Category: Handwork

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The Ideal Skirt: Adjustable Waist and POCKETS!

Yes, it is possible! One can have a skirt with a waist that is easily adjustable to one’s fluctuating circumference, and also with pockets! Huzzah!

I started with Liz Haywood’s free pattern for a three gore wrap skirt. She has a variety of options as far as gores go, but I went with three, because why sew more seams than I had to? I did make a couple of changes, however. For one, I didn’t bother about a buttonhole to thread the waist ties through. I figured I could just overlap them and live with the minor unevenness at hem that would result.

And for another, I added POCKETS! I cut my own pattern piece from a sheet of A4, basing the size of the angled cut on the pocket bag of a favourite dress. Please note: when actually cutting out the pieces, I decided this was too small and added about five centimetres to the bottom for one pair of pocket pieces. Both pockets are fully functional but I prefer the larger one.

A sheet of paper with an angled cut, marked "Pocket" butted up against a larger skirt pattern piece.
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Gandhi, Chaplin, and the Symbol of Non-Violence

When Charlie Chaplin met Gandhi…sounds like the beginning of a joke. But in fact they did meet, in London, in 1931. Here you see Chaplin (seated, dark suit) next to Gandhi (seated, Gandhi).

Black and white photograph of M K Gandhi, Sarojini Naidu, Charlie Chaplin, and others.

The conversation included Gandhi explaining to Chaplin that his use and promotion of the charkha (traditional Indian spinning wheel, used for spinning cotton) wasn’t a rejection of more recent technologies – Luddite, we’d probably say these days – but rather a rejection of the exploitative system that those technologies were then serving.

Which, to be fair, is also how the actual Luddites looked at it. They didn’t object to labour-saving machinery. They objected to the idea that labour-saving was interpreted by employers to mean not “the machine does more, so now workers don’t have to work quite so hard” but rather “the machine does more, so we can work fewer people just as hard as before (and it’s not our business if the rest of them starve)”.

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A Really Good Homemade Mask

Maybe you can’t afford N-95 masks. Maybe you don’t like sending so many disposable masks to landfill. Maybe you can’t get masks that fit you properly. (I find the blue/white ones always slide about and poke me in the eyes, no matter what contortions I inflict on them beforehand.) Maybe you find fabric masks comfortable but are a bit uncertain about how much protection they’re really providing.

On the grounds that the best mask is the one you wear, and which actually fits well enough to form a barrier between your breath and everyone else’s, I have been wearing reusable homemade fabric masks. But these are not your ordinary fabric masks! No, these leap tall buildings in a…sorry, turned over two pages at once. These are WHO-style triple-layer fabric masks!

There are, it turns out, two secrets to getting a mask that works and wears comfortably, whether you make it or buy it. The first secret is to get the right shape of mask. For example, the ones I make for the Caped Gooseberry have a special nose-piece to avoid glasses getting fogged. And the ones I make for myself are child-sized, because it turns out I have a child-sized face, which is why my whole head was being swallowed in a single gulp by your average standard masks. (We’ll get to the second secret soon.)

The good news is that if you have a mask pattern you like, you can still use it to make a mask that’s a bit more beefy in the protection area. For myself, I use this pattern from the Spruce, and for the Caped Gooseberry I use this one from Made By Barb – with certain alterations.

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