handmade clothing – Adventures in Design

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.

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 . . .