Poetry and Clothing Project: September

One of the things I really like about this Poetry and Clothing project, is that it gives me a reason to create garments that aren't necessarily something I'd wear myself. You could say I am fairly limited in what I personally wear: generally I like a retro 50's/60's silhouette, prefer certain colours (navy, red, black, mustard), and have quite a low tolerance to garments without anchors. So making garments for other people, in this case my friend Harriet, is a good excuse for me to bring life to different ideas. It's another way for me to express myself, to have a kind of visual conversation about what I feel.

September's P&C garment is just such a piece. I'm really pleased with this batwing dress. The style is really cool: it's loose and casual yet slinky. The fabric is a jersey, super soft, very fine and ever-so-slightly sheer, so the overall effect is subtley sexy without being revealing. You could also get a fair bit of trans-season wear from it with wool tights and boots when Autumn comes 'a knocking. However, I can't take all the credit for the design: my boss developed a batwing top pattern inspired by an H&M garment she saw. Then I refined it a little and elongated it into a dress version.

As you can see, the fullness of the batwing is gathered into the sleeve sections. The whole thing was stitched together with an overlocker using really fine jersey needles in about 15mins. I then used a normal flatlock machine to turn up the hem and sleeve edges.

I also found a bit of tomato red poly/cotton twill from goodness-knows-when in my stash. I'd been messing around with the pattern that I made my navy capri's from, so thought I'd make Harriet a pair in red. Now, this was always going to be a long shot, making well-fitting trousers for someone who's in another country isn't the easiest task (spoiler alert: they didn't fit, but she's going to find a suitable recipient).

And on to the poetry side of the bargain. This one was written about the top I made and sent in August. Now, apparantly Harriet has recently developed a skin sensitivity to some synthetic fabrics, and unfortunately that includes whatever the hell that fabric is I used for her August top. Around that time, she was host to a French cyclist called Sylvie who was making a stop in Barcelona whilst on her way down to Morocco. After a long time spent cycling around, Sylvie was in need of a bit of freshen up and make over, so Harriet passed on a few garments she could no longer wear, including this top which Sylvie apparantly totally loves. She has promised to take a photo of herself wearing it when she reaches Morocco! It's sad that Harriet lost out on a top she thought was cute, but it's great a happy owner was found. I really love the idea of putting beautiful lovingly made garments out there for inspirational people to enjoy as they push boundaries and have an adventure!


Sylvie (August)

What makes one itch
makes two happy
we spent three days
talking about how two wheels
are better than four
scratching each other's itches.
She was so small
fit into five-year-old clothes.
She left on the 6th September
at seven in the morning
and before she left, we ate
cereal with dried fruits for breakfast.
At 9am I thought of her,
wearing a new top, then
wrapped inside her bivouac tent

And I will count the days that I have lost
against the ones that she will gain
and each time I look insdie
my moth-eaten wardrobe, I will imagine
all those bird-like white shapes
flying over a sea of mint green
and I am certain
that when I see her again
she will have grown


I'm sure it doesn't need to be said, but I LOVE this poem and I love this particular month in the project. It was an unexpected twist, the addition of another garment recipient, one who clearly left her mark. I really hope she does take that photo and sends it to us.

Les boutons et plus

WARNING: Picture heavy post.

I don't know why I added that warning actually, I don't think an excess of images ever caused health problems of any description. Nevermind. It's a few months ago now, but I thought I'd share with you how I went from Barcelona to UK through France back in August this year. I tend to keep this 'ere blog fairly sewing/creation/sustainability/inspiration specific, so don't tend to share holiday paps and the like (in no way criticising those who choose to do so, I LOVE to live varicariously and cyber-travel to places that I haven't been to via other peoples' blogs, particularly Cheap Opulance and Christine's) but as Michelle so eloquently noted, trips can often be catalysts for great bursts inspiration, both during and afterwards.

So here we go (note the sizable chunk of possessions we lugged with us, that big case I'm leaning on could have housed a small family) in Estació de França train station patiently waiting for the delayed train:

Three trains and some crazy border crossing action later, we hit the super-cool city of Lyon! Oh, at this point I should mention that all these photos were taken by my boyfriend who kindly let me steal them, which would explain why I'm in a high percentage of them (he likes to use me as 'foreground' apparantly).

Now, in terms of fueling my sewing obsession, Lyon wasn't directly very useful. The only haberdashers I found was closed for the WHOLE OF AUGUST. Seriously. They thought no-one might need some elastic or a zip for an entire month. But I forgive Lyon for this oversight because I did provide us with one of the most exciting phenomena I've ever experienced: TRABOULES! Secret doors, passageways and internal courtyards to be discovered that you are kind of allowed to snoop around? Hell YES please!!!! I could write whole posts on how interesting these things are, the fascinating history of them and our two-day adventure entering secret doors and coming out in entirely different streets. But I won't. Yet.

In short, Lyon was awesome. If someone told me I had to live there for a year, I certainly wouldn't be pissed off (plus it might mean I'd actually get to the see the inside of that haberdashers!). So, can you guess where we went next? Here's a clue:

I visited Paris briefly once when I was a moody teenager for a college trip, and was dying to explore it as a (considerably less moody) adult. So, culture blah blah blah, art blah blah blah, history blah blah blah blah, architecture blah blah, food blah blah blah blah. Can I talk about sewing now?

There are numerous well written, helpful and informative blog posts already out there about where's hot and where's not to buy fabric and haberdashery in Paris (I know, I read a lot of them before my trip) so I'm not going to try and make another, other than to say, head to the Montmartre area. If you can't see a million fabric shops, walk about a bit until you do. They helpfully clumped them all together. After doing the obligatory walk up to the basilica and squinting my eyes to try and picture what the area looked like when Toulouse Lautrec was wandering about, I hit this shop above. Umm, an eccentric but shoddy and over-priced buttons shop, boo. And then I went into another haberdashers.....

BLAM! Amazingness. I (unhelpfully) can't remember what this shop was called, but I'm pretty sure the French for haberdashers, which I think is 'mercerie', is in massive letters on the facade. This shop had so much of everything. ''Everything', you say?' Yes. 'Even ribbon with baby squirrels on it? Surely not'. Wrong sucker!

Despite only coming away with a couple of metre of bias binding with anchors on (predictable? Moi?!) I left that shop hyped. Check the unconcealable excitement on my face as I approach the jewel in the area's fabric-selling crown:

I'd read awesome things about this epic multi-floored fabric and haberdashery shop. Somehow, despite rolls of fabric numbered in the 1000's, I didn't see any that floated my boat particularly, finding the selection generally conservative. The strange child sized mannequins that I'd been promised however certainly lived up to my expectations:

But heading up to the haberdashery floor certainly didn't disappoint. One word: Boutons.

The last few weeks of life in Barcelona flew by in a rapid whirl of work, destashing and goodbye shindigs and we really didn't spend much time researching Paris and Lyon for our six days in France. But the one thing I didn't fail to figure out in advance was where to shop for sewing stuff. Like a kid on Christmas eve, I had been badly concealing my excitement and impatience for the part of our trip, on the final day, that had been allocated for me to indulge in this activity. I had been subjected to countless linguistic facts about things like 'how many cognates there are between French and English' and 'how to conjugate French -re ending verbs in the Present Tense' for days and days, and I was just itching to get to the pretty buttons. Which is why, when we got to the sewing shops area and my boyfriend begun to feel really strange, light-headed and nauceous, he didn't feel he could tell me until I was done and we had retreated to a bar. He didn't want to risk the mood I would be in if I had to cut this shopping trip short. So the poor boy simply tried to keep his shit together in claustrophobic and busy shop after claustrophobic and busy shop, whilst I inspected every last button Paris had to offer, none the wiser to his situation, with him even mustering up the strength to take these awesome pics (from a batch of many more) to document this day. Thanks Patty! I will endure every language acquisition fact you can throw at me! Promise xxx