Dearest Hive Friends and Needleworkers,
Ooofah! This week had a couple of corker challenges, which led to my having to face them head-on, and having to shift my perception a little, around what is actually important, and how the ego can get in the way of immediate solutions!
It was in the light of one ‘disaster’ that I turned around my perception of an old project too: this Buon Riposo dress. It began at least 2 years ago, I think, and got completed – EXTREMELY INADEQUATELY! - this week. I really do not like it, and essentially it is unwearable for me. Pah!
But I love it all the same, because it is teaching me, and I am learning more and more about what I DO want to sew, create, share in the world.
Until this week, it was actually a semi-functioning bra-lette, which I had made from the remnants of a very old (huge!) orange silk skirt, which I added some beautiful appliqué sections from vintage handsewn napkins to, and then finished off with simple straps and back closure.
The basic idea of the bra-lette structure was nice – in theory! But as I said above, it never really worked for me.
Rather than letting it just sit there doing nothing, and because I have few fabrics to work with here in Portugal, I decided to grab it and make it into a kind of fancy gown garment. It had been sitting in my mind, the idea of this gown, for quite some weeks.
To add a skirt to it, I cut up both an old nighty, and a pillow case. The pillow case made a nice feature, because it has this stitching on it, of the words Buon Riposo – which roughly translated means Happy Lie-Down or Have A Good Nap. Hehe; I love quirky old-fashioned things like this which I find in the market stalls in Italy! They also shift my mood, so I don’t get too serious in my clothing mastery: I do like to keep humour here and there in how I dress (and live!)
The skirt was fairly easy to construct, as you probably can see from the snaps – and to add to the bra-lette: just a matter of handsewing the top of the skirt to the lower seams of the bra part.
It was hard to photograph nicely! It simply does not sit well, and I know there will not be an occasion for which I’ll be wearing it: more than likely, I will take it all apart and make it entirely new.
Going through this process however, allows me to lighten up about other aspects of my life and work, relationships and structures: I made a massive mistake yesterday – or so it seemed at the time – when I deleted the wrong pages of my website. Many many hours of intense concentration were lost. I shouted about it for a minute or two, then accepted that there was no way to retrieve them (via the template site that I use), and went to bed thinking of recreating them in a more simple capacity the next day.
It is so powerful for me, that after a night’s sleep I was looking forward to the new pages, rather than being fixed on the ‘loss’ of the old ones. As I approached my Webnode dashboard in fact, I could see how much cleaner without the pages the site was, and how I could tweak the remaining pages to contain some of the content ‘lost’.
It all worked out perfectly. And I trust that the dress will – or whatever iteration I make from this non-functional one! Seeing overlapping metaphor in more than one area in my life, helps me to recognise that all is well, and that I can create better, if I first let go of my fear of ‘making mistakes’. Getting upset about a ‘mistake’ can actually be a serendipitous hand of fate, guiding the way better. And thinking more positively about anything that happens when we don’t want it to, can lead us to finding the Gift in it, rather than us losing a lot of energy over it.
Mmmmm: I love learning and growing!
