When I look at this, it sort of scares me a touch. Just a touch. There’s a memory of the arms – flesh and blood ones – inside them, and there goes a shiver down my spine. But it’s all fine, really. There’s nothing sinister going on, and no horrible subtext lurking at all. What I was doing with my Labour Day holiday was all perfectly innocent. Nobody’s arms – not mine or anyone else’s – were or will be hurt! (I’m rather pleased with the title of the post, I have to say.)
What was I doing?
Well, as you learned from an earlier post, the new academic year started last week, and so I was (a week late) doing “Back to School” stuff. And I was doing it the way it was done when I was a child. At the end of Summers in my childhood, my mum (later joined by my sister) would be sewing clothes. School uniforms, to be precise. We could not afford to go out and buy such things, and it was much cheaper to make clothes, and besides, making clothes and knowing how what you are wearing was put together is a wonderful piece of knowledge to have. I got into making clothing when I was very young. It started with me watching what was going on and getting interested in the assembling of completed three dimensional clothes from lots of flat (two-dimensional) pieces of cloth stitched together in interesting ways. I liked the skill that some people (my mum and sister for example) had of looking at en existing piece of clothing and beginning to imagine what the flat pieces are that you’d need (the “pattern”) to assemble a version of your own. (I did not think of these processes, as far as I’m aware, in the terms I’m describing it to you now, but I remember being interested in those and other elements of the process.) I got hand-on experience by helping out from time to time, over the years, and sometimes, pitched in since I was good at helping my mum to occasionally interpret instructions for the pattern of a new garment.
My first major project of my own came about because there was a particular jacket that I liked that was old, and/or did not fit well any more, and so I designed a new one that had elements of the old one, but then had all these extra features that I put in specifically for myself. You could never buy that off the shelf. It was the only one in the world, and that was a neat thing. The best thing I ever made, I think just before going off to university at 18, was this ankle length tailored coat that I still have and (sometimes) use. It had all the hidden pockets in the lining where I wanted them, and was a (somewhat extreme, I’ll admit) length that I could not find (affordably) in any store. Looked great with a black pork-pie hat, incidentally.
And so it is that once again I report to you on some thing I was doing that can be interpreted as me regressing to my formative years! I was sewing on Monday. I love doing things like that, as you know. Furthermore, I hate waste and this consumerist society we live in and tend to do my part to resist. I see no reason to throw things away and get new ones just for the sake of it if there is some reasonable way of making adjustments or repairs. (That reminds me – I’ve a big report on some computer matters from earlier in the Summer to write and post at some point.)
There were two main issues to hand. The first is that I’ve been meaning to obtain more short-sleeved shirts for the Summer time. Not t-shirts, but proper loose short-sleeved shirts I can wear on campus, not tucked in (it’s hot, and the improved airflow works wonders), while not looking like I’ve arrived to meetings or classes dressed for the beach, or a hike. The obvious plan would be to go out and buy some, but then why do that when I can make modifications to various existing long-sleeved shirts that have lost some of their lustre in the mode they were originally intended for?
The second issue is that I’ve a few torn seams here and there on various items, and more pressingly, due to cycling to work and so forth, several pairs of pants rather thinly worn in the, er, nether-regions, so to speak. Rather than throw them all away and buy new ones, why not repair them?
This also saves me the tedium of having to go clothes shopping too – I can go shopping for a sewing machine instead! So that’s what I did last week, and of course I had to get a Singer sewing machine in honour of the lovely old Singers of my childhood. It’s a fairly simple electro-mechanical one with the standard stitches – I did not want a fancy electronic one that can write your name and so forth. It was great to see that the basic (and marvellous!) mechanism that makes the stitches in the cloth is pretty much the same as it was in my childhood all those years ago. I remember being fascinated by it, figuring out how it worked, and how all the various parts worked together to give stitches of the right length and tension and so forth, and hence being on hand to make repairs for my mum and sister when things went wrong. (Indeed, it was that way with most things when I was young, and even now: – “How does it work?” “Why does it work?” I suppose I now do these same things for a living, and also teach others how to ask and answer those questions too. This is nice.)
So Monday, Labour Day, saw me mostly cropping, shearing, pinning, measuring, unpinning, remeasuring, fastening, stitching, and more. It’s actually really fun making short-sleeves shirts from long-sleeved ones, finishing them by hemming the sleeves and removing the shirt-tails and hemming those too so that I can use them as semi-respectable “work shirts” as well as casual shirts.
I had a lot of fun, and three new short-sleeved shirts to show for my efforts.
-cvj
Hey…really enjoyed to know about your own experiences….
and yes Amara’s quotes should be the title instead, “Bring me their arms “
On thing about starting over electrically in a country running on a different power system than what I had been using for the last ten years, was the nice discovery that I had still one large appliance from my previous North American continent life that now worked without a power converter: my quasi-antique Jaguar sewing machine. I love this gadget: it’s simple, robust, and keeps on working. Thanks for the reminder that I have more useful tools in my home than I thought. 🙂
About your title…. it triggered in my mind a somewhat macrabre story. Some years ago I read a snippet in a book describing the Etruscan culture, which had me wondering if the rich play-on-words in the story was tongue-in-cheek or true. It begs the question of word translation and meaning across cultures, in any case. The vignette story goes like this:
The Romans (and others) valued the exceptionally fine Etruscans military gear, which sometimes included a gorgeous filigree technique on bracelets, rings, armbands. Usually at the end of a battle, the Etruscans were stripped of their bronze breastplates, shields, shin guards, helmets, weapons, and chariots, and gold armbands (from which hung one or more small orbs of solid gold) and gold rings.
A Roman victory over Etruscans was often followed by a command:
“Bring me their arms!”
after which the commanding general received carts filled with gold-laden arms and hands … (1)
(1) Holder, Philancy, Etruscans: A Beginning, Cortona: HP Publishing, 2002, pgs 105, 118, who references Bonfante, Larissa, ed. Etruscan Life and Afterlife. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1986, pg. 249, who further quotes Livy I. You can see many of these gold filigree and bronze military pieces in the Villa Giulia National Etruscan Museum in Rome.
For maybe thirty years, now, I’ve had a nice old reconditioned treadle machine. I’ve never done anything as skilled as making a shirt from a bolt, but I do turn collars and sew up basic things for around the house, like shower curtains (the idea of a plastic one gives me the shivers).
Jude… The idea is to show that you doubt their prowess. They will be unable to resist proving it to you, if you express this doubt in the right way.
Carol&Co… Enjoy!
-cvj
My project this weekend? Digging out my old Singer and dusting it off and mending the stuff sitting in a pile for a number of years, ashamed to say. I have not picked up a needle since 1995 and it is now well overdue. Thanks for the timely reminder!! And again shame on me for ditching such a wonderful soothing pastime. Perhaps this cat – Matrix – will enjoy picking the pins out of the pin cushion!!
Ah, but Clifford, all four of them are carpenters (though three of them teach science and math) so they already *know* they can hang the door.
Good idea. I also have a surplus of long-sleeved shirts and a deficit of short-sleeved shirts. (It’s very hard to find womens’ short-sleeved collared shirts in stores, anyway.)
Then again, maybe I should start wearing suits so that I am not asked if I am a student every 30 minutes.
Funny, I don’t remember being asked if I was a student so often when I WAS a student.
The trick there is maybe to say something to imply that you doubt that they can really hang the door. Then they will want to prove it to you. Job done.
-cvj
My brother with the genius-level IQ was the same way–he had to know how everything worked, so he was mostly interested in sewing from that perspective. As an adult, he talked my mother into purchasing an electronic knitting machine because he was fascinated with how it worked–an $1800 expense to satisfy curiosity, as it turned out, although I still wear a grotesquely-colored yet somehow-lovely orange knit cap they made. He and Bill Gates built computers from the same kit back in 1979 or so; my brother separated the printed circuit boards with ballpoint pen casings. I, on the other hand, can’t do anything practical–all just mind stuff, like finding information, which is why I was vastly disappointed today when the fourth teacher at my school turned me down when I asked for help replacing my 53-year-old back door. He said exactly what the other three said, “Doors are easy to hang.”
Cute title indeed. 🙂
Never got into clothes sewing much just because when I was little I couldn’t get my stitching well enough for my satisfaction, but in recent years I’ve gotten into embroidery in a big way. Long story short, my canvas school satchel is probably the only one with physics equations (gravity equation with a planetary system, Maxwell’s equations by the sun, Friedman’s equation with a hot air balloon…). Work in progress; I’m trying to think up a good stitchable picture for the Schrodinger equation next… perhaps a kitty…