Long Road to Satisfaction

Crafts make us feel rooted, give us a sense of belonging and connect us with our history. Our ancestors used to create these crafts out of necessity, and now we do them for fun, to make money and to express ourselves.
– Phyllis George

When people ask me ‘How did you get to be so creative?’ I tell them it’s because I ate paste as a child.
– Unknown

‘Heirloom’ is knitting code for “This pattern is so difficult that you would consider death a relief.”
– Stephanie Pearl-McPhee

At the beginning of the summer I bought a couple of sundresses from Old Navy. One was an off white with tiny multicoloured pastel flowers embroidered on it and all I needed to do was take it up a bit in the shoulders to make it work for me. The other one was a kind of washed out medium blue colour with cream and grey roses on it. I wasn’t keen on the ruffles on the straps, and I hated the way the straps were constructed because it was impossible to keep them up. Here’s the dress:

Yes, it was as shapeless as it looks in the picture. I tried to adjust the straps, but they still didn’t work. I tried adding elastic at the waist to give it some shape and that didn’t really work either. I could have just abandoned it altogether, but I really, really liked the material it was made of. So I did the next best thing – I cut it off to make a skirt out of it.

And then I got the brilliant idea to make a sleeveless blouse out of unbleached cotton to wear with it. And just to make it look like it was supposed to go with it, I decided to embroider it with roses to go with the pattern in the skirt. But where the skirt was blue with cream/grey roses, I decided to do my roses in blue:

I was going to do the leaves in grey, like on the skirt, but one of the ladies from the stitchery guild talk me out of it, saying I should use green instead. I must have gone through half a dozen different greens before I found the right shade. And I must have picked out the embroidery for them at least three times.

The embroidery alone took me the entire summer. It’s not that it was especially hard to do, it’s just that I had a lot of other things going on and I wasn’t able to work on it as much as I’d like to.

I was about halfway through it when it occurred to me that I had the roses going the wrong way. The pattern was in an L shape, and I probably should have had the long edge of the L in the middle with the short edge facing away from the center. But I had the short edge facing the middle and the long edge on the outside. So then I thought I should fill in the gap with something fancy.

I found a couple of lace collars online, and then spent a considerable amount of time trying to decide which one to go with, the grey:

Or the blue:

In the end I decided on neither, I’d just leave it plain. On to constructing the blouse itself. And once again I started running into problems. The first lining I tried was from a stash of material I came into, and I think in its former life it was the lining for curtains. At any rate, when I had to re-sew one of the seams it tore like tissue paper. Obviously this wasn’t going to work.

So next I tried the material I’d originally bought to go under the blue lace I did not use for the granddaugher’s ball gown. It was synthetic, and slightly stretchy, and my sewing machine hated it and started acting up. So that got abandoned too.

Getting fed up with the trouble the blouse was giving me, I turned my attention to the skirt. It was a pretty simple matter to put a casing on the top and threading elastic through it. And the skirt was done.

Finally I went back to the stash and found some more unbleached cotton, this time a little heavier than I would have liked, and it was a little discoloured in places, but it worked. I got the lining made and sewed the blouse together, and . . . it didn’t fit. It needed to be taken up at the shoulders and let out in the sides.

Fortunately, the way I added the lining I didn’t have to rip the whole thing apart. I made my adjustments and put it back together again. I did the hand stitching and very carefully made the buttonholes. After sewing the buttons on, I was finally done. And it even fits properly.

I have never taken so long to finish a single garment in my life.

But that’s not going to stop me from another embroidered, sleeveless blouse down the road.