On Mon, 20 Jun 2016 13:48:54 +0700, John B.
wrote:
I though that Winter was when everyone stayed home and knitted socks?
At least it was in up-state New Hampshire when I was a lad.
No riding no ideas no new posts
When I was a kid embroidered "samplers" I think they called them, were
pretty common. Sort of "God Bless Out Happy Home" sort of things
framed and hung on the wall. But I suppose that is another lost art.
I think I have a "Home Sweet Home" sampler somewhere in the house. I
never did have any idea where it came from. If I find it, I'll scan
it and send the image to my older sisters to see whether they know.
History books say that children used to start samplers at about the
age -- or, rather, the stage of development -- at which I collected
recipes in a file box. It was a roll of narrow cloth to which the
embroiderer would add notes all her life, if she kept learning new
things. The hang-on-the-wall sampler was descended from this
notebook, and at first always included an alphabet suitable for
marking laundry.
When I read "The Stitches of Creative Embroidery" I started a sampler
on burlap pages to go with it. I got only three chapters in before I
gave up the project, but I did refer to it a few years ago. Didn't
make notes on alternating paper pages as I should have.
http://wlweather.net/PAGESEW/SAMPLER/Samp6003.jpg
My wife makes most of her own clothes... mainly as a hobby, I guess
you'd call it. Occasionally someone at a party will ask her "Oh, where
did you get that dress?" When she replies, "I made it." people sort of
bug their eyes out as say things like "OH MY Goodness. You can sew?"
as though she just invented gravity. I find it sort of amusing as my
mother (I think she enjoyed it too) sewed. I think that all our wool
"winter" shirts were hand made.
I make all my clothes because I can't buy them. I did have an
epiphany a couple of weeks ago: I don't have to make summer garden
pants, I can buy scrub pants and cut them off! But the place that
used to sell scrub suits now sells polyester medical uniforms. But I
haven't asked the local laundry/uniform rental whether they can sell
me scrub pants yet.
I did find a dress at Goodwill this winter, and got to wear it once
before it got too hot for long sleeves. Goodwill is the only place in
town that sells dresses -- the previous year I visited every clothing
store and big box store in town and even drove to Columbia City to
visit a shop that is particularly good -- so I don't know where the
women who donate the dresses are buying them. Perhaps they go to Fort
Wayne, but I couldn't get there and back before nap time, so I'd need
someone to drive.
Can you buy an eighth of a yard of fabric? Here fabric is sold by the
yard or meters only.
The vacuum-cleaner, sewing-machine, 3D-printer, and fabric shop gets
most of its money from "quilters" -- people who make patchwork. Why
they don't call it "patchworking", I don't know, but they do often
quilt the finished product. I'm not sure about eighths, but they
certainly sell quarters -- and you can buy "fat quarters", which are
half yards split lengthwise. Fat quarters are all precut, and often
they are sold in sets. Hrrm . . . I didn't check all the fat quarters
for plain yellow. But solid colors are usually used for backing or
sashing, not for accents, so I'd be vastly surprised to find *any*
solid color among the fat quarters. (And it would take *hours*; they
are all over the store.)
Which confuses me no end as it also comes in at
least two standard widths :-) So, if you take this material it is two
meters and that one is three :-)
I confused my spouse mightily one day when I remarked that a wide
fabric at $15/yard was cheaper than a narrow fabric at $10/yard. (I'm
making those numbers up because I don't remember.) He's accustomed to
area goods being sold by square yards, and took a while to grasp that
fabric is sold by linear yards.
Just to confuse the issue further, two pieces of fabric that have the
same area won't necessarily make the same pattern. Ignoring the
further complications of crooked cutting and shrinkage and so forth,
suppose I wanted to make something by cutting two pieces half a yard
long and twenty inches at the widest part. I couldn't make it at all
out of fifteen-inch toweling. From twenty inches to a meter, I'd need
a yard, at forty suddenly half a yard would do -- and then it would
continue to need half a yard no matter how wide the fabric got.
I generally make two pairs of pants at a time, because I can get two
pairs out of hardly any more fabric than one pair.
And now I'm plotting how to piece fifteen-inch fabric to get something
that doesn't exist out of two yards!
--
Joy Beeson
joy beeson at comcast dot net
http://wlweather.net/PAGEJOY/