Uncategorized – Adventures in Design

Byzantine Linen Bag

The Byzantine Bag

These bags had a very humble inspiration – the desire to upcycle a linen bag that was originally the packaging for some linen sheets. I loved the simplicity of the bag and created some slender Forager handles for it a number of years ago from the half-inch stock I usually use for closures and shawl cuffs.

Here is the contact sheets of some film Bruce shot of me with this bag on the beach at the Outer Banks a few years ago. My intention in this series was to show the bag handles, as well as the Women’s Wealth shawl cuff, hence the appearance of a piece of knitwear in the last three frames of the roll.

Here are a couple of color images from the same photoshoot on the beach after I put the shawl on. You can see the Women’s Wealth cuff on the shawl and another one on my wrist.

Not everyone has a linen bag in which linen sheets were sold, however, and as much as I like the linen sheet bag, it is very deep and long. I wanted something a bit smaller in scale and with some ornamentation. I made two bags over several years and this blog post offers a description of how I made them. A downloadable pdf of the pattern for the Byzantium motif – in a full-size version that requires some taping and a scaled-down version that can be printed on a single sheet of paper – is available for purchase (only $2) on my website. Once you print it and cut it out, you can then trace it onto your fabric to inform a range of surface embellishment techniques, such as applique, chain stitch embroidery, kantha stitching, painting, batik, or something else.

Backstitched Natural Linen – 12 inches wide by 18 inches tall with a curved bag-bottom profile.

To create the basic bag body for the backstitched natural linen bag, I plotted my dimensions on the fabric and established the curve in the bag bottom by cutting a piece of paper on the fold until I got the shape right. Then I used the piece of paper as a pattern to transfer the curve to my fabric.

I hand-sewed the front and back faces together using a double-strand of cotton/poly craft sewing thread (Dual Duty Plus Button & Craft by Coats and Clarks is what I used but I’m looking for something that comes in larger quantities on a paper or wooden spool instead of plastic). Because this seam creates the bag bottom, it has to be robust so I made a French seam that I then stitched down flat, meaning the seam has been sewn three times. I did a wide hem at the bag opening. I stabilized the holes I made for the screws, that secured the handle, with a buttonhole stitch but you could also set a metal eyelet if you wanted to reduce the amount of handwork.

Once I completed the bag, I used a cutout of the Byzantium motif to trace the design onto the bag body, tracing three shapes total in such a way that they wrap around the side seams for a more dynamic look. For the natural linen, I chose just to embroider the outline of the motif using a backstitch in a fingering weight superwash yarn (Meridian) from Seven Sisters Arts. The color is a fascinating yellow-grey called Vireo. I could also have chosen to fill in the Byzantium motif with chain stitch, for example, or even fully cover the bag body with embroidery for a carpet bag vibe and an incredibly strong fabric. In the past, I have embroidered bags after sewing them up, covering the seams completely with embroidery and creating a continuous, seamless fabric. It takes a long time. But it also lasts for a long time. I chose not to line my linen bag because I wanted an incredibly lightweight tote. To create more body, you could easily line this bag with unbleached muslin or even the same fabric. This would give you an opportunity to introduce a pocket to the interior.

Kantha Embroidered Black Linen – 14 inches wide by 17 inches tall with a squared-off bag-bottom

Like the Backstitched bag, the Kantha bag was constructed first, before I did any embroidery. For this bag, I created a flat bag bottom in the style of a grocery bag to give the bag a boxier shape. Once I sewed it up, I traced my Byzantium motif and then began my Kantha stitching, stitching over the side seams, using a long darner needle and fingering-weight (Meridian) yarn dyed by Seven Sisters Arts using a light and a dark grey and an indigo. Though the Kantha stitching does not add much weight or bulk, by stitching over the seams it increases the strength of the fabric quite a bit.

At its simplest, Kantha stitching represents a series of parallel lines of running stitch, used historically in Bangladesh and the eastern part of India to marry layers of fabric together in order to extend the useful life of textiles. These lines of running stitch were functional more than ornamental and the technique creates interesting effects on printed fabrics in particular as the color of the thread can appear iridescent in relation to the colors in the fabric itself. That is not how I used running stitch in this instance.

My first lines of stitching established the outlines of the Byzantium motif. My subsequent lines of stitching followed the same contours. As in traditional Kantha, I used parallel lines of stitches. But my lines were curved rather than straight. I worked on all the shapes at once, building up layers of stitching lines around each motif at roughly the same rate. As you can see, I changed thread color in different parts of the interior of the shape and outside the shape.

As I built up parallel lines of stitches around my Byzantium motifs, my stitching lines started to bump up against each other. Once that happened, the negative space around the motifs began to be my focus rather than the positive contours of the shape. In general, my stitching was responsive and improvisational. I wanted to have a sense of flow in the direction of the stitching lines but not give myself any rigid requirements. The Byzantium motifs’ edges and the bag opening were my constraints. If I were to stitch another Kantha bag, even with the shapes traced in the same locations, the stitching would be different insofar as my way of responding to the lines of stitching bumping up against each other and the contours of the bag opening would be different and situational. Though I could plan my response ahead of time, I find it more interesting to make decisions as I go along. No patience is required while making it up because it never gets boring.

Like the Backstitched Bag, this bag could easily be lined with the same or another lightweight fabric. So far I have not lined mine.

Naked and the New Black Jacket

Last night I was sitting with Bruce and he was doing something on his phone after telling me about getting a new guitar, visiting with his friend Anthony, who is also a guitarist. As he fiddled on his phone, purchasing some additional accessory for the sound system he is building at home, I suddenly felt so sad and deficient. I started to cry while sitting there in the kitchen on the little stool waiting to turn the zucchini over in the oven.

This doesn’t seem to be about the new black jacket. But it is. Because really I was crying about the jacket and all of the undone projects I think about every day but, lately, particularly the jacket because it has gotten cold and I want the jacket to pull on in the morning. I wish to stretch my arms into its embrace, the sleeves stretching just a little as I straighten my arms and my right hand slides out the other end first and I watch the white fingertips emerge, framed by the black jersey. Brenda gave me this fabric this past summer as it’s not in her palette and black looms large in mine. I don’t even know how many yards are there. She also gave me a beautiful pale grey, same style of jersey. Both are a wool blend. I haven’t burned them to get a sense of the ratio of fibers – how much wool, how much synthetic.

It took a moment for Bruce to see I was crying and when he did he asked why and I said I suddenly felt sad and he told me not to be sad. I knew he thought it’s because of his cancer so I told him I wasn’t sad because of him, that I was disappointed in myself because I don’t do the things I love. I don’t make the things I want to make. I make things for the business, little things, closures, fill orders, cut leather straps into small pieces, punch them, rivet them, set snaps, attach hardware, put them in plastic sleeves with the correct card listing the product name, product code, provenance, instructions for use, instructions for how to recycle the card, compost the plant-based plastic (which just seems like a self-aggrandizing gesture because there are not many localities with easy and available industrial composting facilities and if you don’t have access to composting then plant-based plastic is no better for the environment than any other plastic), and find JUL on social media.

I was crying because these repeated movements are the making I do rather than the other making that I want to do every day, most of the day. My work table is piled with leather, with the tools for making these styling solutions, with the tiny off-cuts of strap ends and the little nubs of leather left over when I punch holes.

I keep telling myself that it’s a matter of schedule. If I organized my time better I could get everything done. I would get everything done – product made, house cleaned, de-cluttered, and downsized, everything excess purged, every unwanted and unused item re-homed, relocated to the place it now belongs, used by someone, nothing wasted. If I organized my time better I could get everything done. I would get everything done. And I would have time and a clean cutting table to lay out paper to make the pattern, re-cutting the pieces of my sloper to become the style lines and silhouette of this new jacket that investigates the possibility of a personal grammar of seams that describe where the contours of my body change direction. I imagine a luxury of time in which I can just play with forms in paper and then try them out in muslin, documenting this experimentation with conjuring three dimensions out of two.

I didn’t say most of this because Bruce was more interested, perhaps, with what he thought was a validation – protesting that I am making things all the time, that even the little little things (as I call them) are beautiful, that I shouldn’t beat myself up, that I shouldn’t be so hard on myself, that my protestant work ethic is making me unhappy. This sort of validation does not help me or assuage the pain. It is not comforting. I am not satisfied with making the little little things I worry are disposable. I kept saying over and over – I want to make beautiful things. I am naked. I don’t have a jacket.

Kevin does this too – tells me not to be so hard on myself, that I’m fine the way I am. These attempts to validate the adequacy of my daily routine invalidate the rest. If I seek validation, I want a different sort, one that supports my interest in making my designs, in developing my writing, in becoming a better business woman, in developing the educational content my customers are asking me for.

I don’t fully understand this dynamic – this impulse of theirs to calm me by patting my head and telling me it’s ok. Especially Bruce, who is always striving to perfect his art, to carve out time for his photography so that he can comfortably assert he is a photographer who supports his art with his job, rather than he has a job and takes photos when he can. I am that same person. When I say I’m a designer I want it to mean of clothes, not (only) of knitwear jewelry and screw-in closures.

Actually this is not about the Black Jacket. I’m writing about self-fulfillment. Funny to use that word, which I use to talk about the orders I pack – fulfillment. I fulfill other people’s orders. I do not fulfill myself. There is a voice that says – you are complaining about something you do nothing about. I have not made a garment since I made the Little Black Overdress this summer. No, that’s not true. I made the pajamas for Bruce. I wasn’t going to make them at first because I want to work on the Black Jacket. But I made them because Bruce has cancer. He loves them. They comfort him. I need the next project to comfort me.

The fact I don’t change myself is what makes me sad, more than some yearning to make something in particular. I despair my own immovability, my own stubborn resistance to self-fulfillment year after year. I don’t want this to sound so self-pitying. It’s not supposed to be self-pitying. I actually wanted to talk about the Black Jacket!

Ok. What is this? Is it a diary of making and non-making? Because surely making is also preceded and succeeded by non-making. Before I can make in the world I must make in my mind. And if I am disciplined I will describe and sketch. It is not solely a deficiency that my impulse is to go straight to the material. This morning I read a brief description of a designer who draped and cut fabric directly on live models. I wonder if she is the one I read about years ago who used to stick pins in her live models too? That would have been a horrid modeling job. No amount of beauty would have made that cruelty seem justified. I am now questioning that assertion; is there beauty that justifies unnecessary suffering? No. I don’t think so. I think there is a kind of cult of personality that gets created around aesthetic genius of terrific brilliance, artists whose creations are so exquisite and ineffable, that the suffering of another (purposefully constructed as an insufficient, daily-grind, unrealized and unrealizable person), in the service of the designer’s production, is a price we are supposed to be willing to pay individually and as a collectivity. But I don’t think the suffering of others is required for the creation of beauty. I think beauty can be redemptive, should be redemptive. Everyone who participates should be able to lay claim to some benefit.

The Value of Stitches

More about the Little Black Overdress

In my previous post about the Little Black Overdress, I described noticing an impatient feeling while backstitching the gathers of the skirt onto the bodice. I kept thinking – this is taking too long. What disturbed me about that feeling, that thought, is the fact that I really do want to enjoy every stitch. This is a goal. And mostly I enjoy my stitches, which is why that agitation surprised me when I became aware of it, which I almost didn’t. We become used to such back-of-the-mind thoughts. Or at least I imagine I am not the only one who has the experience of gauzy thought-feelings moving behind the surface tension of other more front-of-the-mind thoughts. I have come to think of this sensation as something like clouds moving slowly across the sky, casting shadows on the ground, somewhere else, so we barely notice.

As I mentioned before, I realized I was valuing different stitches differently. My embroidery was the most valuable. My visible seam stitching was next on the list. My pretty interior stitching was third, my invisible stitches were fourth, and my covered up practical stitches – in this case the backstitching to hold the gathers in place and connect the skirt and the bodice, and later covered with a ribbon – came in fifth. As I was reflecting on this hierarchy I saw different aspects of my own labor were starting to relate to the value of women’s labor in global markets, classed labor here in the United States. Fast fashion garment workers’ labor is not valued. If the clothes are disposable, then the labor and materials that created them is viewed as disposable. Even couture seamstresses are referred to as ‘hands.’ My impatience over my backstitches was in this mix.

Here is what I wrote about this in my journal:

May 16, 2021

This image shows the gathering but not the finishing I describe below.

Yesterday I attached the skirt to the bodice, gathering the back stitches worked on the skirt side from left to right, until I got to the straight-stitched section, where I switched to working on the bodice side and continued right to left, which is more comfortable for me.

I trimmed the seam when I was finished. I would have liked to bind the gathered edge with the bodice seam allowance. But I didn’t want to stitch on the skirt and I hadn’t left a long enough seam allowance on the bodice side that I could wrap the skirt seam allowance and still have fabric to turn under and stitch in the ditch. So I sewed some of my grey ribbon onto the skirt seam allowance and then top-stitched that on the right side of the bodice so the appearance of the seam is very similar to, but not identical to, the other seam.

I like the way this looks on the front but not on the back. I can see my stitching line wavers on the ribbon – the black thread stands out on the grey ribbon. On the right side the stitching line does vary in distance from the first top-stitched line, but that variation is not really noticeable because it’s black thread on black fabric and also because the relationships I’m focusing on – one stitching line in relation to another – are consistent. The ribbon was not as carefully arranged on the back and I was adjusting to a mild fluctuation in the gathering line, which I then supplemented with a lone of top-stitching on the wrong side of the bodice.

Maybe this discussion is not important. But maybe it is. One of the things I have been thinking about is how Brenda Dayne talks about her projects. To a great extent her podcast is a discussion, or rather a narration, of her problem-solving. She charts her decision-making. She is always tweaking and experimenting. She talks about what she tried, whether it worked. If it didn’t work why not? If it did work, is she happy with the result?

The other thing I have been thinking about is how layered and constant the decision-making is at this stage. I imagine that as I become better at this, that more of what I do, the decisions I make, will become automated (is this right?). I’ll learn techniques that will start to feel natural in their execution. I won’t spend so much time trying to work it out in my mind. Or at least that is my fantasy – that it will get easier and faster.

I just wrote faster and that raises questions for me. As I have been working on different parts of the Little Black Overdress, I discern a sense of urgency that sometimes emerges for me. I notice that I have had the thought that what I’m doing is taking too long. The taking-too-long feeling doesn’t come from any external constraint. It’s not as if I don’t have something else I can wear. There is no deadline. I would like to wear the dress this summer but not yet. The weather isn’t quite there yet. I am enjoying the sewing. I am enjoying the embroidery. I’ve been going back and forth between the two – garment construction to embroidery to garment construction to embroidery again.

This image was taken June 19. 2021, when Brood X of the 17 year Cicadas had hatched and were everywhere, on everything, their collective soughing a soundtrack that was sometimes so loud it drowned out birdsong. Or maybe they just gave up trying to broadcast the boundaries of their territories. In this image you can see that I had thread-traced stitching-lines on the plackets (embroidered to match the cuffs) and the bodice.

The fact that this sensation / anxiety about speed came up alerts me to the cultural bias toward efficient execution. Get it done. It reminds me of my Dickensian Coat, which is so beautiful and deliciously comfortable. David asked me why was I taking so much time to mend a coat? Wouldn’t it be faster just to buy something new? Wouldn’t it be faster?

Bruce (Instagram: @bruce_falkinburg) asked me the same question about the Little Black Overdress. Wouldn’t it be faster if you sewed it on the machine? Yes. The answer is yes, it would be faster. But I don’t want it to be faster. Observing the feeling of anxiety, then, is interesting and points out how much work there is to become aware of all the ways this cultural value manifests, and also how to have an intentional response to it. I don’t think that’s quite right. What I’m trying to think about is the conscious development of a counter-narrative and a personal methodology.

Feelings like this, we are taught, are individual [here you can start to tell I’m an anthropologist]. To the extent they are individual, when you have a feeling that is contrary to the goal, or which even obstructs, you have failed. There is a moral failure – a lack of discipline, a lack of knowledge. But the feeling is actually cultural. If I seek to change the goal to enjoyment of my stitches over speedy execution of the task, then I have to grapple with the feelings that arise. I have to make the feelings part of the method.

Here you can see the final appearance of the bodice of the Little Black Overdress. Photography by @bruce_falkinburg in his photography studio in Frederick, MD

My contention is that the making itself should be enjoyable. My contention is that slow-making should be enjoyable. Slowing it down will draw out the enjoyment. But if the cultural value system is that a little dress should not take too much time – after all it’s just a little dress – then slowing down and putting a lot of time into the dress would be anxiety-producing. That which I have posited should be enjoyable, that is slow-making, becomes fraught.

So my personal theory and practice has to include a strategy for re-thinking making, re-feeling making. I need to understand where all of the feelings are coming from. What are they about? I need to be able to read and interpret the feelings in terms of the economy of waste and haste.

We have elevated being minimally skilled. It is a cultural value to be able to produce something useable/wearable with minimal skill.

As I have been writing, I have been having another parallel line of thought about the fabric I’m using. I thought it was cotton. But the way it glitters and the way it smells when I iron it, makes me think it could be a cotton/poly mix. I just took a flame to it. It does not melt. The steady fast burn with a yellow flame and no smoke suggests cotton. If it does have polyester it’s not much.

More views of the finished dress on the hoof with a silver silk slip as an underdress and metallic gunmetal leather Trippen boots. Photography – @bruce_falkinburg.

Somehow the fiber is making a difference to me. There is a way in which I feel like devoting this much time to a ‘cheap synthetic’ is not justified. So here I’m bumping up against another prejudice I have to grapple with.
Issue: expense or value of materials
Issue: style of project – what am I making?
Issue: mode of use – where will I wear it? Is it fancy? Is it for wearing every day?

There are hierarchies of value here that are really old and have been delivered to us historically and culturally and need to be re-worked in order to get to a new place with making.

When I wrote the above, part of me wanted to mock the observation as so obvious as not to require statement. But it does require statement in order to examine it in more depth and figure out how it’s operating here and how to counter the narrative that says that the Little cotton Overdress does not warrant the time I am spending on it. Are sumptuary laws at play here? Class hierarchies? Race hierarchies? Social evolutionary frameworks?

The value of different kinds of labor. I’m thinking of inexpensive, hand-embroidered cotton things from India. In that instance, the embroidery is rustic, probably executed quickly. The ornamentation is not high-value. It’s not refined (this has nothing to do with the skill of the embroiderer. It has to do with the use to which it’s put, the requirements of the buyer, and the compensation for the work). There is a relationship between the value of the labor and the way we value the result of the labor.

I finished the dress in July.

A few final photographs of the finished dress . . .

I am fortunate to work with Bruce on photographs of my makes. This shoot just felt like pure joy. I love wearing the Little Black Overdress: I feel pretty and glamorous. I wear it, now, when I travel because I feel protected. I recently wore it to the theater because I feel stylish. I want everything in my closet to feel like that.

Bruce told me to lean against the wall and put my hands on it, a pose that felt unnatural to me, so I decided to pose in an even more unnatural manner, as an ancient Egyptian figure, which made me laugh.

Little Black Overdress

I decided not to buy clothes anymore.

Then I decided to put my sewing machines in storage and only to sew by hand.

The Inspiration – Little White Overdress in Cuba, December 2018

I found the little white voile overdress pictured above in a shop in Cuba in 2018. I have worn it often ever since in the way you see above, over a simple white, gauzy FLAX dress I found at a second-hand shop. The little white overdress is one of my most favorite pieces of clothing. So I decided I wanted another version in black. White, as a color, is vulnerable and the lightness of the voile feels summery, even though the style of the dress does not confine the design to a particular season.

The little white overdress worn in the wild and reflected in the window of a gallery in Porto, Portugal, during a trip with my photographer-friend Bruce Falkinburg. It’s a covert selfie of the two of us. I was also after that message on the gallery wall – “Fuck Art Lets Eat”

I thought about the black version I wanted to make for a long time before I started. At one point I took detailed measurements and plotted them on a drawing, but something else snagged my attention and I wandered off and it took me a long time to wander back.

The next time I approached the project, I started with a decision about material. I have a bolt of crinkly cotton that I got very inexpensively years ago; because I have a lot of it and because it was cheap, it is a low-stakes fabric that I have used before as an alternative to muslin in design experiments for which I needed better drape than muslin offered. In addition to deciding not to buy new clothes, I have decided not to buy new fabric when something in my stash will serve the purpose well. In sum, the crinkly black cotton is black, inexpensive, and I already had it, so the little black overdress would be made in the crinkly black cotton.

Finally, in April after at least a year of intention and deliberation, I traced a pattern from the existing dress, chalked the pieces onto my fabric, pinked them out, pinned, and started sewing – by hand. I did not document my process. The first image I have is from May 5 when I was sitting outside in back of my house gathering the skirt onto the bodice of the dress and feeling like I should post something, anything, to Instagram. In the image below, I had already sewn the bodice and sleeves, attached the sleeves to the bodice, and constructed the skirt. You can see the side seam of the bodice in just about the center of the image. and just above the middle of the left side of the image you can see the seam joining the sleeve to the bodice.

The story this image is trying to tell has to do with the joining of the bodice to the skirt. On the left you can see my thread-tracing on the stitching line of the bodice. Coming from the lower left, you can see where I have basted my skirt gathers and then pinned the skirt onto the bodice.

As I was back-stitching the skirt onto the bodice, I noticed something very interesting. Before I tell you what it was I will give you a little bit of context for why I decided not just to sew my own clothes, but to sew them by hand with a needle and thread.

I have sewn since I was a child. My first projects were dresses I designed and sewed by hand for my dolls, cutting pattern pieces free-hand based on existing shapes and stitching them up with a needle and thread. By the time I was in college I was making almost all of my own clothes using a machine, most of them my own design. I didn’t have any training. I worked intuitively and no doubt did many things wrong by industry standards. But I was only trying to please myself, to make things I wanted to wear.

After college I got a job stitching in the costume shop at the Arena Stage Repertory Theater in Washington, DC. There I learned to flat pattern and began to learn couture sewing techniques. I loved the long days of sitting at big tables sewing by hand, talking to the other women in the costume shop. We only sewed long seams on the machine. Everything else was done with needle and thread. During a brief gap in between shows when we had finished checking the costume archive for moth damage, I made a sloper for myself and took a first pass at my perfect jacket. I’m including a recent picture of myself in that jacket below. It still fits well and feels pretty incredible to put on (and I need an image to break up this post lest you stop reading!).

These photographs are by my dear friend and collaborator Bruce Falkinburg (Instagram: @bruce_falkinburg) and were taken in his amazing studio. He was practicing lighting configurations on me and I got some pretty terrific shots of this jacket out of his experiment. (Please ignore the folds; I hadn’t gotten it out of the closet in a long time and didn’t get it pressed before the shoot.)

I did not succeed in making my perfect jacket, though at the time I felt it was closer than I do now. The armscye is too big and the sleeve cap too tall for what I want now. There are no drag lines when I stand with my arms down. But I want better range of motion without distorting the body of the jacket and changing the feeling of the bodice.

I didn’t stay much longer after this jacket at the costume shop. Arena didn’t pay well enough for me to support myself so I got another job. But I kept sewing, went to graduate school in Anthropology, stopped sewing, started chain-stitch embroidering during a post-doctoral fellowship in Australia, kept embroidering after leaving academia until arthritis made it too painful. Now, 30 years later, I am returning to this long-neglected passion for hand-sewing, having forgotten many things. At the same time I am rekindling my embroidering, having largely resolved the pain of arthritis by shifting to a non-inflammatory, plant-based diet.

In so many ways I feel I am starting again at the beginning. I often think – I don’t know how to do this! And then I tell myself, usually saying it out loud – Ok, Laura, so you don’t know how to do it. Do it anyway.

I love to sew. But I don’t want a lot of things. Sewing by machine, then, is too fast for me, my me-made equivalent of fast fashion. If I want to exercise my passion in an on-going manner, I will produce too much, outpacing my need. My production becomes consumption. My making suddenly bleeds into waste and I don’t want to create waste. I don’t want to consume more than I need. I don’t want to participate in fast fashion. I don’t want to make things and then question whether I should have. I don’t want to feel crushed that I have cut into fabric too hastily.

And I find working with a needle and thread to be meditative, contemplative, pleasurable, good for thinking. To me, sewing garments I design for myself, that fit my body and are creative expressions that emerge from my life and reach toward the life I want to have, represents a poetics of intention. It’s slow. And I want it to be slow. I want to sew because I love to sew. I want every stitch to be pleasurable. I want the making to be a slow and emergent joy in the practice that starts with the idea, changes into a new kind of sensuous appreciation at that first wearing of the final garment and is renewed and extended every time I put it on.

So what to make of the fact that, when I was backstitching the gathers of the skirt to join them to the bodice, I felt impatient? I noticed the feeling and, as I mentioned above, thought – now that’s interesting. What is that about? I realized I was valuing different stitches differently . . .

Shared Birth – The Beginning of a Reflection on Mothers and Sisters (and believe it or not . . . knitting)

The approach of my birthday, Mother’s Day and making room for my son to return home from college became an occasion for reflecting on family and creativity.

My twin sister Nora – of Noni Designs – and I were born at the beginning of May in 1967. Our poor mother thought she was having one big boy. Instead she got two tiny girls born six weeks early. We were incubator babies, supposed to be Gemini (the doctor predicted a delivery date of June 12) but instead born Taurus. Did that change everything?

We would have been Daniel if we were a boy and Nora if a girl. So my sister, who was first, is Nora. May name Laura was hastily selected; I am named after my mother’s maternal grandmother.

This is what we looked like when we were born. Nora is on the left (I think). I always look at the lips if I am in doubt.

In later pictures it’s easier to tell us apart.

AGED THREE?

I have no idea who made these matching sets of ponchos and tams. Maybe it was my paternal grandmother, who was an avid knitter in the English style. But they could also have come from one of the aunts on my maternal grandfather’s side, who all knitted continental, having emigrated from Sweden. (UPDATE: Since I wrote the above, my mother has commented that she thinks they were made for us by our Auntie Jo. Jo was fictive kin and an important creative figure in my life, and probably for my sister too. Auntie Jo was the first artist I knew. That is, she did more than knit and sew like the other women in the family. Auntie Jo painted. She made wood carvings. She was in gallery shows. And she made phenomenal pecan pie. She was not a pretty woman. She would tell you this herself. But she was beautiful to me and she had black hair until she died.)

My sister was a cherub. I often appear mischievous. In the picture below, knowing that, you can guess I am on the left. We must have been about 3.

PART OF THE EXTENDED FAMILY

You can pick out my sister easily if you look for the cherub. She is on the right in my uncle Al’s lap (father’s brother). To the left of him is Nancy, his first wife. My mother is to Nancy’s left next to me. And I’m on my father’s lap looking sullen. I like this picture. It was taken in Boston before the family moved to Maryland when we were four.

And here are just the two of us during that same visit:

Me less intense, my sister distracted by one of my parents?

STARTING TO REFLECT

I started looking at these photographs because I had to empty the beautiful creative space I made for myself and about which I wrote some months ago. The reason: Julian is returning home but I’ll tell you that story in a different post. The room was spare but full of treasures and I took my time compiling and moving, looking at each thing, letting the objects evoke past adventures, most of them with Julian. And I found an old book of photos, from which came most of the pictures here. The moment for reflecting on them was perfect because it was only days away from my sister’s and my birthday. So I thought about my sister and our mother. I thought about our father. I thought about my son and what it has been like to be his mother and to mother him differently than I was mothered, to raise him without a father.

And I thought about my first knitting project, which I gave to my father.

Starting over after 25 Years . . .

My first job, at the age of 14, was in a little fabric store called L.T. Henry fabrics, which was owned by a man from New York who sent things down that he couldn’t sell in his main store in the garment district. It was one of those stores that was tidy but packed with things, some of which had been there for a long time because they were so unusual.

I used to wander around the store, when there were no customers, hunting, finding new things, hiding the ones I like behind and under the other bolts. The store had the conventional broadcloths, tweeds, double-knits, seersuckers, light suit wool, tulle, flannel (in the days before fleece), interfacing, bias tape, thread, zippers. But there were also extraordinary silks, brocades, designer fabrics in a little fabric store in a shabby strip mall with a KMart and a People’s Drugstore.

I used published patters at first and then I started cutting my own patterns, winging it really. I habitually skipped the pressing and the interfacing. I always wanted to wear it the next day so I cut corners. But over time I got better and eventually got a job in the costume shop at the Arena Stage repertory theater in Washington DC. There, I learned couture and custom tailoring techniques. I learned to measure the body to make slopers and how to manipulate a sloper to make flat patterns. I got really good. Before I left the theater I made a beautiful custom tailored blue brocade silk jacket. It still fits magnificently. This is not a good picture. I’ll take a better one. It doesn’t convey how beautiful it is. It took a long time – all those tiny, invisible stitches to marry the interfacing to the fabric on the underside of the lapel that I shaped over a ham to create a sensuous rounded fold.

And then I stopped. I went to graduate school. The independent fabric stores had already begun to close by then. I stopped for 25 years except for the odd, exquisite, custom-tailored Halloween costume (remember the beautiful, green, full-length coat in The Little Prince?) for my son when he was a little boy.

A few summers ago I took a class at the Haystack school of craft. It was supposed to be about designing your Uniform. I had long found that idea incredibly appealing and was so excited to go out and buy fabric for the Uniform I imagined – a series of long, fitted jackets and coats in wools and linens in a grey to black palette. Fitted collarless blouses in linen, long skirts, flared pants. The class was a disaster. The instructor led us astray by starting with industry blanks instead of measurements to make our slopers. The blanks, of course, didn’t fit anyone so they needed to be fit and made again. No one had experience fitting so the students waited to be fitted by the instructor, moving the alterations onto paper, cutting muslins again, repeat. The instructor had advised the students to add seam allowance to the pattern, rather than have the edges of the sloper pattern represent the stitching line, as I had learned in the theater (I ignored the instructor and my patterns edges represented the stitching line so I added my seam allowance every time, which was very slow). If a student failed to add seam allowance to her pattern, the muslin wouldn’t fit. Because there was so little seam allowance (students were advised the garment industry standard of 3/8″ rather than the custom tailoring standard of 1″, which allows for alterations on the muslin or the finished garment), the entire muslin would have to be made again after trying to figure out where the muslin had gone wrong.

And the problems go on like that. I had to stop what I was trying to do for three days (the course was only 2 weeks!) to read a book on fitting so I could interpret correctly what the drag lines and drapes in the muslins meant and how to fix them.

Needless to say I never got to fabric. I kept wishing I could remember everything I had known so well 25 years ago when I was at the theater. I was so angry after the course that I didn’t continue to work on any of the projects I had set out for myself.

This week I’m starting again. I’m going to cut two linen skirts, one short in grey, and one long in black. I hope to wear the black one to my 10,000 Small Businesses graduation on August 2. I’m starting with a commercial patterns that I am tweaking. I will keep you posted!

The Secret Menu

I never knew Chinese restaurants have secret menus until a Chinese colleague took me to a restaurant that on the surface looked like all of the others I have ever been to.

This menu of specials was outside of a Chinese restaurant next to the Korean grocery where I do my shopping, as it’s so much cheaper than the conventional grocery stores. The second item – Pork Intestines and Blood in Spicy Sauce – reminded me of two things:

1) A Chinese restaurant a Chinese friend took me to once in Champaign, IL when I was a post-doctoral fellow there. She said it was ‘pretty good.’ We were given the predictable huge menu full of the standard dishes. She handed that menu back and spoke to the waitress in Chinese and we were then brought a single sheet of white paper with about 8 things on it. My friend turned to me and explained that the chef is from Szechuan and this small menu was made up of authentic regional dishes, which were spicy and distinctive. She ordered for us, including several things that she explained were not on the menu but which were specialties of the area. The dishes were brought in courses. I have never had Chinese food like that Chinese food. I had never known there was a *secret* menu. The fact that pork intestine with blood and spicy sauce is on this menu tells me that the secret menu is on display. How exciting!

2) At Balinese ceremonies of a certain size, roasted pig is always on the menu. Every part of the animal is used. Communal meals are made in which a pyramid of rice is place on a square woven bamboo mat that is covered with banana leaves cut to size. This mat is then put down on a wooden, table-like low platform on which a circle of guests sit in same-sex groups (never mixed). Around the rice are arrayed different parts of the pig, including a minimal amount of meat, and vegetables cooked in ways that you rarely see except at ceremonies because they contain ingredients like cubed pig fat mixed with steamed long beans cut in 1 inch segments, shredded fresh coconut, and a paste of turmeric, garlic, shrimp paste, and salt, and minced shallot, and chiffonade kaffir lime leaves. It’s the presence of the pork that makes them rare in other contexts as pig is ceremony food.

After everyone is seated and the food has been placed in the center of the group, one of the women takes her fist and punches a well in the rice. Then a bowl of spicy warm pig blood is poured in the well. Everyone eats together with their hands from this common platter, taking rice and small amounts of meat and vegetables onto the tips of the middle three fingers of the right hand. Once you are ready to put the food in your mouth, you push it off with your thumb while sticking out your tongue just enough to catch the food and at the same time ensure that your mouth and hand do not make contact. Using this technique, there is no ‘double dipping’ even though everyone is using her hand.

It’s the specific technique for eating with your hand that is is key, not just at ceremonies but always. No licking fingers. Food doesn’t go in your palm. It’s a bit tricky at first if you have never done it before (and people will laugh at you for your inept initial attempts) but you get used to it.

This ceremony food always made me mildly sick for a week, gurgling stomach, vague malaise. I finally gave up on it and said I wasn’t allowed to eat pork. Then I was relocated to a pavilion with the priest and other ritual specialists who also are not allowed, for religious reasons of purity, to eat pork. So we ate duck and never from a common bowl. No stomach problems ever again.

Though I appreciate the secret Chinese menu coming out of the closet, I will not be trying the special! Not because I’m not brave enough or find it disgusting. Indeed, I’m confident it’s tasty. But experience has made me wary of this dish.

A Past Life in Bali

We all have our past lives. I used to have a dream – which I haven’t had in a long time – in which I was walking through the rooms of a magnificent house, room after room, each leading to the next. They went on and on. They didn’t repeat. I think about the episodes of my life like this – like a series of rooms. I entered the room. I was in the room for awhile. And then I left the room. My PhD fieldwork in Bali, Indonesia between 1998 and 2000 was one of those rooms.

I left the United States when my son was just one and a half. I had funding from three different academic institutions: Fulbright, Wenner-Gren (specifically for Anthropology), and the Asian Cultural Council. Between the three grants, I had enough money to conduct research in Bali for two years.

My Bali is a difficult place, full of magic, envy, meanness, sickness, inter-village warfare, marriage by rape and abduction, poverty. And it’s also beautiful. It is undeniably a physically beautiful place with exquisite rice terraces, spectacular ceremonies, gorgeous people, astonishing music and dance.

But none of this is the most beautiful part of Bali to me. What is most beautiful is the unseen meanings behind ceremonies, offerings, dance, poetry, stories, music. The ways in which people put into practice and embody a cosmology that articulates a relationship between the universe and the human body – those are the aspects that, to me, are breathtaking.

I studied those things in various ways, through an investigation of dance, in which the dance movements and postures are gendered – male, female, ambiguous. I studied Balinese life crisis rituals: tooth-filing, marriage, mortuary, birthdays for people and temples, and calendrical ceremonies in which the gods are ritually bathed and entertained. I studied Balinese esoteric texts written in Old Javanese, a Sanskrit-based language used for religious and ritual books and incantations during ceremonies.

The works I studied ranged from anatomies, which began with the glance of lovers eyes (wonderful, no?), love magic, meditation maps, ethnobotanical treatises on the characteristics of plants and plant parts, instructions for how to die, and erotic instruction manuals similar to the Kama Sutra. I learned how to cook.

I learned how to dress appropriately, how to move differently, how to bargain in the market, and what not to do. And I lived in a village and learned how to be a person by hanging out with other women, listening to their gossip, watching them work, absorbing their lessons for me.

A big part of learning how to be a person was watching how my neighbors taught my son to be Balinese and how I came to understand their cultural instructions. I will share them with you and if you are a parent, you will find some of it very useful.

Below is a picture of my son when he was 3 and we were on a vacation from Bali to Borobudur in Java. – 1999

What an amazing place it was to raise him for some of those first critical years. It’s true that it takes a village. We were lucky to have one for awhile.

This Course Changed My Life & How I Think About My Business

I want to tell you some news that I am so proud of. I just finished a business course called 10,000 Small Businesses. It’s run by the Goldman Sachs Foundation and has support from Bloomberg Philanthropies.

The curriculum was developed by Babson College which has one of the most respected MBA programs in the country. Warren Buffet is on their Board. In fact, at our graduation on August 2, Warren Buffet will be present, along with: Catherine Pugh, the Mayor of Baltimore: Lloyd Blankfein, the CEO of Goldman-Sachs; Michael Bloomberg; and a representative of the Harvard Business School. Are you getting the message yet? It’s a big deal. And: It’s free!

I found out about it by chance. I am on an email list for Baltimore small manufacturing businesses and get updates about courses and opportunities and this was one of them. I actually didn’t know what it was. I imagined it was a weekend workshop and figured I would just apply, clicked the link, wrote the essays, and then didn’t think much more about it. Little did I know.

You have to make at least $100,000 gross, have 2 employees, and they are especially interested in businesses that are minority and women owned. Getting in is competitive. You write essays, submit your financials, write more essays, have an interview, and then hope.

The course has 9 modules and runs over five months. We didn’t have class every week, but usually had two back-to-back in one week from 8am – 5:30pm. (Breakfast, lunch, and snacks in the afternoon were catered and were healthy and delicious with salads, whole grains, vegetables, several protein options, fruit, and dessert. As you can see from the list, vegetarian options were available at every meal and all of you paleos would have been just fine too.)

We covered money, marketing, personnel, leadership skills, negotiation skills, bankability, funding, operations. And unlike many business courses that focus on developing a business plan, this course focuses on what they call a Growth Plan. You have to develop a new opportunity and come up with a feasible and actionable plan for engaging that new opportunity in order to grow your business.

10,000 Small Businesses emphasizes that if you are doing what you have always done you are shrinking, you are dying, slowly going out of business. All businesses have to keep innovating in order to grow and in order to do that you can’t do it part-way. You have to be all in.

This course talked about the difference between a good idea and a growth plan, research-based decision making versus emotions-based decision making, business decisions based on the financials, not gut feelings.

I didn’t know what inventory turnover rates were. I didn’t know what break-even points were. I didn’t know how to figure out my shop rate. How do you know what is cost of goods sold versus overhead? Now, those of you with business backgrounds may judge me. Please don’t. I ended up doing this business by accident. I never planned to be here.

I have learned on the hoof. I was trained as an anthropologist. I’m a designer. I never had any training in accounting or business and have berated myself over the years for being a bad business woman until I decided I didn’t have to take up brain space daily by castigating myself for not being up to date on the books. I decided I could do better. Now my books are up to date (and they need to be if you are going to apply for 10,000 small businesses because it’s part of the application). Despite winging it, I have been able to make a living and support myself as a single mother with sole responsibility for my son – no child support ever. I have a house. I have a beautiful studio space. I have 2 full-time people in Indonesia who the business supports. I work with many artisans there, Fair Trade, and they rely on the business we do together to support their families. I have a half-time person here in the United States.

I have survived. But survival is always only just enough. And right now it’s not quite enough.

So I have developed my growth plan – which is to create a line of ‘affordable luxury, branded silver jewelry for a broad customer base that extends beyond the niche market of home knitters and needleworkers I currently serve. I have begun to implement it, as you can see from my last blog post, and for the first time I can see past survival. I can imagine JUL as a bigger design company (and they say being able to visualize it is the first step). We did visualization exercises in class it’s so important! And I now have the tools to make that vision a reality. I have to admit I’m scared right now. But I’m also excited and exhilarated. The new design work I’m doing with Agus (in the picture below) is what I really love about what I do. And as we go along in this new direction, I will add more categories of designs – housewares, wearables, and bags again once it’s financially feasible and I have the right infrastructure to make you beautiful bags at an affordable price without losing my shirt.

I am so thrilled to be entering this new phase! And I’m so excited I can share it with you through the new designs we are working on!

Below you can see me with my creative partner in Bali, Indonesia. His name is Agus. I have worked with him for 10 years as my co-designer and collaborator. Since Agus’ father died suddenly of a massive heart attack a year ago, he has been the head of the family, responsible for taking care of everyone and for most of the income that supports the household. His wife assists him with his work on JUL by sharing management of production and overseeing quality control and book keeping.

My First Product . . .

I started my business with just one thing.

Really I started with nothing. Nothing and my collaborator in Bali – Agus – my creative partner now for almost 10 years. Agus was given to me by my friend Wayan. This is how things work in Bali. You get relationships through other relationships. Connections are gifted.

I met Wayan when my son was just starting to walk. Julian must have been just over a year (he started walking at 9 months). Now he’s 20, about to go to college in a month and half (I can hardly absorb that, and I’m not at all a clingy mom – I just thought about how a German friend used to pronounce that word: with the ‘g’ soft like the French for ‘I’ – Je, or as in the word ‘fringy’).

Wayan and I were sitting in a waiting room at the Johns Hopkins tropical medicine clinic or something like that. We were there to get exotic vaccines before going to Bali – cholera, other things, don’t remember. I kept looking at him thinking – he looks Balinese, or maybe from the Philippines. But I thought Bali. And I also thought, how unlikely; probably I’m wrong. This is a picture of Wayan in 2006.

Julian walked to him, put his hands on Wayan’s knees and looked up at him. Wayan was lovely with Julian until Julian did something inappropriate, though I don’t remember what. And Wayan (whose name I didn’t know yet), said “I don’t like that,” and I felt terrible about my boy’s faux pas. Though I shouldn’t have. It’s the job of adults, all adults I believe, to elder children. If we are community, then we all have a responsibility to discipline and praise children when they behave according to conventions of polite behavior, or violate them. But I didn’t have that view yet. I felt like it was my fault that Julian had done something to which Wayan objected. Yet Julian was just a baby. He wasn’t fully a person. He had a long way to go. Wayan was not judging me. He was eldering Julian, Balinese style.

I don’t know how it happened but Wayan and I started talking. I learned he was indeed Balinese. He learned I was going there to do PhD research. We knew someone in common (how likely is that?!). We exchanged contact details. Wayan turned out to be a dancer. I was going to study gender and dance. And that’s how it started. I won’t tell you all of the story now. You must be patient. It will unfold. It’s a good story. It crosses centuries. It takes awhile to tell.

For now I will offer the abbreviated version. Wayan and I became friends in Bali. We both returned to the States. We continued our friendship. Then we both returned to Bali . . . So when I was in Bali once years after that, still in academia doing research on marriage by capture, which I will tell you about a bit later, my sister, Noni, asked me if I could find someone who could make some hardware for bags. Everything she had found available in the US was boring she said. Couldn’t I help her get something more unique, something better, to go along with the knitted/felted bag patterns she had begun doing? I said of course.

So I asked Wayan if he knew anyone. And he did. He brought me Agus. Agus had long dreadlocks then. I don’t know whether they were really his hair nor not. But it was the affectation of an artistic person to have unusual features like that – dyed hair, dreadlocks, gauged ears (even though traditionally, that was a Balinese thing for both men and women and old men and women always had huge ear-holes). Agus was quiet. Wayan did all the talking.

Agus and my son Julian in 2011. I met Agus in 2006 but I can’t seem to find any photographs of him at all from that time.

Wayan and I always speak in English. He is the only Balinese person I speak to in English. When he speaks in English, he understands me. He has absorbed alot of American-ness, so he is flexible and open, values so many things about the way we do things differently, as long as he is speaking in English. When he speaks in Indonesian, he is not as tolerant of my American idiosyncracies. And in Balinese, even less.

So when I met Agus, Wayan posed as a translator I didn’t need, mediating my interaction, as if Agus and I couldn’t make contact without him. And maybe we couldn’t initially, though not because there was a language barrier. There was none. The barrier was we didn’t have a relationship. We had no shared history. We had no social context that made working together make sense. That had to be built. And it was slow.

Indo July 2011 070 — Agus and my son Julian in 2011. I met Agus in 2006 but I can’t seem to find any photographs of him at all from that time.

In Bali, when someone employs another person, the employer is the tree. The employee is the fruit – anak buah, or fruit person/child. This is, as you might guess, an hierarchical relationship. The tree determines what happens. The tree makes all of the decisions. The anak buah is the follower. The anak buah does as s(he) is told. No decisions come from the anak buah.

But this model of the tree and the fruit did not work for me. I needed someone who could make decisions in my stead, act as an agent, be my collaborator, my fellow ‘tree,’ not my fruit.

Agus would tell me – I’m embarrassed to go pick up our castings because we haven’t paid the workshop. I would ask – why haven’t you paid them? He would say that I hadn’t told him to pay them. I would protest that I hadn’t even known they needed to be paid. I instructed that if someone needed to be paid in order for us to complete the products our customers wanted, then he was authorized to make decisions about who should be paid and how much. All he had to do was let me know.

It took a long time to get to the point where he felt comfortable making executive decisions; I needed to be able to rely on him completely while I was here in the US and he was there in Indonesia.

At the beginning, he was someone I didn’t know. But he knew how to design jewelry. And through Wayan, however unnecessary his translation/mediation was at the time, we negotiated that Agus would do some designs for me.

Agus came back with a lot. This is the one I used. This is the first design.

The first ones were all handmade. They were sterling silver.

They took too long to produce and were too expensive.

This is how JUL started: