Body in the Basement

Down in my basement is a limbless, headless tan body shape;  a paper-tape paper-mache of my torso.  It's my own personal dress form, made, per Barbara Deckert's instructions in a Craftsy sewing video, by my sister.  It should be a much more accurate likeness than the dial-a-butt/bust, felt-covered forms they sell in fabric/craft stores.

Wear comfortable shoes and stand on a cushy mat

It takes a good friend or a close relative to make this for you, as it involves dunking and pressing long and short strips of pre-pasted brown tape all over your body.  Three times over, for three layers, over a t-shirt.  You have to be able to stand still for well over an hour as it dries, although you may -- and you will -- laugh. You can also move your arms during this process a little, as we're not trying for sleeves.  You can help pat down your own boobs and belly, reaching left with the right and vice versa. Trying for your sides is going to raise your shoulder; we don't want that. We want the relaxed, straight-standing  clone of you that you need for fitting clothes you sew for yourself.

You have to sacrifice the t-shirt, because after it dries (do this on a low-humidity day and pool your blow driers) your mummifier has to carefully cut you out of this hardened shell, up the back.  She should lay her hand between the blade and your back wherever possible, and try to angle the scissor blade away from your spine if she can't.  My sister wound up cutting a hole in my exercise shorts (they were old) and underpants (they were newish), but not my skin.  

You should hear a nice crisp cracking going on behind you, like the sound of walnut shells, when your form maker cuts through shaped and hardened tape and t-shirt.  Then you carefully back yourself out of the body cast, put on another shirt (and shorts, if necessary), line your cut ends together (get help with this, too), and tape it back closed. Insert a padded hanger through the bottom and hang in a sunny bay window, to let finish drying.  It makes a great murder mystery prop when seen from the outside.

My sister did a good job.  When my form was done I was fairly dismayed to see how much space I take up, particularly from the waist down.  Looking inside the hollow bottom, I could see that my internal organs had much more room than they needed.  If we kept it in the kitchen I'm sure it would keep my nibbling in line much more effectively than a photo on the fridge.  It would be... not quite the elephant.. but undeniably surplus me..... in the room. 

I love this wrap dress.  I made one
for the first-born in Indy, too... w/ the
wider seam binding the pattern
actually calls for

I mailed it to the second-born
at work... she had to put it on
and show me right away,
hence the wrinkled hem.

It took me over a month to get this pasted tape from an art supply store. (The stuff at Staples has nylon threads in it, which makes it no good.)  During that time I tried, vainly, to shed a few pounds. Then  I kept the tape in the shipping carton for a few more months, sewed for my kids and made the same safe wrap-around dress for myself -- till I finally gave up and went over to my sister's with tape, dunking tray, t-shirt and extra poundage

So this dress form better help me sew for myself; it may make an improvement simply by not sucking in its gut every time it tries on a waistband.  We've taken it down from the gallows, stuffed it with newspaper and impaled it on the only thing we could find that's on a stand and fits -- one of those skinny ionizer oscillating fans.  Now we can dress it up, stand it in the window and make it turn back and forth -- just in time for Halloween.  And if being able to hug myself truly does inspire me to lose pounds and inches,  I will be delighted to hold still for another taping.

I'll get another fan and keep both sizes in the basement.

McCalls 6959

Seders, Sewing, Running Threads

Traditionally, there is no time for sewing between Purim and Passover.  No, I’m not all that traditional… not one of those competitive-cleaning Jews who start at the furthest point in the house from the kitchen and just keep sweeping and scrubbing in the direction of the breadbox for a solid month.  But somehow, between the shopping and planning and complaining and the cleaning I do, and the switching food and dishes around, no sewing gets done.

Authentic Grandma Dishes

At this point the average American Jewish reader raises an eyebrow and thinks… “switching dishes? Not traditional? Excuse me?” Well, yes, it’s out of scale with the rest of my relatively skim religious observance and rare among non-Orthodox Jews, but I started switching the kitchen around ever since I helped my grandmother fetch her Passover dishes from over the fridge 20-something years ago. I stood on a chair in her tiny kitchen, she and I wrapped them in late-eighties pages of the Star Ledger, put them in the carton and I took them to my home with all the storage space. 

Vogue 8772 and
 this week's breading

They’re a little chipped and veined and were never fine china to begin with. But what else could I do but give them a good, kosher-for-Passover home? Like Brigadoon, they come out into the light one day a year, looking traditional on the Seder table and reminding the over-forties of my grandmother. (Actually, Brigadoon was one day every hundred years, but who’s counting.)  They then go back into hiding for another year in the old kitchen cabinets that hang in the garage. The rest of the Pesadik dishes, the pots, pans and silverware, the placemats, oven mitts and the napkin holder spend the rest of the week.

Day before yesterday, on the first Saturday after the Seders, I indulged in a trip to Joann’s, ostensibly for buttons
(50% off), and fell prey to three bolts of fabric (30-40% off).  Yesterday I cut out another McCalls 6579 skirt, same fabric as the first, to sew and send daughter #1 in Indianapolis.  I also cut out the Vogue 8772 blouse again, for myself, this time in a bright cotton print that’s probably meant for quilting. 

Since I had the first shirt made already, I thought I might perfect the fit by learning how to insert more ease in the armhole. Looked for relevant video instruction in this Craftsy online course daughter #2 bought me.  Instead I found the instructor slicing patterns up and taping them together again, drawing lines and moving darts around, which looked like way too much work for a blouse that already fits fine as long as I don’t raise my arms like Horschack. 

Blouse or Quilt?

My sister and I and our spouses have Seder production pretty well in hand by now, having taken the baton from our mother and aunt maybe 20 years ago.  My sister’s is remarkably traditional, her husband being remarkably qualified, for a non-Orthodox, non-professional Jew, to do a very good job of leading, complete with fluid Hebrew, nice melodies, and supplemental readings that he refreshes every year. He can also carve turkeys, which comes in handy twice a year.

Our Seder reflects my Jewishly mixed marriage; my husband being a fervently Secular, active Jew paired with my mainstream Conservative upbringing, fortified with immigrant grandparents who I saw on half the Sundays of my childhood.  We read the blessings, some of the Haggadah text and the highlight songs, but we also actually insert the Exodus story -- something the Hagaddah doesn’t do -- and we throw in Go Down Moses, the Partisan Song that’s the anthem of traditional lefty Jews, and a few Yiddish songs and readings, too.  

In our own ways, my sister and I both run steadier Seder ships than the ones we remember from home, where one aunt was always nibbling the haroset from the Seder plate by the fifth page, an uncle was getting too far ahead in the wine cups, the text was straight Maxwell House, and everyone tended to ignore and talk over my father, who stumbled along in slow, mistake-filled Hebrew. (My mother’s cooking got the respect it deserved, though.)

  

We had 15 this year.  I miscounted and only set for fourteen.  I explained to the non-Jewish guests that in our tradition, the Seder starts with a round of musical chairs.  No fooling them, though.  Actually, there’s little left to teach the Episco friends and the presumably baptized nonbelievers. They’ve all been to other Seders already, and this isn’t their first with us, except for Fred’s new girlfriend.

It’s been painfully long since there were any children among us to introduce anything to. Having not procreated myself until past 30, I cannot point the finger at my kids.

The chairs that have been left empty by departed relatives are being filled not with new little Jews, but by non-Jewish friends and boyfriends.  The good part is that these are friends whose company we like, whose interest in our Seder is a compliment to our program and my cooking.  Then there’s the whole ecumenical thing, the openness, the sharing.  We also behave better when it's not all family. The bad part, of course, is that we're shrinking in the numbers by which we -- at least up till my generation here -- count ourselves. 

Somewhere between good and bad is a new self-consciousness about what's in the text, if we hear it through non-Jewish ears.  My brother-in-law, for example, as part of his annual commemoration of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising -- which took place on Passover -- had his daughter's boyfriend read aloud this long sad list of pogroms and exiles from the beginning of Jewish recorded time.  And Josh, being direct, finished reading it and said, only half joking, "I'm feeling like the bad guy here."  

Now of course a) he’s not the bad guy but b) the list is quite personally true, despite our own safety and comfort. My brother-in-law’s own mother made it out of Vienna on the second-to-last boat leaving from somewhere in Europe. We are missing all this old-country family whose pictures and even letters we have; people we might have known, visited and even brought here or at least Skyped and spoken Yiddish/Russian/English with, if not for that terrible history. But I wonder if this long, much-recited litany of persecution is what makes the world so eager to catch Israel discriminating against others.  To unseat us from our high horse. To say, see, it's what countries/people do. 

Either that, or I’m falling into the all-about-me trap, again.  Other peoples have histories of loss, escape, victimization.  On the third hand, they all try to memorialize it.  Is our list just longer?  Should we skip a few?

Before Riverdance, Before Green Bagels...

So there’s now only hours left in which to blog about St. Patrick’s Day.   If you’ve read this blog before (or even just the title) you already know that Michael Bloomberg and I are about equally Irish (well actually him a bit more, since I’m sure he attends the parade, he’s probably been to Ireland at least once, and I think he wears those white cableknit sweaters even on other days).

Of course I usually try to wear some green on St. Patrick’s Day and always did when I was a kid, simply because it was fun to match everyone else in school and on the street. Here was harmless conformity that didn’t threaten or conflict with my Jewish identity; it was in fact a perfect fit with my New York Cityness, in my outer-borough way, and my parents’ before me.  Weren’t our neighbors, on the other side of the wall that separates row houses in Queens, born-in-Ireland Irish? Mrs. Vardi even had a brogue.  Even our teachers were more Irish than anything else, in those years before the wave of graduating Jewish ed majors crested. Our principal was a Miss Calahan.  For third grade, Mrs. Mulhern.

Pupils and teachers, Irish and not, all held some kind of St. Patrick’s Day observance every year. So on this particular March 17 of the sixties, here’s me, six years old, sitting with my similarly green-clad schoolmates in the auditorium of PS 102 Queens, where the teacher at the piano is playing Irish music.  There’s a nice, deep, wood-paneled proscenium stage in front and framed prints of famous paintings on the walls; paintings, like Gainsborough’s Blue Boy and  Seurat’s La Grande Jatte,  that I will recognize for the rest of my life as those I first met in PS 102. Of course there’s an American flag in one corner and I think the flag of New York City, the one with the windmill and beaver, in the other.

That day some teacher asked -- I forget who -- if anyone knew how to dance an Irish jig. I know this was loooong before Riverdance.  I think it was long before the Irish dancing trend hit regular neighborhood kids. Far as I know, none of my friends took Irish dancing lessons, and while I remember the strange sight of miniature bridal gowns (or so they looked to me) on seven-year olds in the spring, I never saw any kids (and certainly not the O’Hares on my block) sporting any of those $500-and-up Irish dancing costumes kids get today with the stiff, short flared skirts and the elaborate piping.

But at some point in my six years to that point, I must’ve seen some Irish people, or non-Irish people, dancing jigs. It looked to me like a simple matter of raising your knee and kicking or toe-stepping your foot at three corners of an imaginary square. So I raised my hand.  I distinctly remember my teacher, knowing that I had to be one of the least Irish people at PS 102 Queens (this being years before the Asian influx), exchanging  glances with the piano-playing teacher and shrugging.  

Then she nodded to me, I went up to the middle of the stage, the piano player played, and I proceeded to do my best approximation of an Irish jig, steps I must’ve seen on Ed Sullivan, or Danny Kaye, or (the previous year, before getting the bus for afternoon kindergarten) Captain Kangaroo. 

My dancing wasn’t good enough to draw applause or bad enough to offend.  What it did do was encourage all the kids with just slightly less chutzpah to suddenly remember that they knew how to do the Irish jig, too, and pretty soon, one by one, we amassed a whole stage full of Irish jiggers, all high stepping and kicking into the corners of their imaginary squares.

That’s all I remember about that.  This is a memory of a fearlessness that must have hit its peak when I was six, on a day before the dawn of doubt.  

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.  

Making it Under Deadline

The most important thing is to get started, right? Because I have resolved to start this blog by New year’s Day, 2013, and thrown every conceivable procrastination device in the path of this goal, acting no better than Congress over this Christmas vacation week.

I’ve tried first to learn a CMS (content management system). Someone told me to learn Joomla, and I’m up to Chapter Ten in an actual book I bought at an actual, brick-and-mortar Barnes & Noble. I might eventually move my blog and my website into Joomla … but that may take another week. Better to start writing.

Border print from Tanzania

I’ve sewn several skirts and a dress first, because daughter #2 was over for part of the week, and who can argue with time spent sewing clothes for and with one’s daughter? She had this wonderful dark green border print that her friend the adventurer had brought her from her six months volunteer teaching in Tanzania -- a trip that included scaling Mt. Kilimanjaro; something the girl had to accomplish before starting law school at Tulane. The same night my kid returned home to DC, she finished the skirt on her new machine. She texted me a picture around midnight. Ta da! Beautiful orange birds hiding among beautiful dark green pleats.

I have another skirt in the works for my sister, with wool so fine the nearest I can find to it at Joanne’s (not nearly as nice) was going for over $29 a yard. My sister picked up acres of this in grey and tan at a garage sale for $5. Her skirt is 80% done -- but I won’t see her for a while. Better to start writing.

I have to finish preparing for a “Are You Smarter than a Fifth-Grader”-style game show I’m organizing for the Hebrew School kids and parents of my congregation, but that’s not for two weeks. Better to start writing.

Then there’s the news. I have to know about the fiscal cliff and Hillary’s blood clot and “Gangnam Style” promotion in South Korea and Indian women protesting outrageous treatment and Russian Jews in Israel and stories much more arcane than these because they’re all there tempting me in the margins of Google News or in print on the kitchen table.

Could I cop the writer plea? Procrastination is what writers do. And in other media and for other purposes, writing is what I get paid for.

McCalls 6570

But as with most who write for money, it’s the non-paid, extracurricular prose that’s where the heart lies and the ego feeds. And if I don’t get that started, I’ll be remembered as the one who sewed. Not what I intended. I’ll remember myself (less eternally) as the one who fled from the keyboard to the sewing machine for the less iffy and much more tangible proposition of DIY wardrobe. Considering Lord & Taylor can’t lure me out of the house with screaming good sales, I’d call that avoidance. Fair statement?

I’ve also delayed blogging because it’s embarrassingly narcissistic: I strongly suspect that more people write blogs than read them. If I want to attract any readers, I’ve got to put some value in here.

M6579 pattern envelope pic

Notwithstanding my use of sewing as a procrastination device, I hope to attract some fellow sewers. Making clothes is a whole new ball game, now that sewing’s gone social like everything else. People review patterns and pin up pictures of their projects. You can see, before you cut, how things look on bodies like your own around the Latin-lettered sewing world, not models or drawings. You can find 25 Youtube demonstrations of the narrow hemming foot -- and those are just the ones in English. I can’t believe the number of sewing blogs out there, some miserably spelled, some wonderfully written. I’ll gladly contribute to this conversation.

I also hope to attract some readers with the other broad, recurring themes of my life, some introduced or hinted at here. Taken all together, I share them with a good chunk of the reading world.

There. I’ve started, just a tad past deadline.  Just like Congress...