While I Was Away (2) -- In Praise of Purlbee's 40-Minute Tote Bag Pattern

For other ladies across a considerable age span, I made tote bags with this pattern from Purlbee, which is perfect. I like that the tote is lined and also that it has width at the bottom, which gives the bag shape and more holding capacity. I made five totes in a three-step assembly line. I cut all the bags out at once on a cutting board--quilt-cutting fashion, then made the all the inside and outside bags, and then made the angled ends and put them together. To make it easy I used webbing for the handles and was relieved that it was very easy to sew with the machine. It was fun to match the outside and  inside fabrics. Here they are.

 

Cheerful bag for a young lady.

 

These blue bags are for ladies who live near lakes and the sea.

These two pink print bags were lined with off-white cotton from two old curtains.

It takes so little time to make these totes--which can be any size you like--that when a young visitor was unexpectedly coming, I made one real quick for her. This took 35 minutes, since I knew exactly what I was doing. So if you have your machine out and a stash of fabric, the 40-minute tote is a great spur-of-the-moment gift for someone or a great gift for a birthday with perhaps some baked goods or seeds in it or other little gift inside. I made this smaller bag of four fat quarters I had in my stash. I am hoping to make a couple totes for myself to take to work in the summer.

While I Was Away (1) ...

Happy to be posting again and hope I can do more as we come into the new year. After my daughter's wedding, I had to quickly get into gear for Christmas. After I got over my fear of changing the needle in my sewing machine (which turned out to be very easy), I got to work to whittle down my considerable fabric stash and make aprons, which all the ladies in my family--the young and the older--seem to get a kick out off. I used McCalls M5358, which produces an apron without having to work with pesky bias binding. In the middle you can relax in front of the tv and do hand basting, if you like, to take a break from the whirr of the machine. Aside from these in the photos, I made a dotted red Swiss one with red rick-rack, but in the last-minute rush, forgot to take a photo.

I think this is my personal favorite, as I love orange and yellow cheer.

 

Signature colors for my sweet aunt.

 

 

 

The lacing at the bottom and on the pocket came from old curtains I had saved. I keep fabric like a miser, so was glad I could find a place for the lacing. This apron, for my cousin, was my daughter's favorite.

 

Gray with hot-pink accents for a sophisticated bride-to-be.

I bought fabric for this one for a cousin and luckily guessed right for her colors. Very vibrant fabric and I love this apron--she's a great cook.

Although I stuck to same pattern, I didn't make the aprons in an assembly line, because I was afraid I would get confused and had never used the pattern before. I think it was best to finish one and then go on to the next. A real sewing whiz could probably make gift aprons in an assembly line without a hitch. One by one, from getting the fabric ready, cutting, and sewing the apron, it took on average of 8 hours apiece, perhaps 6 to 7 hours at the end. It would be faster for a seamstress.
I hope the ladies enjoy them as much as I did making them!

 

 

If I Could, I Would...

Evening dress, Chanel, 2011

If I could, I would support the haute couture, speaking of it here in its most narrow definition as the "creation of exclusive custom-fitted clothing. Haute couture is made to order for a specific customer, and it is usually made from high-quality, expensive fabric and sewn with extreme attention to detail and finished by the most experienced and capable seamstresses, often using time-consuming, hand-executed techniques." Its literal translation is "high sewing."

In this narrow definition, today it involves only those few houses that are official, correspondent, and guest members of the French Chambre Syndicale de la Haute Couture.
Haute couture in itself is not a road that leads to riches. The standards for hand sewing, materials, and design for those with the ability and interest to buy unique pieces of the finest clothing in the world are kept extremely high. For instance, as Karl Lagerfeld explains in describing to an interviewer in the BBC production,The Secret World of Haute Couture , the feathers for his designed evening gown composed of embroidery in the bodice and feathers in the skirt, are specially produced on a farm in South Africa. In short, all pains are taken to render an article of the highest possible quality and all the fabrics are created and treated specially. For his 2011 fall-winter collection, the designer Valentino, reported the September Vogue, showed a "magnificent coat of hammered gold brocade ... which had the brilliant texture, almost a relief effect, of a Russian icon's surface, clocking in at 750 hours' worth of embroidery."


Chanel embroidered gossamer, 2011.

Such "high sewing" could become a lost art. Twenty years ago, a haute couture designer would fashion up to 160 different pieces of clothing for a collection; today the number hovers around 40. In the years after World War II, Parisian haute couture kept 46,000 embroiderers, lacemakers, and hand seamstresses busy in subcontracting ateliers. Today that number has dwindled to 4,500. The money lies in ready-wear, which are duller shadows of the original dress.

Despising ready-wear as a form of prostitution, the French designer Alix Gres, for example, died in penury and obscurity in 1993, after creating clothes for such non pareils as Jacqueline Kennedy. Madame Gres, as she was called, was a sculptor who turned to dress design in the 1940s. Taking inspiration from the Greek and Roman statues of antiquity, she molded a dress from one, uncut piece of cloth directly on the model, through pinning tiny pleat after pleat--with exquisitely graceful results.

A gown of white silk jersey by Madame Gres, 1958

For sure there are plenty of designer clothes that I find incomprehensible or dislike. That said, haute couture repesents the pinnacle of excellence in turning a two-dimensional object--in this case, the cloth--into a three dimensional object, the finished article of clothing, in a way that expresses both the designer's and the owner's ideas and sensibilities. Those who collect haute couture regard their purchase as an investment in a work of art, in the same way that a wealthy person collects original paintings. I can only imagine that if haute couture succumbs, the quality of all of our clothes, including those in the sales bins at our favorite department store, will slip irrevocably downward.

You may also want to see:
Welcome Back Lace!
In Praise of Sewing

Bright Star: An Ode to a Seamstress

Toots Brawne and her sister, Fanny, the fiance of the great English poet John Keats.

Bright Star is a film no one who loves sewing could not love, and for good reason, it has been nominated for an Oscar in costume design. The film opens with zoom-in shots of a needle passing through fabric. Unlike the A&E version of Pride and Prejudice, which used embroidery only as a backdrop in the credits, this sewing is carried throughout the film. Fanny Brawne, the fiance of John Keats, according to the film, was a seamstress and designed and made all of her clothes. Throughout Bright Star, we see Fanny and then her little sister, Toots, doing their hand sewing and embroidery--in good times and bad.

The film is a beautifully photographed period piece about the friendship and then love between Fanny and Mr. Keats--with precise and nuanced acting by all actors and the recitation of poetry in a way that seems perfectly natural and not affected. Jane Campion's movie is to be praised as pointing people in the direction of Keats' works and the story of Keats himself.

Despite the fact that Keats' friends were apparently hostile to Fanny, Campion assumes, and I imagine rightly, that if Keats' love for Fanny had enabled him to write again, it could not have been bad. By focusing in on Fanny's love of beauty through her craft of sewing, we can see that she has a temperament that was attracted to and receptive to his. This temperament in Fanny is drawn out when, upon hearing of the death of Keats' beloved brother, Tom, she races upstairs to her bedroom to make a pillow slip for Keats, embroidered with a highly detailed and gorgeous bare-leaved tree, and enclosed is what seems to be a linen envelope with ribbon. "She was up all night sewing it," Toots tells Keats proudly. At another point when Fanny decides to bring Keats some biscuits, she carefully arranges the package with ribbon and cloth, explaining to her mother, "Anything that goes to Mr. Keats must be perfect." "Perfect" is an adjective that is often on her mind.

Naming her film after Keats' beautiful love poem to Fanny Brawne, Bright Star, I think Ms. Campion's consciously tried to craft the film as a poem of visuals. Scene after scene simply takes your breath away with the beauty of its coloration and composition--a metaphor for the Keats and Fanny's love of beauty and each other.

The costuming contributes to this effect. I do not really care for the empire style of Regency era clothes or how they are presented in most movies, at least. In this film, there is no decollatage, as Fanny wears delicately made blouses over empire jumpers in ensembles of color that go perfectly with Abbie Cornish's coloring. The effect, scene after scene, is stunning and the reliance on diaphanous materials for sleeves, ribbons, and curtains points to the mood of delicacy and sensitivity Keats waited for to create his poetry.

Another feature that endeared this film to me are Fanny's younger siblings, Sam, and Toots. And here we see that the whole Brawne family, including Fanny's widowed mother, cared deeply for John Keats. The presence of Toots--marvelously played by Edie Martin--acts as a grace note,a lyrical poem in itself against the backdrop of the unfolding tragedy of love and loss.

Bright Star is a celebration of poetry and sewing--two genres that appear be anachronistic in today's post-modern world but, it seems, many yearn for.

P.S. See Jane Austen's World for a post on the white embroidery we see in Bright Star.

Also, you may want to see these two other "sewing" movies, Broderies, and Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress. I reviewed them here.

Fun at the Sewing Machine

Thanks to a hiatus in work, I was able to spend last week doing some sewing with my sewing machine. I find that I can knit no matter how tired I feel, but sewing requires far more concentration, and I need to be on my toes,especially since I'm a novice and still terrified of my machine.


I had a lot of fun making this apron as a belated Christmas present for my aunt. I bought a 1-yard remnant of this fabric on sale with no idea what I would do with it. But I like the almost stained glass effect on this apron with the fabric and black binding. The pattern is Simplicity 4282.


Then I made this nightgown for myself. I wanted a winter nightgown that was more light-weight than flannel and softer, and then I remembered I had bought this soft fabric as a remnant, again unable to pass up the lovely flowered print. So I bought Simplicity 9012, an easy nightgown pattern. While the apron took me 2 days because of adjustments I had to make, I was able to finish the nightgown in an evening, and it is comfortable. This Simplicity pattern is very easy, and I hope to make myself some soft white muslin nightgowns for the summer from it.

Once I got going, I felt like I could easily become addicted to my sewing machine and can now understand why Anna over at Pleasant View Schoolhouse always wants to bring her machine on vacations! She is a fabulous seamstress. Her blog is my browser homepage.

In my dreams I make all of my own clothes -- with exactly the design I want, exactly the fabric I want, and exactly the fit I need. I like to read about Gertie's adventures in this regard at Gertie's New Blog for Better Sewing. And it's always fun to check Sew Retro to see what a lot of talented people are up to.

I learned how to sew in home economics class in high school with help from my mother -- opportunities for which I am very grateful. My mother sewed dresses for me when I was in elementary school and a gown for a prom. In high school and college I sewed myself skirts and dresses. Then for a long time, I sewed only curtains. Now I am venturing back to make aprons, dresses, and Christmas gifts.

I find it fun and sometimes suspenseful to see how stitching turns a perfectly flat boring object (in shape, that is) into a three-dimensional article fit for a particular purpose. If you like the finished product, it's a real pleasure.

Embroidery in India

A woman embroidering in India

From "Rahmin," a short story by Rumer Godden:

In Calcutta, where I lived, the chiken-wallahs worked in rows of booths in the market or out in the nearby villages, whole families stitching away, fulfilling orders--if they were lucky--for monograms, children's dresses, table-linen, underclothes, or, more often, making and embroidering these things. They would then be packed in a thin cotton cloth, made into a neat bundle, and carried to the houses of Europeans or wealthy Indians in the hope of making a sale.

When I visited India I bought some of this handiwork, and my friends in India brought me sweetly embroidered little tops of thin cotton for my daughter when she was a baby. I bought table clothes and bedspreads. In the charming neighborhood where I was staying with friends, a man would come periodically with his embroidered goods wrapped up in a bundle and tied to the back of his bicycle. Often, as it used to be in the USA, in India, the market comes to you.

The picture above was taken by Claude Renault and you can see his marvelous pictures of India on his blog.

Anna Karenina and La Broderie Anglaise

Why Anna Karenina


Vivian Leigh as Anna Karenina in the 1947 film, which was co-written by the French playwright Jean Anouilh

On Sunday I finally finished Leo Tolstoy's Anna Karenina after six (!) months of crawling through my 750-page edition. I read it in college but I wanted to read it anew because I wanted to read Gary Saul Morson's Anna Karenina in Our Time: Seeing More Wisely. I was interested in this book thanks to Alicia at Posie Gets Cozy, who related how Morson's essay "Prosaics: An Approach to the Humanities" (American Scholar 57, Autumn 88, 583) had changed her life. I was able to get a hold of Morson's essay through the journal database at my local library and it made me think a lot. When I found out about Morson's book on Anna Karenina, I wanted to read it but knew I wouldn't get much out of it unless I re-read Anna Karenina first. (This great novel was Oprah Winfrey's book selection for summer 2004. Straight off Oprah's blurb on the book describes it first as "sexy." Warning: Anyone who reads this book to find scintillating sex or any other kind of sex is going to be very disappointed.)

All I remembered from my first read of Anna Karenina decades ago was the story of Anna, her husband, and her lover Vronsky. In fact, as Morson points out, this story takes up only 40 percent of the book. Another 40 percent is dedicated to the landowner Levin, his wife Kitty, and her family. It is the counterpoint between these two story lines and their interweaving that Morson focuses on in his interpretation.

I haven't finished Morson's book yet but am rushing to share the following, because embroidery, or sewing, is also for me a symbol of the feminine desire to create beauty in the home and for the family and because Tolstoy's reference to broderie anglaise comes as the stretto in what is to me the most beautiful scene in Anna Karenina.

La Broderie Anglaise


Morson raises the issue of broderie anglaise (English white-on-white eyelet-like embroidery--see the example above) on page 70 of the proof copy of his book that I bought.

Morson writes:

Levin does not understand how Kitty could, instead of indulging intellectual interests, spend her time beautifying the house with her broderie anglaise. We may recall that when Stiva [Kitty's brother-in-law and Anna's brother] wakes up at the beginning of the novel, he drops his feet into slippers that, as a birthday present, Dolly [his wife and Kitty's sister] "has embroidered for him...on gold-colored morocco." Embroidery in this novel signifies the value of ordinary life through the effort to beautify it with one's work. Tolstoy's wife wrote in her diary:

L.N. was just saying to me how the ideas for his novel [Anna Karenina] came to him: "I was sitting downstairs in my study and observing a very beautiful silk line on the sleeve of my robe. I was thinking about how people get the idea in their heads to invent all these patterns and ornaments of embroidery, and that there exists a whole world of woman's work, fashions, ideas, by which women live... I understood that women could love this and occupy themselves with it. And, of course, at once my ideas moved to Anna... Anna is deprived of all these joys of occupying herself with the woman's side of life because she is all alone. All women have turned away from her, and she has nobody to talk with about all that which composes the everyday, purely feminine occupations."

[Morson then continues]: When Kitty insists on going with him [Levin, her husband] to his dying brother Nikolai, Levin imagines that she is simply afraid to be alone. But for her, sharing such an experience is so essential to the partnership of the marriage, which is not an alliance for amusement or pleasure. Precisely because she understands everything prosaically, she proves of great help to Levin and to Nikolai by attending to "the petty details":

[Morson then quotes Tolstoy in Anna Karenina]: It never entered his [Levin's] head to analyze the details of the sick man's situation, to consider how that body was lying under the blanket, how those emaciated legs and thighs and spine were lying huddled up, and whether they could not be made more comfortable... It made his blood run cold when he began to think of all those details... But Kitty thought, and felt, and acted quite differently. On seeing the sick man, she pitied him. And pity in her womanly heart did not arouse at all that feeling of horror and loathing that it aroused in her husband, but a desire to act, to find out the details of his condition, and to remedy them.... The very details, the mere thought of which reduced her husband to terror, immediately engaged her attention."

[Morson then writes:] The word "details" appears four times in this passage because the experience of death, no less than of life, is a matter of details. Kitty cares for, as she lives by, the smallest gestures in life. She improves the situation by making Nikolai's room cleaner and more orderly, by attending to every detail of his surroundings, until, at last, we see on the table her broderie anglaise. Levin acknowledges the correctness of her idea of love and marriage.



So ends Morson's discussion of the image of broderie anglaise in Anna Karenina. To me, Tolstoy's description of how Kitty transforms her brother-in-law's situation is incredibly moving and inspiring. You can read it online here. Read Chapters 16 through 20 of Part V.

Home Sewing Boom in England

According to the British newspaper the Guardian, there is a home sewing revival in Britain with an accompanying sharp rise in sales of sewing machines. The Guardian reports that making your own clothes is now considered the height of fashion. Here's hoping that a fashion environment in which a lot of women are making their own clothes will breathe new life into designer fashion. Already this spring, the "retro" dress has made its way down the catwalks--pretty, more feminine dresses in retro types of colorful fabric.

Here in the U.S.A., a similar boom has taken place. I joined the sewing revival this past year. Fear and trepidation all the way: first it took me two years to bring myself to buy a sewing machine, even though it was always at the top of my shopping list. Then, after I bought it, I suddenly decided I had to piece a quilt by hand. It took me five months to get up the gumption to wind the bobbin. Finally, as yuletide was lurking around the corner, I took the plunge to make some gifts from Christmas fabric I had bought on sale in January: a tablecloth, napkins (from a Purlbee tutorial), and place mats. I love the idea of making an object that exists because you shaped otherwise shapeless materials. I like the way in sewing clothes, we take what is basically a two-dimensional object--the flat fabric, and turn it into a three-dimensional object for use. I love to play in my mind with all the colors and prints of the objects. Sometimes in the past months, I have woken up in the middle of the night dreaming about a quilt I have been thinking about or how to make a little crayon holder. I hope all this enjoyment eventually translates into objects whose workmanship is not too shoddy.

And Another Cheerful Note

I made this dress for another sweet niece who just turned 8 years old. Her name is Sam, and she is as smart as a whip. The fabric is a cotton knit I bought many years ago because I loved it for a little girl. The pattern is Simplicity 3866. It took a lot less time than my first dress, and the knit was very easy to work with.

On a Happier Note

I made this dress for my lovely niece Maris for her 11th birthday. It's black and white with grey. The rick-rack edging helped the look a lot. Although this dress is not at all complicated, it took me quite a long time, most likely because I was very tentative about what I was doing since this is the first real clothing sewing project I have done in a very long time. I liked the result. My niece is quite petite, so I cut the dress pretty short. I liked the fabric a lot for her. I made it from the Simplicity 5234 pattern. Now my daughter wants me to make her a dress, and we have picked out the pattern but we haven't found a fabric yet.

In Praise of Sewing

Over the weekend I very happily watched two movies that touch on sewing: Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress and Broderies (or Sequins).
Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress is based on the semi-autobiographical novel of the same name by Dai Sijie. It concerns two city youths who are sent to remote mountains to undergo re-education at the hands of the local peasantry during the Chinese Cultural Revolution. The little seamstress in question is the young granddaughter of the local tailor, who owns a 19th-century sewing machine. Now his granddaughter makes the clothes. Under the influence of a smuggled novel by Balzac, which one of the boys reads to her at night, she begins changing her output, adding "bourgeois" embellishments, such as bows and flounces, to the drab Cultural Revolution garb. The sewing machine also came in for a strange and funny use. The seamstress's skills in sewing appear to be important in giving the seamstress the self-confidence to be so open to what the two city boys brought and had to offer. She soaked up Balzac and the music on violin that one of the boys had brought and changed her life and theirs. I loved both the book and the movie. The movie seems to be a French production but is in Chinese with English subtitles.


The young heroine of Broderies helps embroider a dress in the workshop of her friend and employer.

Broderies is about a 17-year-old girl in a provincial French town who goes to considerable lengths to produce artistic works in embroidery on her own. She is in a personal crisis because she is pregnant with no prospect of help from the unknown (to us) father. In desperation, she seeks and finds work with a woman in the town who is bereaved over the loss of her son and who also produces from her house gorgeous embroidery for the haute couture designers in Paris. Despite a gratuitous sex scene, the film is a sensitive portrayal of two women under considerable pressure, both of whom are dedicated to creating beauty, and the way in which this dedication binds them and strengthens them. I heard about this movie from reading Yarnstorm, and I am glad I searched it out and watched it. It is visually beautiful and offers another peek at the highly skilled work that goes on far behind the scenes to produce the creations of Parisian high fashion.
There is also a French movie called The Lacemaker made in 1977, which according to a reviewer of Broderies, has a lot of scenes of sewing, but I have not been able to get a hold of this movie at a reasonable price.

A Tiny Step with a Little Bag

Here is a small drawstring bag I made for a little friend of mine. This was my first post-Christmas sewing effort. I did it from a tutorial at Happy Things, which very generously has a series of tutorials on drawstring bags for beginners (definitely me) and also on quilting. Thank you very much, Happy Things. I messed up the top since I did not follow the measurements in the tutorial, but the bag still works. I love the fabric, and I am glad that I lined it, because it makes the bag more substantial and also because it is more cheerful. Now I am going to fill it with it fun little things for my friend. I don't know if she will like it, but I'm having fun!

35 Million Sewing Hobbyists in the USA

According to the Home Sewing Association, the number of sewing hobbyists in the USA is up 17 percent from the year 2000 and now stands at 35 million. This is great news--along with the revival of the apron and retro apparel that is now filtering its way into the mainstream (always the last to know) media. There are so many wonderful sewing blogs for inspiration, such as Purlbee, Pleasant View Schoolhouse, Sew Retro, Sister's Choice for quilting, Turkey Feathers, Granny Along, SouleMama, Anna Maria Horner, and many others. Check the links to other blogs from these blogs for an infinite amount of sewing (and other) inspiration. I am working on my first quilt, a four-square baby quilt, and have ideas for about three more. Very relaxing but I am having trouble matching all the seams as I sew together the rows. It will all work out though, I hope, with some patience. Also there are problems in the design, but I am hoping it qualifies as a decent first attempt. Sewing offers an enormous range of satisfaction and projects--from making a quick shift dress in 2 hours or making a uniquely gorgeous heirloom quilt that takes many months. Have fun!

On Sewing

Heather at A Place of Quiet Rest posted this quote on Tuesday:
"It is a token of healthy and gentle characteristics when women of high thoughts and accomplishments love to sew; especially as they are never more at home with their own hearts than while so occupied."
- Nathanial Hawthorne