Hallo beautiful dress-making friends! Here is Part Two of my long blue dress from an old sheet creation story!
The final 5% of any creative project often ends up taking 95% of the time to finish. This is an equation that has been proven many iterations of paintings, gardening projects, DIY tasks and especially sewing! It is relatively quick to get the crux of the form in place, but then there's the detail, the fixtures, the seams and hems, the stabilising of the form. This is an alchemical formula, that we need much more energy for the really good completion of any truly creative task, whereas we can fling something together superficially in relatively little time with very little care and attention.
So I love this laboriousness of completion! I take time out of my home life to pop up to the bar and drink some iced juice and eat a custard croissant, and to chat with some locals or foreigners. It is a lovely way of keeping grounded whilst listening to more mainstream folks, as I stitch and move the fabric around on my lap. I stop occasionally to take a snap for our community here. And refuse a call to be photographed by the foreigners, who "insist that it won't go on Facebook!!" and I half-heartedly try to explain, between their protestations, that their Google phone will take my data anyway from facial recognition, and I simply do not want to have my data and 'identity' harvested. I manage to elude yet another attempt at coercion into being digitally recorded.... and settle back into my juice snack and stitching.
This part of the finishing is labour-intensive but glorious: it is finishing, piece by satisfying piece! I know that it will fit, because I did the fiddly work of pinning the waist belt straps in place beforehand, using my own body as measure, and the ends of the straps are wonderfully, unusually going to sit up where the shoulder straps would usually be sewn in, at the top of the bib... This came to being by 'chance' or serendipity, as when I put the dress on, inside out, the straps were a bit rumpled when I pulled them around horizontally, and yet they sat perfectly neatly when I put them at the shoulders/ top of the chest. I love that this is a more unique style, which will set my clothing designs aside as more special.
I thought that I'd made a blooper with the place that the straps attached to the sides of the breast bib, but they too found their perfect spot, as I began just playing with the edges of the straps and taking time to ruminate slowly over how best to construct their connecting. At first glance, they were going to attach without proper stability, but then when I turned over the first row of stitching to check the back, I saw that I could pick up a second layer of stitching and have a more solid attachment, which would be perfectly sound for the pulling of the belt when I fasten it.
The decision about the buttons took an age! I wanted to have three different sizes of mother-of-pearl buttons, sitting on belt ends which came from either side, round the back, crossed over, then finished buttoning into the waistband from either side of the front - but not meeting together, just attaching to the waist... When I attempted to pin, it was clear that the shoulder placing of the button was best, and so it required only one button each side, no space for three. After checking every button tin (I have around 8 tins for different colours of button), I decided that these reddy-pinky-brown big ones were best against the blue, and for the holding force necessary to balance the straps and the pull of the fabric.
I do a lot of hand-stitching for finishing seams and edges, and this project has a lot of wee places which needed edges neatened. But the long hems required the machine!
THE ANTI-MUSE
And in the final stretch, my anti-muse seeped in a little. I kind of relish getting to confront my neuroses: to really wriggle around under them until I pop out from the dark weight and find the freedom of my expression. Sometimes the anti-muse - I am going to record a podcast about this later today, whilst it is fresh in my conscious - is truly integral; it seems such a part of us that we think it is both immovable and insurmountable.
So we don't even try to change our habit. But the deliciously familiar discomfort is my calling: I feel the edges of it and TUG, and it all unravels fairly quickly... I can hear the feeling, and smell the readiness of a thing to shift cosmically, quantumly - and it does.
I began my Year Of Mastery some months ago, with quite some baggage in my cells, feeling like I might be taking on a mountain that I couldn't climb.
One step in front of the other, turning up each day, I have gained skills and confidence which is priceless - and which I simply did not have before. I THOUGHT I had it, but I was feeling so vulnerable when I walked out, no matter how much I loved my clothing.
It really felt like the stitching and the fabric weaves were creating a charge and a spell around me, which simply was not protecting me how I magically needed to be protected; on the multidimensional levels.
As I've spoken to before, the act of sewing is an act of reworking the fabric of reality. Of our own and the greater collective reality, because we are an inalienable thread in the fabric of the collective. Our work as women is so powerful in realigning threads, energies, sense of self and sense of place and power: we are stitching the Universe back together in the mystical sense.
I went out with my dress on this morning, to photograph it. I noticed a couple of small un-neat-nesses, which I tucked in for most of the photos, but which I need to add a couple more stitches for.
And I would love a big pair of pockets, which there is a good space for, and which I still have a lot of the old sheet left to make.
It was a nice experience to go to Palazzo Marotta at the other end of my street, and use the open terrace to photoshoot, and the temperature was perfect, with strong light to show off the garment. Though each item of clothing I make is always very imperfect, I love nevertheless finding my Way, and I am careful to acknowledge my growing skills and sureness of myself.
It is beautiful, healing the wounds from my life, which made me stay small and contracted.
LOVE!
www.claregaiasophia.com
