was watching the film.

The original skinheads, in the late 1950s, had nothing to do with racism and violence. Theirs was an inclusive culture, born directly out of living and working with Caribbean immigrants who’d recently started arriving in the UK. Without these groups mingling together, we’d never have had Ska and 2 Tone, and bands like Madness or The Specials. But, the economic climate in those times was terrible, and the feeling did develop that other people were coming into “our” country and taking “our” jobs and “our” houses. Racially-motivated violence was breaking out all across England, predominantly in working-class communities, and this escalated into the Notting Hill riots of 1958.

The same thing effectively happened during the early 1980s. The country was faced with record levels of unemployment, along with an increase in immigration from countries such as Pakistan. The Falklands war began in 1982, and with it came a surge of popularity for far right wing politics. The Teddy Boys, who’d been the main antagonists during the Notting Hill riots, had been all but forgotten, but skinhead, punk and the National Front became inextricably linked in the public image until the skinhead look unequivocally represented a uniform of racism and hatred.

There are countries where the skinhead image still represents what it did during the 1950s – a working-class background and the love of a certain type of music. Hel Looks, a website which documents street fashions in Sweden, demonstrates that the skinhead look is still popular. In parts of America, skinhead is more closely linked with 1970s punk.

I’ve worn some unusual clothes over the years. As a Goth, people were forever telling me to “cheer up”, or reminding me that “it’s not Hallowe’en”. Having pink hair is apparently a license for people to point and shout at me in the street. I’m more than used to being stared at because of my clothes, and not always in an appreciative manner.

But to walk down the street, in England, wearing tall cherry reds, jeans, braces and a feather cut? However much I might enjoy the style and the music, I just couldn’t do it.

(More here, from Wikipedia.)

Paying the Price.

I’ve just been reading an interesting discussion on about why customers are unwilling to pay prices which genuinely cover the cost of a handmade garment, whether it’s a reconstructed t-shirt or a couture wedding dress. I’ve had many customers – individuals and other small businesses – come to me asking for hand-made clothing, only to disappear without a trace when I told them the price.

Thanks to companies like the dreaded Primark, clothes have become cheaper and cheaper to buy, and the actual cost of their manufacture (in both monetary and human terms) is no longer reflected in their selling price.

As an independent businesswoman in the UK, I am legally obliged to pay myself a minimum wage (currently £5.52 an hour) for my work – and yet in many cases I am simply not able to do that. If I charged the full amount of what my work was actually worth, my customers wouldn’t be able to afford it, and I would make no money at all.

Unfortunately, by selling myself short, I devalue not only my own work, but also that of other business and craftspeople in a similar position, and I exacerbate the problem of customers expecting to pay cheaper prices.

If I were a computer programmer, I’d be charging an awful lot more than £5.52 an hour. Heck, if I were a plumber, I’d be charging more than ten times that! When did dressmaking, or any form of craft which requires a development of skill to learn, become such an undervalued occupation?

has written a really interesting article on the subject: Why do wedding dresses cost so much?

I’ve been the lady hand-sewing the beads onto your precious dress, and I’ve listened patiently to the complaints about the cost of the alterations when I’ve had to hem, by hand, all ten tulle petticoat layers under your skirt. I can state unequivocally that although I was paid slightly more than minimum wage for doing that job, neither I, nor the husband and wife team who ran that independent bridal store, were making our fortune from the cost of that work.

I’ve also had several brides come to me, assuming that because I was making them a “home made” dress, it would be much cheaper than one bought off the peg. In actual fact what I would be making is a couture dress, which is a different thing altogether!

Last week I wore a dress that I’d made myself, to work. One of our customers expressed surprise that the dress was “home made”, because “it looked really neat”. Now I have eleven years’ experience as a dressmaker – of course my sewing is neat! Would you react with surprise if you hired a plumber with eleven years’ experience, and he turned out to do a good job? No, and you’d pay him good money to do it.

The lady who made the comment obviously had no way of knowing that I’ve been a dressmaker for a long time, but it made me very sad that “made by hand” in her expectation was inextricably linked to “looks a bit rubbish”. The current rise in popularity of “DIY” and reconstructed clothing is also doing nothing to disabuse people of this notion, as so many sellers of this style are using the term “DIY” to apparently mean that they don’t have to finish seams or be able to sew well.

Now I’m completely self-taught, so I have no issues whatsoever about people just getting in there and having a go! I’ve written a couple of tutorials for simple skirts, and I hope to write more in the future. I also enjoy reconstructing t-shirts, and making clothes out of recycled materials. However, I do believe that if you’re going to sell your work, then there are some fairly basic standards that need to be applied. Otherwise, once again, you’re lowering the standards and expectations that apply to all of us.

I don’t think I’m ever going to be able to make a living from my dressmaking, and that makes me very sad. It’s not going to stop me from sewing, because I really enjoy it, but I do wish that it were possible for more people to understand the value of these skills that I’ve worked hard to attain.

50 Years of Everyday Fashion

This weekend we were idly looking at the magazines in the local shop, when Paul said, “I can’t believe you haven’t picked up this!”

“This” turned out to be a magazine by Yours (the best-selling lifestyle magazine for the fifty-plus woman, apparently), called, “50 Years of Everyday Fashion: How the Women of Britain Created Glamour and Style on a Shoestring”.

It has a glorious picture of Audrey Hepburn on the cover, it costs £4.99, and I heartily recommend it! It covers the period 1948 to 1997, and also has sections on men’s clothes, Royalty, and weddings.

The thing which particularly interests me about this magazine is its “everyday fashion” approach. So many fashion magazines and books, whatever period they’re discussing, tend to only talk about the prominent designers of that time. Of course this is important, but it often bears very little relation to what was being sold on the high street, what women were making for themselves, and what kinds of clothes people were wearing to go about their everyday lives.

There’s a whole chapter on making your own clothes, and it’s full of photographs of people wearing the most beautiful outfits. Some of the clothing made during wartime and post-war rationing is particularly noteworthy, because people had to be imaginative in the ways that they used fabrics and re-used old clothes. The magazine suggests that the rise of designer labels during the 1980s was one cause of home dressmaking going into decline, but cites the recent resurgence in the popularity of knitting as a hopeful sign that people might also regain enthusiasm in making their own clothes.

I think that enthusiasm is already here – although I’m naturally somewhat biased on the subject!

The TV show Project Runway, for example, has inspired a range of Simplicity sewing patterns. Books such as Rip It and Generation T are a drop in the ocean of books telling you how to make new clothes out of old ones, and there are dozens of online communities devoted to showing off clothes that you’ve made yourself.

If I was going to recommend one book to anybody who wanted to learn how to make their own clothes, it would be the Reader’s Digest New Complete Guide to Sewing. I have the original 1978 edition, and it’s an absolute goldmine. Anything you could possibly want to know about making your own clothes, you’ll find it in there.

If you’re more interested in reading about clothes than in making them yourself, then you might enjoy The Virago Book of the Joy of Shopping. It’s little snippets from literature which give an insight into the ways that people used to shop, and it’s absolutely wonderful.

I’m on BBC Four!

Many thanks to Phil and Pat, who have kindly left me a comment to let me know that I am on the BBC Four home page!

I'm on BBC Four!

I don’t know how long the link will be there, but in the “Overheard on the Web” section (bottom right), next to a youthful picture of Cliff Richard, is a link to the blog entry I wrote about Pop Britannia.

Now I am sort of embarrassed, and wishing I’d edited the post into a more concise review, instead of waffling on about all sorts of nonsense. But hey! I’m on BBC Four!

We stayed up past our bedtime on Friday evening watching the third installment (which you can watch again here), and thoroughly enjoyed it. In fact, we spent much of the weekend talking about our own experiences of pop music during the seventies, eighties and nineties, and discovered that a five-year age gap can make an enormous difference to your musical experience.

We also talked about writing to BBC Four, to let them know how much we’d enjoyed the programmes, and to say that we would very much like to see them expanded into a longer series. I appreciate that they have a lot of ground to cover in a very limited time, but the last programme particularly was notable to us for the sheer number of bands who had been left out. This is inevitable when you’re trying to cover the best part of three decades in only an hour, but it left us feeling as though we could have happily watched two more episodes.

If you missed the Pop Britannia programmes, all three are being repeated tonight, back to back, from 9pm on BBC Four.

Pop Britannia

Last night I watched Pop Britannia on BBC Four, and my brain has been feeling a little bit wobbly ever since.

I have found a thing that I’ve been missing for almost fifteen years, and now I need to work out the best way to get it back into my life again.

Watching that programme was like sitting in front of my parents’ record collection, and putting on singles at random. I learned to play the clarinet because I was fascinated by Acker Bilk and traditional jazz. My parents had records by Cliff Richard, Billy Fury, Marty Wilde… all sorts of people. In fact this compilation, which I gave to my Mum for Christmas, is pretty representative! A copy is now on my own Wish List.

I’ve always been a huge Beatles fan, my personal favourite album being Rubber Soul. That’s the point at which they changed from being just like all of the other groups of the time, singing mostly songs which other people had written for them, and started releasing records comprised mostly of their own music. But one of the things that I particularly liked about music during the late 1950s and early 1960s was that it was all about the songs. Singers weren’t expected to be songwriters – the writing was already done, and you would choose the songs you wanted to sing. (Or more likely, your management would choose them for you.) I would have loved to have been a singer during that period, and I still love singing the songs of that era.

Distressingly, I have none of this music whatsoever in my iTunes, and I don’t even have anything on CD, as everything I owned was on cassette, copied from my parents’ records before I left home. I do own the Beatles’ “1” compilation on CD, but I can’t find it! It must be around here somewhere.

I have always been fascinated by the way that the art, music and culture overlapped so much with one another during this period, in a way that I don’t think had been seen since the Pre-Raphaelites. However, the Pre-Raphaelites manufactured their own culture in many ways, and what happened in the 1950s seemd to grow organically as a result of a new generation of children growing up after the war, appropriating parts of a very much desired culture seen in American movies and imported music, and creating their own version because they could. I’ve been leafing through my books on Pop Art, and reading poetry by Brian Patten, Adrian Henri and Roger McGough. I’d really like to see Pop Art Portraits at the National Portrait Gallery but it’s only on for another couple of weeks, so I don’t know whether I’ll make it.

I’ve also added more books to my Wish List, from the bibliography of an essay that I wrote in 1993. It’s called “Peter Blake and his links between Fine Art and Graphic Design”, and it was the culmination of the Art History section of my art foundation course. It’s 4,000 words long, and reading it back, even fifteen years later, I’m still quite proud of it. The conclusion’s a bit rushed, but I was already well over the allowed word count, so I suppose I thought I’d better stop! The whole thing is hand written, on square sheets of blue paper, with postcards and photocopies of the relevant images glued into place. The pages are bound into a Chinese zig-zag style of book, so theoretically you could unfold the entire thing into one enormously long sheet. I’ve just started the process of typing it up, so that I have an electronic copy. I’ll probably turn it into a web page eventually, if I can source all of the relevant images online.

I sent Paul up into the loft earlier, to find the box containing this essay, and all of my old sketch books from my A-levels and my art foundation course. I’ve been thinking of getting back into sketching again, but when I looked through those books I discovered that I’d barely done any sketching at all! All of them are filled with little bits of ephemera, cut out and glued in. I like cutting out and glueing in. 🙂

I have been doing some sketches over the past few weeks, of ideas for new clothes to make from the Bishopston fabrics, which should be arriving in the next couple of weeks. Last night I may have accidentally designed what I hope is going to be the perfect dress – for me, at least. I’m still looking at a number of reproduction 1950s dress patterns, and trying to work out which of them I could adapt to fit me, and whether they would actually be practical to wear every day. For anything I’m going to wear to work, i definitely need to add pockets! I’m thinking that I could make a pair of these capri pants in the black and silver bee brocade though, to be worn with a black polo neck.

I do wish that I’d bought the Swinging Sixties book from the V&A exhibition, although I do have plenty of photographs, which I’ve just uploaded to Flickr.

I know that all of this is vague and rambly, but I enjoyed the programme last night so much that I’m still a bit over-excited!

If you missed Pop Britannia, you can watch it online for a week, and it’s repeated tonight/tomorrow morning, at ten past midnight, and again at 02:40.

I don’t suppose anybody has any means of recording it for me?