Renegade Curves

I joined my local Curves for the typical goals of weight loss and fitness; getting back into clothes that had hung patiently for years, while I failed to return to the size I had bought them in.

They're still hanging. I'm still doing the machines on the circuit,  three days a week on a good week, two good weeks a month, two not as good. Andrea, or Susan, or Pat say hello from behind the desk. I scan in my bar code, and if it's anywhere near the 24th of the month the computer reminds me to get weighed and measured. 

None of us regulars are ever seen being weighed or measured.  I haven't done that since month three, about four and a half years ago.  The numerical results are not encouraging. We rather measure our success by the assumed number of pounds we haven't gained. 

More tangible is wind.  If I've been a good about doing the 14 machines on the circuit, 30 seconds each, two times around with aerobic moving in between and three pulse checks, I can run up the stairs at home without breathing hard.  I can pedal up small hills.  If I've let a week go without, I breathe hard, sweat, and walk the bike uphill. 

That alone would be good enough reason to go to Curves, but if cardio exercise

was all I cared about, I could pay far less to go to Planet Fitness.  I could push and pull against fancier machines for longer periods, hear better music and stare at TV screens with close-captioned scrolling on the bottom.

Don't want to do that.  Don't want to see strangers, or men, or start staring at screens half an hour earlier in the day than I do already.  I want to see the familiar faces of the same women I've been facing across the circuit for years.  If we get to talking about something, I barely notice that I've finished all my least-favorite machines and the 30 minutes flashes by in what feels like 10. That sociability is the not-so-secret sauce of Curves.

A lot of the women at Curves are retired teachers; I envy them their pensions and their frequent, teacher-discounted cruises. They’re very big on cruises at Curves. Seems everyone’s been to the Caribbean and Italy.  Some are up to Thailand and Viet Nam.

Of the women who come my time of week, maybe two and a half are black, two Asian, one Indian.  Most are over 60, some surprisingly into their 80’s. Some stay for Zumba, led by a supremely toned woman whose sexy moves are very roughly approximated, wearing pants with ribbons on the back pockets that fly as she bumps and lunges. Some of the women wear belly dancer coin sashes. 

The Spanish music for Zumba is a big improvement over the disco-fied Beatles medleys and other annoying recordings we often move to, in between the every-30-second "change stations now" lady. I imagine silence is very beautiful after a day of this.

I learn good neighborhood things at Curves; good stores, sales, specialists, restaurants, movies. I start a mainly solitary working day by checking in with people. I also learn about things that go on outside my mainly Jewish bubble: the women from Italian families talk about how they'll make the seven fishes for Christmas dinner, and how nobody makes the food their grandmothers made anymore.  Well of course, I can relate.

But of course I also bring the bubble with me; that film of outsiderly self-consciousness, tinged with cynicism. Curves is a pretty goyish place; its founders forbade opening on Sunday and they’re still closed then. Not bad in itself, but their politics smack of Sarah Palin's. The music they play is often corny or country. The owner installed a vibrating machine called a Theravibe and right next to it, on the wall, is a list of conditions that are supposed to be alleviated by standing on this thing in your stocking feet and being shaken at various speeds; it's got everything written there but cancer.  Some women pay an extra $50 a month to use it. I haven't taken the free trial. Yet.

We seem to voluntarily avoid talking politics and religion. But, this being New Jersey, it turns out that quite a few of my fellow exercisers and even a Zumbanik or two are Jewish. And Jewish and non, most are no slouches; some are or have been in the arts, some musicians, some business, some academe, in addition to the great preponderance of retired teachers. One of the women who works behind the desk organizes trips into New York to see Broadway plays. (Some of which aren't even musicals.) They also organized a group lunch in the struggling new Indian restaurant two doors down, whose food is excellent. I'm beginning to suspect that many of them voted for Obama, in a county that always goes Republican.

Because this Curves is even showing small signs of rebellion. You can't find this branch listed on the corporate website. Why? Because the owner of this Curves doesn't comply with the official regulations that say you can't put your own posters and decorations on the walls. You can't invite urologists in to come in and give talks on prolapsed bladders. You can't offer field trips or have a suction-cup dartboard or, well… a Theravibe. I’ve also heard -- although I can’t confirm -- that corporate wants to drop the circuit idea and be a more regular gym. The site nowadays certainly deemphasizes the circuit.

Curves corporate hasn't gone so far as to pull its machines and strip the owner of her franchise; too many others have gone under and this one absorbs the displaced members. They've just dropped her from the website. And nobody, behind the desk or on the circuit, seems to care about that or about corporate in general. So after four years, I’m no thinner but I’m not fatter either, and I've adjusted my attitude if not my body mass index. This place is beginning to feel more like home.

Sewing Fail

For  those of you who landed here on a sewing Google,  lessons to learn from my recent failure.

The Vogue 8701 I shouldn't have
tried to make a skirt from

1. Don't make a skirt from the skirt pieces of a dress pattern.

I have so many patterns that I've never sewn, I thought I could save myself from buying another and use the bias skirt of Vogue 8701 to make my sister the simple, almost-circle skirt she wanted out of the acres of beautiful wool she got me for --don't laugh -- $5 at a garage sale.  It didn't lay right when I improvised a waistband where the pieces were expecting a bodice.  I also didn't get the size right; it came out too tight, then too loose when I let the seams out. Or the length; too short.

2. Don't make an almost-circle skirt out of good wool, especially for a middle-aged waist.  

Instead of falling into thin, twirly folds below a cinched waist, all that heavy fabric just fell into a few, fattening  panels, skiing off my sister's hips at an unattractive angle and stopping too soon, not much below the knee. I had her try it on for two attempts and she was unequivocal about rejecting it both times. 

Abject sewing failure; do not attempt.

I wasted oceans of time on that skirt, making lining, inserting invisible zipper, adding seam pockets, then letting out seams and sewing them over when it came out tight.  And I'm the wide sister. But I don't blame her. Great invisible zipper insertion doesn't make up for an unflattering cut.

Vogue 8667

I have to put this project away until I've racked up two or three successes.  Then I need to take all the pieces apart and see if I can cut an actual skirt pattern pieces from them.   Most of all, I still need to make my sister a wool skirt. With less fabric. And  a skirt pattern.

It's not like I've had no successes with this wool.  Here's the dress I made my younger daughter, in the grey:

My sewing history

My mother has kept her sewing supplies in the same dark brown cookie tin since my earliest memory, which is now over 50 years old.  The tin probably contains at least some wooden spools of that vintage, now wound with brittle, dried-out Coats & Clark’s thread in several colors, assorted hand needles, and a tape 

McCall's 3584

.measure. Also a pin cushion; probably a tomato model

With these, she sewed on buttons and sewed up hems.  For real, from-scratch dressmaking, you have to go back a generation to my grandmother, whose knee-activated, table-hidden Singer is also still tucked away in my mother’s house.  But Grandma never taught my mom to sew, and my mom never taught me.

   

Could it be that Jewish women who immigrated to the US in the 1920’s associated machine sewing with sweat shops, and so never encouraged their daughters to sew? My junior high school friend Laura sewed some, and her Italian female immigrant ancestors might have treadled shoulder to shoulder with mine. The first sewing machine I saw in active use, however, belonged to Chris, my luck-of-the-draw roommate of sophomore year at college. She had a nice sturdy portable Necchi, and I can picture it on her desk in our dorm room. Chris was the country mouse to my city mouse; a common cross-cultural introduction at our upstate state school.

Some old pattern with front and back pleats.. in progress.

Chris was so bedrock American that her mother actually braided rugs. She also canned fruit, grew asparagus, sheered sheep and spun wool. Chris' father had built at least part of their house; perhaps the loft we slept in, overlooking the braided rug and the spinning wheel. I think that this degree of self reliance was unusual even for Tully, pop. about 800 back then, 20 minutes south of Syracuse. I visited for a weekend once or twice. My first up-close Republicans, judging by the newspapers they read. In any case, Chris sewed beautifully finished seams and perfectly turned, pointed collars.  Many years later, when I was pregnant, she sent me her home-sewn maternity clothes to wear.  Came in handy, too.

Butterick 5588

So I was inspired by Chris, and after using her Necchi to make an enormous womb of a stuffed chair for our dorm room, I went out and got my first machine. I bought a Singer 503  in the basement of the beautiful Pfaff sewing machine and fabric store in the middle of Rockefeller Center, near the skating rink.  Of Jetson-style, tapered design circa 1960, it was a trade-in that the Pfaff store clerks were glad to hustle out the door for $300.  It came with interchangeable cams that performed all kinds of stitches mechanically.  I’ve been buying patterns and learning by doing, off and on, ever since. 

I've owned three sewing machines now.  Two of them came to bad ends. The first, Jane Jetson model got swiped from my car when I foolishly left it visible on the back seat, parked in the vicinity of Macy's Herald Square. I was left with only the cams to remember it by. The second, a $300 Viking trade-in rescued from another Pfaffs store (follow the money), was caught needle-deep in water on the basement floor during our first-ever flood.  I replaced it with a flashier Viking; my first new machine. I never leave even the foot pedal on the floor now.

I can’t be sewing to save money.  Clothes made on the other side of the world can hardly cost more money than I can earn in equivalent hours. I just like to make things, to see and feel the potential hiding in bolts of fabric, to get away from the damn computer screen and do something low-tech but semi-high-skilled and produce something tangible, to escape from the demands of more typical, contemporary accomplishment. Sewing may not have been the absolute best use of my time. I admit, though, that making cute clothes for my daughters when they were little felt virtuous. Also fun.

Like sewers everywhere, I have fabric stashes that go back years, some of which -- it’s becoming increasingly clear -- will survive me. I still can’t resist a fabric store.  But fabric stores have gotten a lot rarer.  Here in the Jersey burbs, just off the NYC map, I can point out four places where there used to be a fabric store. When So-Fro in the mall closed, decades ago, I pounded on the shut gate like Dustin Hoffman in The Graduate.

Now, even if all you want is a certain color thread or seam binding like Woolworth’s used to sell in every neighborhood, you’re out of luck or stuck online. If you want it today, you’ve got to schlep to Joanne’s, twenty minutes west of here on the edge of the countryside, where sewing stores remain and my demographic thins out. 

I don’t bump into Jewish friends in fabric stores.  I’ve met one or two who sew, curtains or even clothes if they happen to be hard to fit. But they’re rare, too.  Look at the 25 different English-speaking women you can find demonstrating the use of the narrow hem foot on YouTube.  No Jews. Black, Hispanic, lapsed and practicing Catholic and Protestant women are shopping with me at Joanne's, but not my people, much. Nor Asians, come to think of it. My sister tells of an Indian friend who bought fabulous fabric for her daughter’s wedding, but she actually went back to India to buy it.

I don’t really care so much -- I can be New Jersey’s only Jewish sewing blogger of 2013 --  but a) I’m probably not -- Come out, come out, wherever you are; and b) some of us Jewish women may be getting lured by the new online courses, social media contests and Project Runway. (Is that still on? They’re promoting patterns with it.) Some of us may enjoy just doing something slow, some like to show off.  Somebody’s got to be buying that blue bolt of cotton Hannukah print. There’s also a recent book of Jewish sewing crafts -- I actually contributed to it -- and I hear Joanne’s is moving into a bigger store, one strip mall closer.