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What Fifteen Hours of Sewing 101 Taught Me:
1. Patience is far more critical to sewing than knitting, even though sewing produces results faster.
2. A garment is wearable and comfortable despite the crooked seams.
3. If interested in a good fit, it is always helpful to look beyond chest measurements, to things like ease, length, etc.
4. Do not rely on the sewing store experts or the teacher to pick the right size for you, even if you tell them you are absolutely new to published patterns.
5. Still, it is possible to be imaginative and view sleeves large enough to accommodate the family as a fashion detail.
6. Reading, cutting, ironing and pinning wafer-thin paper patterns is extremely fiddly, but when you painstakingly finish the fifteen hundred complicated steps, and the bands fall nicely into place, it’s really a very good feeling.
7. Pinning is absolutely KEY. It’s the gauge of sewing, that without which you are doomed.
8. Topstitch is a bitch. But the ninth time you try it after ripping it eight times and being close to tears, you can learn to live with it.
9. Motorised sewing machines are not at all scary. In fact the Jenome Heart is quite handy.
10. This is addictive, and browsing for second-hand machines on Ebay and Craigslist is bewildering but fun. What’s stressful is figuring out how to find the time to indulge this new craze in your busiest semester ever.
Thanks everyone for the opinions on the Sidelines vs. FLS. I love the swingy look of the FLS, but yes, I confess I too am not sure if it will flatter me. Some of the comments reinforced that doubt, so I finally opted for the Sidelines Top, but with some mods and a different yarn – which is still in the mail. If swatching goes well, I’ll blog about it soon. I decided to temporarily shelve the Mas Acero (Safeena, will definitely email you first if I do decide I have too many things in that shade!), and switch to working in some other colours for now.
In the meantime, I joined a Sewing 101 class here, and wanted to put down some first impressions about it.
First off, my jaw hurts from dropping to the floor at the prices of the pattern, the fabric, and the supplies. Yes, I am a mighty fool for not bringing some general fabric, or all my supplies with me. I guess it’s not so much the actual price as the difference because of the exchange rate, and my annoyance at having to basically reequip myself all over again. The pattern – apparently an easy one for beginners according to the saleswoman who sold it to me – is for a basic straight-lines robe, which I thought would be a good way to learn about such important things as sleeves, belts and bands. And it promises to be quite an education, given that I spent the entire five hours of the first class cutting the tracing paper, and pinning and cutting the fabric. Ten more hours and I will, no doubt, feel like I should have not just a robe, but a square hat and tassel, and a degree as well.
I saw one of those shiny electronic machines for the first time ever, and learnt where the bobbin goes and how to select speed and stitch and all of that. But the class is eye-opening in many other ways too – learning about the “grain of fabric”, which is a new and intriguing, if altogether proper concept, and about reading and using commercially published patterns. As always it set me thinking about how things are done so differently in different parts of the world. My teacher in Pune did not mention grain at all. Some fabric for salwar kameezes has a pannaa (width) of 54 inches, and even when it is 45 inches, it is not always cut lengthwise along the grain – certainly many of mine have been cross-grain. You would just need a lot more fabric to cut along the grain – in the case of my robe, I was surprised that I needed nearly 4.5 metres, when a full-sleeved A-line knee-length kameez, roughly similar dimensions as the robe, usually takes no more than 2.5.
I tried gently to suggest that I try the robe too along the cross-grain since it would allow me to use the remaining fabric for another kurti, maybe, but the teacher was quite adamant that I cut it according to the layout in the pattern. So I need to pick her brains about the hows and whys and what-happens-ifs of all this, and also pay closer attention to grains and things the next time I buy fabric from a taagaa (bale), rather than a pre-cut piece set, in India. I wonder if the need to economize over the fabric impacts the sewing practice, even at the expense of the fabric’s integrity, since garments along the grain are sturdier, perhaps? Even as I type this I imagine the internets and sewing fora to be abuzz with these debates – battlelines drawn sharply between the along-the-grain walas and the cross-grain walas, like English or Continental knitters, or like toe-up and cuff-down socknitters, or those who knit exclusively with natural fibers and those who use acrylic…
But I confess I was unprepared for two other things. The first was the actual pattern, which I had no idea would be pre-traced on paper! In my Pune class I measured myself, drafted the pattern and cut it on old newspaper, then held it by hand over the fabric as I outlined it with tailor chalk, then moved it away and cut the fabric. Here, I chose the L size, cut along the paper that already came in the pattern, ironed both the paper and the fabric, and then painstakingly pinned the traced pattern to the fabric. Oh my god the pinning! She made me repin it thrice, because I didn’t have enough, and she was worried the fabric would move. I was heartily sick of it, but deeply impressed with the attention to precision. I finally got the sides together in a fourth round of pinning, all prepped for sewing next week. All I could think of was – wow, is this how everyone sews every single pattern they make here? It’s a lot more labour intensive than the general eyeballing method of Mrs. Rajput back in Pune. It set me thinking about how much of this was her individual teaching style, and how generalized these sewing practices are.
A deeper discourse on handicrafts vs. the industrial revolution, individual product vs. mass production etc is fighting to burst forth here, but I am quelling the urge for now, because I am suspicious of simple binaries of “it’s like this in India” vs. “it’s like that in the West” and I really don’t know anything yet about the world of sewing to generalize beyond these two individual experiences. But it’s certainly worth exploring these themes further in my sewing adventures, as potential differences in crafting philosophy, or as pedagogical or epistemological approaches in different parts of the world to handicrafts that live in an industrial age. Maybe it will all emerge as individual quirks and accidents of history rather than broad patterns (!) of cultural practice; for now, does anyone know of interesting books or website that discuss stuff like this? I’d love to read more about it. (Actually, Abena, if you’re reading this, it would be great if you could weigh in on this, would love to get your take on it!) I’ve written in the past about the differences in knitting methods – in terms of the attention to gauge, yarn amounts, measurements and blocking vs. a general let’s-see-what-happens attitude among knitters like my mum. And yet, sewing demands an attention to fit that knitting does not, both because sweaters aren’t used as much in a warm country like India, and tend to stretch and fit loosely anyway, so it might well not be a good comparison. We all know a tailor has to be far more careful about his garments fitting his customers than an auntie has to be about her sweater fitting her nephew…
As my sabbatical draws to a close and I prepare to leave home for the US again, I am reflecting on my year of research – libraries I visited, progress I made on my new project, etc. etc. But whatever archival jackpots I may have hit, whatever dead-ends I may have faced in my research (there have been some of both), the singular achievement of this year has to be, without doubt, my conquest of the basic handloom cotton salwar-kurta.
I still cannot believe I have not tried this before! It is enormously exhilarating, and just as much fun as knitting, but in a very different way. Frogging a seam in sewing is somehow worse than undoing a few knitted rows. In knitting you are prepared for the long haul, especially with shawls and sweaters, but here I was unprepared for the instant gratification of the finished product. I loved the whole drafting process, learning about shaping and the maths involved, the thrill of tracing and cutting the fabric and the actual sewing. I have barely scratched the surface, of course, but given that about 95 per cent of my salwar kurta wardrobe is of this basic pattern, it also seems like dramatic progress.
I still haven’t figured out how to photograph myself in it without feeling odd (sweaters are different, somehow), but on the whole, the salwar kameez fits well. There are a hundred errors, some of which I am still in the process of spotting. But the seams were straighter and the fit a tad nicer in these two shorter kurtis I made after that to wear with pants, with some cloth someone had gifted me a while back. I still have to hand-sew the neck bands in. The dark pink one at the back is a bit too bright even for me, but it was freely available for the experiment and landed on the cutting block.
I think, apart from the basic terror of tearing into the cloth, sewing in the sleeves was the hardest. A lot like setting in sleeves in sweaters, no? My teacher is of the Do-It-Recklessly-Without-Pins school, and wanted me to learn how to manipulate the cloth by hand as I pedaled furiously. I was more conservative, however, and some judicious pinning helped avoid that ungainly inch that often gets left over on one side.
Yesterday I had to stop myself from buying a whole shelf-full of cloth pieces to cut up and sew, because I don’t have a machine back in the Bay Area, and all the airlines have drastically cut down the baggage allowance for international flights. But there are classes that I am eyeing. I also took a short peek at some sewing forums, but hesitated, because it seems like a whole world to take on, complete with product reviews, favorite techniques and patterns and designers, debates over plagiarized patterns suppliers and free patterns and celebrity bloggers, and of course, abbreviations. The sewing equivalents of:
*Knitpicks vs. Elann
*”would you copy?”
*VBD & SSK & p7tog
*”oh, I *hate* acrylic”
*Review threads galore on Malabrigo and on Knitpicks Notions needles
*the Yarn Harlot’s book tours
*yarn pr0n.
Suddenly I have an idea of how new knitters must feel when they encounter Ravelry and other online knitting worlds and the avalanche of information they let loose, and how quickly one has to learn the vocabulary in order to participate in it in order to use these resources meaningfully. I don’t know if I’m quite ready to take that on in the sewing department just yet, but I am certainly itching to sew a million things all at once.
This simple, shapely and harmless-looking contraption is currently my new love, and my nemesis.
I laughed out loud when I read Swapna’s comment a couple of posts ago about the sewing machine roaring away at the slightest provocation. Mine (or more precisely my cousin’s) is still similarly untamed, which is to say I am still a dunce at using it. There is one little manoeuvre required to get it going: gently rolling the wheel forward with your right hand, and then pedaling with your feet to keep it running in that direction and thereby setting the whole contraption down to the bobbing needle into motion.
Sounds simple, except that the smaller hand-wheel keeps wanting to turn away from you, thereby promptly breaking the thread and requiring continuous swearing re-threading. If the wheel-pedal coordination is off even slightly, it’s twang-clap-snap-thut. When you see a veteran doing it, it’s very difficult to figure out just what the hell they’re doing to keep it going in the right direction, and of course they can’t really tell you what they’re doing because it’s second nature to them, and they can’t understand why you’re making such a fuss about it. Rather like when you are learning how to drive a stick-shift car, and just can’t get the hang of releasing the clutch just as you press the accelerator, and the car keeps stalling. Or like you thrash about and swallow a lot of water but the correct freestyle action to stay horizontal and swim somehow seems impossible to do. Until one moment you suddenly you can accelerate, or strike through the water, or start sewing in the right direction, and you cross over to the other side. There are setbacks, of course, but then it goes on to become second nature. Right now I’m somewhere between a setback and second nature, as I try to shape the neck of my very first own-sewn kurta.
There is a distinctive sound to the running of the old mechanical sewing machines, especially the ones with the foot-pedal. For me the clickety-clack of the wheel and the needle immediately conjures up two distinct themes. One is the ubiquitous neighbourhood tailor shop. Dyspeptic tailors bent over in a line in the poorly lit back of the shop, the air suffused with a mix of machine oil fumes, the smell of freshly cut fabric and sweat. Little triangular scraps of cloth litter the floor, sari blouses and kurtas line the walls above the bent tailors, and the main tailor-master, standing behind the counter that doubles as shop-front, cutting table and dogeared pattern library, tries to persuade the reluctant auntie customer to break with her regulation U and try a new octagonal neckline.
The other is an image of the ever-suffering and consumptive, but hard-working and morally upright mother in old Hindi films, played with melodramatic gusto by actors like Leela Chitnis, Sulochana and, of course, Nirupa Roy. All these women fought great societal and financial odds to bring up their children singlehandedly in film after film with one important weapon in their struggle for self-reliance and middle-class respectability: the humble sewing machine. It has been part of countless scenes where a) Ma weeps and coughs as she adds yet another seam and worries about the rent; b) Ma chastises wayward younger son for profligacy and truancy even as she has worked her fingers to the bone to pay his college fees; and c) the hero bursts into the room as Ma is working at it, announcing that he has passed his BA or got a job, thereby implying the machine’s impending redundancy.
Hindi film moms in the last decade have shed their widow whites and have become a lot more glamorous and trendy. While their acquiring of colour and joie-de-vivre, even sexuality on occasion, is entirely welcome, I can’t help thinking that the vanishing of the sewing machine from screen is part of the broader evaporation from Hindi cinema of working class and lower-middle-class lives, characters and stories in favour of globalised, consumerist and insanely wealthy settings. Dress-making, though, continues to be a gendered sign of self-reliance and respectability – young heroines in films and TV serials often have their own fashion boutiques as a business. I can’t recall if I’ve ever seen a sewing machine, vintage or electrified or computerised, in any scene, though…
To return to the saga of my own sewing, my seams need some sobering up before they can walk in a straight line:
But hey, that ghostly apparition is my own-sewn, completed and freshly washed salwar, waiting for its kurta to be done so it can be ironed and worn (yes, it fits!):
