Pitfalls of Vintage Clothing

I love vintage clothing. I love the evolution of style over time. I love contemplating how old an article of clothing is based on color and fabric. I love the workmanship. I never wear vintage clothing.

One reason I never wear vintage clothing is my height. I'm nearly six feet tall and that's gigantic for the Edwardian/art deco styles that really attract my attention. This lovely gown is from 1908.

From the measurements given, I'd estimate it to be about a size 0 or 2. At 53 inches in length from shoulder to floor, it's going to be slightly below knee length on me. If I could get it buttoned.

Another reason I never wear vintage clothing, as much as I love it, is that "vintage clothing" now includes items of clothing that I have worn back in the day. It's one thing to wear something from the early half of the 20th century, IE, before I was born, but it's another thing to wear something that I remember from high school.

Here's a pattern from the early 1960's. Not only did I sew this, but I wore it. A lot.

Don't you love the way the skirt is split to reveal the shorts underneath in the view on the left? I fought long and hard with my mother to let me hem it up shorter than the pattern shows. Should I mention that I used fabric in a navy blue print with large, dinner plate size daisies for the skirt and top? Groovy! Let's not even discuss a Carnaby Street style dress I made and wore extensively in high school that would make vintage clothing collectors drool if it still existed. (it may still exist, somewhere. I hope I never find it.) It was a cool burnt orange and orange checked plaid with white collar and cuffs, set off by a kelly green man's style tie. Yeah, baby!

Have you ever seen a picture of someone like Vera Wang with one of her over-the-top creations?

Lovely, lovely gown. I wish I could have found a large picture so you could really appreciate it. But check out Vera. She's got a black, ready-for-action outfit on, minimal makeup, and a low maintenance hair do. Vera Wang can create her ultimate fantasy gown, but when it comes down to day to day life, she's going for comfort and convenience. Sort of like my admiration of vintage clothing.

October's Bright Blue Weather

Mrs. Bosely, my fourth grade teacher, was a big fan of choral reading. Choral reading, if you've never heard of it, is also known as "voice choir", where group members recite a poem, sometimes in unison, with movements and voice changes for effect. It was popular in the late 19th century as the entertainment of church and school functions. While it was the middle of the 20th century, large sections of western Pennsylvania had not yet been informed of that, so Mrs. Bosely continued to edify our young minds in this classic tradition. After learning a new poem, our grade would go around to the other classes in the school to perform it for them.

Our most popular piece was a poem from 1893 by Helen Hunt Jackson titled "October's Bright Blue Weather" Even if it is obviously a 19th century piece, it still is a good poem.

O SUNS and skies and clouds of June,
And flowers of June together,
Ye cannot rival for one hour
October's bright blue weather;

When loud the bumble-bee makes haste,
Belated, thriftless vagrant,
And Golden-Rod is dying fast,
And lanes with grapes are fragrant;

When Gentians roll their fringes tight
To save them for the morning,
And chestnuts fall from satin burrs
Without a sound of warning;

When on the ground red apples lie
In piles like jewels shining,
And redder still on old stone walls
Are leaves of woodbine twining;

When all the lovely wayside things
Their white-winged seeds are sowing,
And in the fields, still green and fair,
Late aftermaths are growing;

When springs run low, and on the brooks,
In idle golden freighting,
Bright leaves sink noiseless in the hush
Of woods, for winter waiting;

When comrades seek sweet country haunts,
By twos and twos together,
And count like misers, hour by hour,
October's bright blue weather.

O suns and skies and flowers of June,
Count all your boasts together,
Love loveth best of all the year
October's bright blue weather.

See? It is good, although I wonder how many fourth graders would recognize a gentian with the fringes rolled tight or a chestnut's satin burr now.

Still, just say "October's bright blue weather" and everyone will know what you are talking about: crisp, clear, sunny days and cool nights. Sweater weather. Dash and I were out at the studio house last week, wandering around the back yard, enjoying October's bright blue weather. I should have been quilting that quilt that's been under the machine for a few months now or waxing that piece of fabric I've been working on for two years now. I could have been cleaning the studio, which needs it badly, or cleaning my house, which needs it worse. I might have been typing monthly reports, working for world peace, or helping the homeless. But I wasn't. I was making a small dachshund very happy and enjoying myself in the process. Love loveth best of all, October's bright blue weather.

Things You Do While You Are Waiting For Bones To Mend

Toward the end of August, I broke my left knee cap while walking down the street, in broad daylight, stone cold sober, in flat shoes. You can bet I won't be pulling a stunt like THAT again.

I didn't do much for the first week or so except nap and contemplate this fresh evidence of my own mortality. When I did come back to life, internet browsing was the easiest thing to do.

This is the first thing that attracted my Vicodan-laced attention. I love antique copperplate toile fabric and have a modest collection of pieces that I've gathered here and there. My dream car has always been one that runs and is paid for, but I believe this Porsche was made just for me.


By the way, my birthday is coming up soon.

The next thing I did was catch up on the few blogs I follow. My favorite is my friend Stan's blog, These Things Too. There's probably a way to make that a hyperlink, but I don't know what it is, so go to the right hand side of the page and click on it there. Stan is funny and literate and his blog has great pictures now of inlaid guitars. I also enjoy Cheryl's Garden for the really nice botanical pictures. I've been in Cheryl's garden and have watched it take shape over my visits.

Chez Pez is one I found randomly clicking on Stan's blog. Apparently the author is currently enjoying the Austin music festival and I am permanently jealous that she saw Alejandro Escovedo.

For the textile tie-in, Dress-A-Day is a new one I found. Lots of lovely links to vintage clothing and, best of all, vintage dress patterns. The author is an avid dress wearer and posts pictures of some really interesting dresses. I fully support the idea of dress wearing and I think I own a dress or two, but never found them to be very practical in my day to day life. If it's knee length dress, I'm always yanking it down. If it's mid-calf or longer, all that fabric flapping around my legs annoys me. But go have a look, vintage stuff is lovely.

Real vintage clothing fun can be had at http://www.antiquedress.com (C'mon, I don't know how to make a hyperlink. I'm into textiles, not computers. Copy and paste.) I go there to admire the 1920's gowns. Look! This one is for me!

It would look great with this:


For those of you confused by these pictures and the above comments on dress wearing, please reference the earlier post about my obsession with high end art deco jewelry and remember my birthday is coming up.

Another fun site is the International Sewing Machine Collector's Society. Copy and paste this link: http://www.ismacs.net/home.html Go to the machine gallery. Here's a picture of the most expensive toy sewing machine ever auctioned.

Cute, eh? There were only four ever made, intended to be the ultimate toy for the rich child of 1892. It was sold at a London auction in 1995 for 8,000 pounds. If you like sewing machines, or even just machines, go there to look around. Sewing machines did not always have the familiar shape they have now.

Please do not feel you must break body parts to enjoy these sites!

Girls Just Want to Have Fun

I’ve been sidelined with my left leg trapped in an appropriately named “immobilizer” for about a month now, but recently got out of the house to make it down to the Society for Contemporary Crafts in the Strip District of Pittsburgh. If you’ve never been there, go. I wandered in there while shopping in the Strip District with my friend Steve and was impressed with the gallery space, the display, and the way the usual gift shop presents as an extension of the gallery space. While I was there, I grabbed a few colorful pamphlets. One of them turned out to be a schedule of classes held at the SCC. Consulting with Gladys, we signed ourselves up for a Precious Metal Clay class.

Gladys and I have been sewing, unsewing, decorating, and torturing textiles in a number of ways for decades. Every once in awhile, textiles just aren’t enough. Our last out-of-the-box creative adventure involved the new house Gladys and her husband are building. The basement has a poured concrete floor that looked just like a blank canvas. Gladys wanted it decorated and to cut to the chase, she decided to stain the concrete.

Staining concrete involves respirators, incredibly strong and toxic acid, eye goggles, and just enough protective clothing to keep it this side of a haz-mat suit. It was a blast. We cleared the area of innocent bystanders and sprayed the acid. The floor looks great. However, three years have gone by since we did that.

Precious Metal Clay is powdered silver (in this case. There’s also bronze and gold.) in a cellulose binder. You form the clay much like you would any clay and the cellulose binder burns off, leaving you with pure silver. What attracted us was the statement that “pieces can be fired in a kiln or with a torch.” Torch. That’s the key word. The lure of open flame was irresistible.

I took my camera, but I got caught up in the process and forgot to document the fun. Precious Metal Clay is sensitive stuff. It dries out quickly, unless you want it to, and picks up every little mark. Torching it with butane turned out to be tricky since the clay curled unevenly under the flame. We put our pieces in the kiln and were satisfied with the fact that temperatures in excess of 1600 degrees Fahrenheit were involved.

I am pleased to say that my first piece, embossed with leaves from the plant in my dining room window, was of sound construction. Had I known I would decide to cut out around the leaves, I would have done the background differently, but all in all, it’s a decent first attempt.

Acid, open flame………..what’s next?

Ze name ees Reush....Reush d'Fleur

I have a secret obsession with high-end art deco jewelry. If you are thinking about surprising me with a drop-to-the-knees-gasping-for-air present (and have a spare $50,000 or so), there’s a suggestion. Something about the lines, the angularities in the designs, just does it for me. Frost it with some European cut diamonds set in platinum…how could you go wrong? It’s a secret obsession because in no way do I lead a high-end art deco kind of life. My job necessitates a lot of time bending, stooping, crouching, and sitting on the floor. My home is decorated with thought to good reading light and minimal dusting. Being a shy person, my social life consists of hanging out with friends, family, and my fellow textile junkies. Still, an obsession will find a way to be satisfied.

My mother’s side of the family were multi-generational pack rats. When my father moved into his little house, my siblings and I divided up boxes and boxes of stuff, including our grandmother’s rhinestone jewelry from the 1930’s and our mother’s lead crystal jewelry from the early 60’s. My sisters, lovely women with strange obsessions and vague longings of their own, took one look at the sparkly stuff and gave it all to me.

Around the holidays, I do find places to wear some of it, especially the big paisley shaped pin. I adore the earrings, but after about 15 minutes of clip earrings, my earlobes start to throb. You’d be amazed how much of the blood that circulates through your body goes through your earlobes. There is also a triple strand lead crystal necklace that I gave to my niece in Chicago. She wore it splendidly when she graduated with her master’s degree. But mostly the sparkly stuff sits in the original boxes, waiting for the right person, the right time, the right place.

A quick jump here……..every winter the quilt guild I belong to organizes a retreat around a theme. The committee decided last winter that the retreat would be organized around a mystery dinner theme and each retreat attendee would be assigned a character to play. We were given a name, a brief outline of the character, instructions to flesh this character out any way we liked and……to the ultimate horror of this shy person………we were to stay in character all weekend.

Yeah. No secret aspirations for a stage career here, let me tell you. My only theatrical appearance was as a cherry tree in the fourth grade George Washington’s birthday play. The whole idea sounded like a weekend of dental surgery.

A month or so before the retreat, I was assigned the character of Reush d’Fleur with some information on my quilting abilities. I figured she was French and I could get away with wearing a black turtleneck and a beret, do my usual wallflower imitation, and helpfully fade into the background while the more flamboyant members of the guild ran with the idea. Packing for the retreat, I went into my closet (otherwise known as the Home for Wayward Textiles) and Reush d’Fleur emerged.

Reush was a member of an obscure branch of fading European aristocracy. Part French, part Bulgarian, (I pre-faire to zink of myself as con-tin-ental,dahling.),swathed in vintage satin and chiffon, sporting a mink stole, and draped with the sparkly stuff, Reush was everything I am not. Graciously haughty, Reush spent the weekend being politely amazed that she was expected to carry her own luggage (Zaire ees no port-aire? So theese es like ze camping I have heard you speak of?) and wondering about the cafeteria line for meals. (Ees theese pree-son? Must I bang my leetle cup on ze tray for more coffee?) The rhinestones loved it. They’d been waiting over 50 years to play this part.

The sparkly stuff took over. I was channeling high-end art deco. It was no problem to stay in character, complete with cheesy accent. Reush airily related stories of her life and family (For centuries, ze name d’Fleur was associated weeth graite wealth and powaire……) while my fellow guild members stared with what was probably a mix of fascination and horror. As we got ready for Saturday night dinner, I begged Gladys to stop me. The rhinestones would have none of it.

After the retreat, the rhinestones were put back in the original boxes and I thought Reush would fade into the corners of the Home for Wayward Textiles. Still, the rhinestones will find a way to be satisfied.

I have a secret obsession with high-end art deco jewelry………………………….

Process and Product

“It’s like having a little tape recorder in your head that is playing at an incredibly high speed at an incredibly low volume. A little voice telling you about all the things you’ve seen and considered…..and you just want to get them out of your head.”

Peter Plagens, describing the process of painting

“Creativity is doing, pushing, experimenting, trying. Only by working his chosen media did he find their limits; only by trying to express his vision – however trivial, simple, or extraordinary – did he see it.”

Robert Taibbi Creativity: Working the Medium

Ted maintains my website for me. Well, he’d maintain it if I’d give him stuff to put on it. Every so often he gently reminds me that “it’s been awhile since there’s been something new”. With the last gentle reminder, I promised myself I would get out to the studio and get something finished. Progress is slowly being made……. as in slooowly the ice age receded.

I admire my friend Gladys’ way of working. We share studio space and have taken workshops together. She’s amazing. A flurry of intense activity and, next thing you know, there’s a fabulous piece of art. When I read Peter Plagens’ description of the process of painting, I thought of her right away.

Then, on the other hand, there’s me. My portion of the studio should carry the disclaimer that anything that vaguely resembles art is purely coincidental. I’m in love with the process and there is where the problem lies. This piece of fabric was shown at the art cloth show at the Quilt Surface Design Symposium a few years ago. I spent a few months and a few yards getting the nice purple-raspberry color I was picturing in my head. The black lines took about 20-plus hours, spread over two evenings after work, and were made by filling a little squeeze bottle with thickened black dye concentrate and drawing on the fabric. In a moment of experimentation several months later, it went into a blue dye bath. Then a yellow dye bath. It was sold at the art cloth show and my fellow textile lovers were horrified. How could I spend so much time on something and then let it go? Easy. The picture in my head was out in the three dimensional world now, so the yardage didn’t interest me anymore. The real pay off was discovering how to make a nice bronze-y color by layering lemon yellow over the purple.

The other problem with loving the process is the level of detail that can be included in the expressing the vision. This piece of fabric has been in the works for almost two years. I was driving down a highway in the fall of 2006 and missed a turn while admiring the way the sun shown through the fall leaves. Dash and I took some hikes in the woods, looking for leaves in “good” shapes. I photocopied the leaves and then made plastic stencils. With an archival textile marker, I spent many happy hours putting the leaf pattern on the fabric. I’m in the process of waxing the empty spaces between the leaves and will then wax the black lines where the leaves overlap. Then the plan is to mix up lots of autumn leaf colors and drop them into the leaf shapes. Is there an easier way to get the effect of sun shining through fall leaves? Probably, but it might not be as much fun.

A mask tells us more than a face

I was at the beach with Ted and Deidre when I stumbled across Oscar Wilde and his quote about masks. It rode around in my back pocket for a few months until an art quilt group I was participating in came up with a challenge to create a small wall hanging in the design style of the artist's choice. Oscar and his mask merged with a high Victorian edition of the King Arthur legends I was reading at the time. The mask and the beaded eyelashes got a nice reception from my fellow quilters. I was done with the mask, but masks were not done with me.

The next mask took me by surprise. Of all the things I have done, this one is my favorite. It was the first time I knew, deep down in my bones, that I had managed to get what I was seeing and feeling out into the three dimensional world. I sent it to a well-known art quilt magazine in response to a call for portraits in fiber. It came back to me with a nice letter saying that, as interesting as this piece is, they preferred uplifting and inspiring fiber art. They put it on their website anyway with the other submissions and it really stuck out in the sea of pastel floral portraits.

Oscar Wilde also said that if you gave a man a mask, he would tell the truth. I like hearing the responses this mask gets. Some people recoil. Some people get excited. Everyone has an immediate, intense reaction and they start talking, telling me the silent thoughts and feelings the mask allows them to say out loud. When the rush of words is over, someone will occasionally ask me why I made it. If I could answer that question, I wouldn't have had to make the mask.

Sunday, July 13, 2008

My friend Stan over at These Things Too has suggested more than once that I start a blog. Normally, I ignore Stan’s suggestions since they tend to include the likelihood…… no, the certainty of jail time for me. His explanation for this is that he would do poorly in jail whereas I would somehow fare better. I don’t see how a blog detailing my textile obsessions could land me in the slammer, but if it does, Stan has promised to bring me cigarettes to trade for stuff.

For someone who wouldn’t do well in jail, he sure seems to know a lot about it.

Textile Memories – The Apron

It will be no surprise to anyone in the family that my earliest and fondest memories involve textiles. Whether it was the times, the family, natural inclinations, or a combination of all three, textiles dominated the landscape of my childhood.

The rag box, the linen closet, and the ironing basket all have their stories, but my favorite textile memory is my apron. It was 1957. Rosie the Riveter and her jumpsuit had been banished in favor of June Cleaver vacuuming in her pumps and pearls. Every woman wore an apron over her housedress, and it was possibly the most useful garment ever made. Constructed of fabric leftover from a variety of sources with a pocket trimmed with rickrack, aprons were used not only to protect the housedress from housekeeping splatters, but to dry hands, wipe children and, if you held the bottom two corners up, serve as a basket. I was 5 years old and like most 5 year old girls, I wanted to be like Mom.

My apron was under the Christmas tree. It was yellow cotton and had a pocket trimmed with orange rickrack. Along the bottom hem were little pockets where a set of 48 crayons had been inserted. I liked the crayons. I loved the apron. Santa had ostensibly brought it for me along with a Dale Evans cowgirl outfit, but I knew Grandma had made the apron. Mom tied it around my waist and I was on my way to adulthood. The apron became part of my everyday attire, usually tied over the Dale Evans cowgirl skirt. After washing my doll clothes in the old starch basin, I hung them out to dry, pinning them on my little clothesline with clothespins that I had clipped along the hem of my apron. I had a real handkerchief that I kept in the pocket of the apron that I used to wipe my brother Tim’s nose. Tomatoes from the garden and toys from the sandbox were brought into the house using the apron as a basket. In an otherwise well-photographed childhood, I’ve only found one picture of me wearing the apron. It was Christmas and I’m sitting on the floor, hair in pigtails, wearing the apron over a red plaid jumper. Tim, 3 years old, is in front of the Christmas tree. I have a watchful eye on him in case he might need dried or wiped.

As much as I loved the apron, I grew, and the apron became too small. It made its way into the dress up box, which too has its own story. It lived in the dress up box for years and I would see it from time to time. Eventually, I lost interest in the dress up box and I don’t know what happened to the apron.

This last paragraph was going to be a nostalgic, misty-eyed lament to the demise of the apron. As I type, I am wearing jeans and a t-shirt. Over my jeans and t-shirt I am wearing an old oversized denim shirt. All my adult life I have worn a similar shirt around the house. It has a pocket and protects me from housekeeping splatters. My shirt has dried hands, wiped children, and if I hold up the shirt tails, can serve as a basket. Maybe I’ll sew a little rickrack on it.