I had a reasonably ordinary weekend last weekend. Now it is Friday and almost the next weekend I can't remember all of the terrible so it can't have been all that bad but I do remember quite badly rotary cutting my finger and nail and needing to go to the doctor and that did put a slow down on lots if the quilt blocking I had planned to do.
Instead Nik and I went to Carlton to do a few things we had been meaning to go for a while and had a little walk around and an early but delicious dinner. On the walk I happened to pop into Readings bookshop - all the stores in this small (and I think only Melbourne based chain) are great but I have found the one in Carlton to have a particularly good sewing and craft section. And what do you think I saw, and a week before the publish date but Sarah Fielke's new book - Quilting: From little things! You know Sarah, she writes for Sewn and was one of the two co-authors Material Obsession: Modern Quilts with Traditional Roots
and Material Obsession Two.
So, what do I like about this book? I love the way it is set out with the book working through different techniques with each being demonstrated by two quilts, a doll quilt and then a larger bed sized one. And, like all Sarah's books, they include some challenging and more time consuming quilts. There is a place for beginner and quick quilt books but I really enjoy some with more difficult quilts as well as they are so rare.
I really love this quilt and it is going on the list. I think it also shows really well one of the things I especially appreciate about both Material Obsessions books and this new on and is the focus on the whole quilt and not just the piecing. It is easy to finish a pattern by saying 'quilt and bind as desired' but I find the liberal use of hand quilting and the notes at the end of each pattern on how and why quilting methods and designs were chosen elevates what could just end up being a quilt top to an actual quilt.
And I think this quilt has to win the title for the best quilt name EVER and one of the nicest stories behind it.
And one more thins I really love is this picture. Sarah is a wonderfully talented quilt maker and her designs and quilts inspire so many people but I love this picture as a demonstration of how nothing is absolutely perfect all of the time. See the seam allowance folded over in the middle?
As I understand it this book is only available in Australia at the moment (and possibly the UK?) with this availability getting wider by the day. Should you not be in those areas and can't wait for it to come to a store near you I think Sarah has some for sale on her blog and Readings has it here ships worldwide.
I am a real sucker for judging a book by it’s cover (title too for that matter). On my ‘getting to know my local’ tour of Melbourne I picked up another book, my bibliophile persona showing through again. Sew Retro 
, by Judi Ketteler, from Dymocks in Elsternwick {I can’t believe how easily I got a park, when I went there and almost everywhere come to think of it, the difficulty parking is one thing I will not miss from Sydney} is a cross between project book and history of home sewing. I got it because I liked the cover and the pictures.
But, as with Weekend Sewing
, I grew to like it for completely different reasons, but I still like the cover, and the pictures.
As is probably clear, and as I said explicitly in an earlier post, I like to sew. I really like to sew for others. The satisfaction and joy I get from sewing is only multiplied by knowing I am creating for someone else to enjoy, picturing the thing I am making being used, and in the actual giving. In this enjoyment of sewing and craft in general, among my group of friends I stand alone.
As I said Sew Retro is a history of home sewing, and a well written one at that. Moving from era to era, starting at about the time domestic sewing machines were invented, Judi examines the prevalence of home sewing, purpose the sewing served and the materials these, usually women, had to work with.
These women, most often described as mothers, wives or teen girls (as opposed to career women as I am) had access to more and more equipment as time progressed and the market provided and sold more tools. Without giving away the ending, and generally speaking each of the era’s was concluded to be one in which sewing was a household task (that may have been enjoyable but needed to be completed, enjoyed or not) or one in which the task was completed for enjoyment alone.
In reading through this book, interspersed with projects inspired by the era, I could not help but reflect in the experiences of women in my family, and my own. My paternal grandmother had six children, many more than average and sewed and knitted for necessity, only heightened by the fact she was raising children on a farm and did not have ready access to the shops in town. Now she doesn’t sew, but knits a little and weaves tapestries and fabric on a loom in her home all for enjoyment. My maternal grandmother, mother to two daughters, seems never to have owned a sewing machine, and now does needlework and knits but does not sew. My mother made all our clothes when we were young , both for enjoyment and need, though I don’t know how she learnt. Now she knits and sews for us for enjoyment, and to show us she cares. I do it because I like it, having being taught by my mother when I was very young. Obviously the family experience I am able to reflect on only covers the last 2-3 eras in the book, the current explosion of an online community and the trend towards young sewers being popularised is only touched on.
I’m not a wife, at least not one with an actual marriage certificate or a stay-at-home homemaker variety, may never be a mother and have not been a teenager for just over a decade. I’m not retro, not in the way the category is described in this book. Yet, despite enjoying a very different pastime to that of my real-life friends and fitting a very different demographic from the mummy bloggers that seem to dominate the authorship of the blogs a read, I don’t think I’m strange.
I am just me and among other things in my life, I like to sew and craft.
When I started becoming involved in the online community almost a year ago I created HandmadeRetro. At the time I wanted to convey the idea that I made things at home, as once-off, because I like them or I am making them for someone or to fulfill a need. In a nutshell, things that are useful, but also aesthetically pleasing. The Handmade part of HandmadeRetro. The Retro was an attempt to convey the idea that I felt a little retro, engaging in crafts that seemed, in my social sphere at least, a product of a bygone era as well as something that was a feature of my own personal history but was making a comeback.
Now? I remember that I know everything old is new again, all the time. That things change but stay remarkably the same. That people have always sewed, and crafted but I understand more that fashion trends have never missed this, with must have equipment, more materials and changing fabric trends. I wonder if in ten or twenty years women will again be sewing for need, rather than recreation.
So I enjoyed Sew Retro as something that offered a me something to think about, as a history of an activity that, by the nature of it, is just an everyday thing. And because of the cover and the pictures.
Now, I think it is time I went back to work or unpacked some boxes and stopped gazing at my navel.
The past week or so have seen me in Melbourne with not as much to do as I thought I would have on my plate. Don’t get me wrong, I have been busy and there is still a lot to do but we are sort of a bit stuck until it can be arranged to get all our furniture and boxes out of storage and the unpacking and homemaking can begin in earnest. This is the time I thought I would frantically be looking for a place to live and then arranging leases and unpacking but the house and lease part happened almost as soon as I got here and now we are just waiting (somewhat impatiently on my part) for the unpacking.
I’ve kept myself busy though, visiting IKEA looking for storage and furniture ideas for the new sewing room (if anyone knows a good furniture op shop in the St Kilda to Chadstone area please let me know. I need a new sewing table and the kitchen table I used before was great but is still needed in the dining room to eat dinner off…) and finding my new locals, quilt shops, bookshops, Spotlight and shopping centres. That sort of thing.
I picked up a new book for a quilt shop, Amitie in Bentleigh, dangerously close to where we live for my bank balance. Weekend Sewing: More than 40 projects and ideas for inspired stitching by Heather Ross wasn’t an impulse purchase. I saw it one afternoon when I quickly ducked into the store as I had been driving past. Not as strange as it seems, the store was recommended to me and I had a spare few minutes. I didn’t get it then, rather I went back again the next morning, bought some fabric and left without it after some consideration, only to go back again that afternoon to claim it for myself.
I’m not really sure what drew me to it; I think it may have been the large number of projects and the glimpses through the book of many of Heather’s very early fabric designs. It could have been that many of the projects were clothing, I’ve been on a bit of a clothing kick lately but none of those are the reasons I love it so much now.
It really comes down to the two page introduction, which I, somewhat shamefully, admit to reading stopped at successive sets of traffic lights on the way back to the hotel after buying it.
Heather talks about learning to sew knit and craft as a child and how, as she grew to adulthood the time for getting lost in sewing was overtaken by life deadlines and responsibilities. I’m paraphrasing and I hope she doesn’t mind, but this is the message that stuck in my mind. She goes on to explain that the book’s name ‘Weekend Sewing’ is in reference to her idea that some of her sewing time is just for her, for fun and not for commercial interests and in her mind this is called weekend sewing.
And now for the navel gazing. This struck a huge chord for me. I don’t remember learning to sew, or knit though I can do both, knitting less well than sewing. Since I have started to sew a lot more in the last year or so, and since I have started reading blogs and especially since I started writing this one, I have tried to remember when I acquired these skills.
I do remember getting by first pair of knitting needles (they are a fat purple pair, about 15cm long and came in a pack with an equally fat crochet needle); I just don’t remember how old I was. Certainly less than eight. I also remember helping to sew my school uniforms (by actually sewing seams), one in particular I wore in year one, which I started when I was five. I remember tracing out multi size patterns for Mum and cutting fabric for clothes for me, my younger brother and sister for her to sew later. I know I made dolls clothes, first for my dolls and later for an antique doll that was my great aunts, then my mum’s and now mine. I distinctly remember this one because I did it, taking over from Mum when I got frustrated she was taking so long. This is the first quilt I made, sometime when I was at uni, for my dog when she was still a puppy, I didn’t realise then that it was a quilt though.
But as I went to uni, and then when I started working I stopped sewing. There was the odd project, some curtains for a friend, a costume for my parents wedding anniversary party but for the most part the machine was packed away in it’s own case and stored away in the spare room.
Then last year my friend announced she was pregnant and I sewed up a storm. It happened to coincide with a purchase of a new machine. This might seem a strange purchase given what I have just said but my mum bought herself a new machine, gave her used, but not old one, to my sister who live a short drive away and gave me some money specifically to buy a new machine. And so, with a purpose for sewing and a new machine that was not so loud you wondered if there was a whole room of machines sewing at once I had means and a motive. It could have stopped there but then my partner told me about Etsy and then I found blogs and flickr. The motive stayed and I discovered a community spirit, but most of all I had rediscovered the enjoyment that creating something gives me, and the sense of calm and wellbeing I get while sewing and on finishing a project.
I don’t think it is a feeling I could describe well to others, especially others that don’t sew or craft. In fact I’m sure it isn’t, because I’ve tried. I work long hours, often 10 full on hours a day but a few seams, a finished quilt block, a look or email of gratitude, refreshes me in a way that sleep, watching TV or doing some other stationary traditionally considered ‘rest’ activity can’t.
But that is my weekend sewing moments, after work, on the weekend, in the evening and even once or twice very early in the morning. It’s obviously not all, or even the only thing, I find re-energizing and invigorating. I is, however, one of them, an important one, and I hope I can continue to find the time to ‘weekend sew’ and not forget the enjoyment it gives me again.
So I thank Heather, and her book for echoing my thoughts so well in her introduction, for 40 projects and much inspiration. I’m planning a shirt for some lucky little boy
Pair of slippers for each of our Christmas time guests
A zippered bag, just cause you can never have too many of them
And a pair of garden gloves, just because they are cool, and because I have a great new garden.
Do you think if a made a pair for my partner as well he would garden for the second time in 10 years and help me out?
