Dearest Needleworkers and Friends on Hive!
Ahhh, this has been such a breakthrough week!! 
and I have had some progress – possibly myself more – in our Masterpeace remedy adventures, and my work in the McMA atelier has come along very nicely… Checking out my visit a few days ago to the Artemis gallery, where I could map out some ideas about our imminent expo there…. It helped me simplify everything, which in turn helped clear my mind completely and focus on the goal of showing my clothing to a larger public for the first time!
This pair of mega-trousers is a relatively straightforward new garment that I (re)constructed using two favourite pieces of clothing from the 50c stall: a pair of red and white pinstripe jeans, and a thicker-black-and-white striped dress. Both were very small dimensions – certainly not for the robust hips of a healthy and well-fed woman like myself!
I love taking a really small-but-perfectly-formed garment and making it a) infinitely more funky, and b) fitting for the not-super-petite form. I love how we can take almost any garment apart, and make it fit whoever we like to – and how we can make it more expressive or impact-full.
me, larking about for photographer Vincent
This alteration is a method I’ve used before several times: taking either a complimentary or a contrasting fabric, and adding a thick strip of it down the side of trousers or a skirt, to make a quite different style.
And I adore stripes, and contrasting stripes in particular. I love how the graphic of one strikes against the softness of another – in the final trousers here, there is a great dynamic quality of one playing with t’other: lightness and heaviness, dancing.
I love love love the widest trousers too: they get so wide that they are almost a skirt – and the feeling of wearing them, even if it is a stiff-ish fabric, is very sensual and freeing: more room to move one’s legs around in!
For the most part, this project was a simple-but-complex one. It didn’t need much structural change on the red and white trousers: just cutting down the side seam, cutting the bottoms off, and using the cut-off bottom strips to make both a top waistband section, and a patch to cover some old blue ink pen stains which plagued these jeans.
When I was photographing today, I actually noticed another ink stain at the back of one knee: oopah! I shall have to do another patch!
It was a bit fiddley to make the strips to accommodate the new side-extensions; it wasn’t immediately obvious how to attach a new strip – whether to put the new (B & W) fabric inside or behind it, and the same with where it was attaching to the border of the red and white ‘pants’. I sewed and unpicked a couple of times. Ouch!
And the deconstruction of the B & W dress was fairly complicated; it was a tiny-waisted flaired skirt, which I removed the bodice from, and then cut the skirt into pieces that would be pinned and sewn together to form the length of the side-seams. It took a lot of pinning, and then a lot of faffing on the machine, to get the strips neat enough to add to the trousers...
But the final trews are quite fabulous, even if I do say so: they sit quite nice on me, but I’ll be presenting them at the end of the month, and so they seem like a model that may even sell… I’ve been thinking a wee bit about fashion this month, and how to avoid making things that are stuck in one season or year. It makes much more sense to have a kind of timeless style-ish-ness, if I am able to cultivate this in my projects. I’m hoping that my several decades in the field of fine art will keep me right in this: knowing about composition, harmony of colour and tones, textures and lines – I have a good solid palette of skills to bring to my sewing.
I sewed a couple more labels on this week too, and it thrills me very much each time, to have such a small but exciting full-stop to put at the end of each worked piece. A wee moment of triumph, which I may write about later…
