Old-Fashioned Fruitcake
This month, buttons and hoops!
I’ve been sewing on buttons for years, and I’ve finally started to do it properly. I always used to just pinion the button to the garment without mercy, but then a mercilessly pinioned button found itself unable to cope with the strain and popped off. I’m not going soft on buttons, I just object to sewing the same button on twice. I’ve got better things to do with my time.
Despite a total dearth of dressmaking this month, I did manage a bit of upskilling: one skill in the area of knitting, and one in the area of embroidery – which are, coincidentally, the two areas I’ve made progress on this month.
It is a truth universally acknowledged that weaving in the ends is the worst part of knitting. There are, it is true, occasional freaks of nature who enjoy doing it, but they’re as rare as a necklace of hen’s teeth round a unicorn’s neck. So if you happen to know one of these creatures of myth and legend, be sure to keep your friendship in good condition, with regular offerings of chocolate, flowers, theatre tickets etc.
Seventeen measurements, to be precise (dictated by Pattern Drafting for Dressmaking). The full panoply of which (good word, panoply) gives you enough information to create a pattern which fits you perfectly. The measurements include everything from your widest point or ‘seat’, to the distance from your neck to your waist at front and back, to the circumference of said neck at the base.
Obviously, these are very difficult measurements to take by yourself, particularly if you want any degree of accuracy (which you do). Unlike the woman in the pictures above, who has either the help of two people, or the help of one freak with two left hands, I had the help of the Caped Gooseberry (CG: where is the base of your neck? me: where those two little knobbles are).
So all I had to do was stand there and help figure out what the descriptions meant. (I think we still got at least one of them wrong.) Seems simple enough, you would think. But now for the hitch in Deborah’s character, to steal (and alter) a line from Jane Eyre.
