Dinosaurs & DIY Disasters – Making A-do & A-mending By Way of Creative Alterations

Which bitch is which?

 I’ve been a charity shop shopper for donkeys – years, that is, not actually for donkeys, that would be a pretty niche market I reckon – and one thing I’ve gleaned from all this sorting and sifting is: you’re bound to find your ‘that’s-exactly-what-I-was-looking-for!’ dress, or coat or whatnot only to find it has shoulders an American football player would be proud of!  What to do?

In the past I would go for the get-it-and-leave-it-in-a-pile-of-‘Things to Adjust’-a-little-unsure-of-how-to-go-about-it-all option. And then, when I did have a go, I’d invariably be left with something kinda wonky and I’d look kinda wrong.

Mr Glittery commented earlier in the year, when observing my humungous scrap heap collection of car crash couture awaiting a nip and tuck, that all this potential to-do-ing must be adding to my general confusion. He was right. So

A match made at the Make Lounge

recently, Tuesday night for a couple of weeks was spent at the Make Lounge making do with and a-mending some of my finds at their Creative Alterations course.

I took along the remains of my once precipitous pile: an oversized dinosaur print sweatshirt I spied when I worked at Rokit, a shapeless Hawaiian print shift, and a but-it-looked-nice-on-the-hanger red silk dress I’d picked up in the £3 sale in TRAID.

The class was led by Nin Castle, founder of Goodone, who “…produce innovative, quality, one-off clothing which is made from hand-picked, locally-sourced, recycled fabrics.”  Having gone round the table and waxed lyrical about our visions for the stuff we’d brought Nin noshed a biscuit or two – biscuits abound at the Make Lounge – then urged us to get real.
Her top tips:

Needing something to be bigger is not better where adjusting clothes is concerned.  Making something smaller is far easier.

Which stitch is which?

However drastic a makeover you’re planning, just do one thing at a time and assess your progress – it may not need as much tinkering as you anticipate.

The Make Lounge has a relaxed vibe with just the right amount of focus to make sure you get what you came for.  We tried on, trimmed and tacked our pieces together with the aid of Nin, the overlocker and a glass of wine.  And if  Nin was otherwise engaged with a creative query, then Make Lounge owner, Jennifer Pirtle was always there to lend a helping hand.

When I asked Jennifer about the Make Lounge strapline ‘Meet People Make Stuff’ she said to her the meeting is just as important as the making. Traditional crafting courses on offer were either too long winded, or too long in the tooth (old fashioned) and held in drafty church halls said Jennifer.  And so, the concept of short, practical, yet fun courses – you can make anything from frilly
knickers to candles in a tea cup – hosted in a sociable and stylish environment – with biscuits – was born.

I went with a friend who was trying to rectify some DIY disasters and we met an eclectic gaggle – giggle? – of women ranging from a classic, sophisticated, business lady who’d lost weight, to a tall, arty type wanting to adjust and update a lacklustre family heirloom.  And we left with some craftily altered outfits.

So make lounge not war on your wardobe and get creative.  ‘Make lounge’, geddit? It’s funny right?  No?

Magpie Genes & Charms of Hummingbirds – Making Jewellery out of Memories

I’ve had a magpie gene since I was a twinkle in my daddy’s eye (errrgh). One of my oldest memories is spreading the contents of my Nanny’s button bag across the carpet like a treasure trove. And my estate to date comprises: a tatty silver tinsel Christmas tree; a pair of clip on crystal cluster earrings donated by Les Dawson look-a-like Grandma Last; a tiny rose pendant dad bought me from Miss Selfridge because I told him I liked it but my then boyfriend didn’t; and a few avian-themed pieces, partly a nod to Hitchcock’s The Birds, partly a symbol of freedom, partly cos I just like ’em.

Memories are made of many things, but jewellery acts as a kind of tangible portal, a shimmering path, to nostalgia-ville. Making jewellery, or having it made for you – as in the case of my now defunct engagement ring – also imbues a piece with memories and meaning. A few weeks ago I went to Treasure, part of Coutts jewellery week, and met a cluster (?) of jewellers using vintage pieces in their work. One in particular, Rosie Weisencrantz, focussed on this idea, creating what the company terms ‘memorial’ jewellery, made from pieces left by deceased loved ones, “As each precious life is personal to the one who lived it, every necklace tells it’s own unique story.”.

So having found myself washed up on the sandy shores of Southend-on-sea-the-place-to-be once more, seemingly destined to re-live this chapter of my life repeatedly, until I discover that certain something… I’ve finally come to understand you just have to go-with-the-flow. So I am learning to lurve my home by indulging in another fave pastime, beach combing. When I was a wee nipper smacks of jellyfish used to silently terrorise beach combers with their alluring crystalline cabochon bodies; and way before that Amy-Johnson-queen-of-the-air lost her way, or ran out of fuel or something, somewhere round here, disappearing plane ‘n’ all beneath the waves, waiting to be discovered by one of those men with a clickity-click-metal-detector. I’ve been less adventurous collecting sea glass – bits of broken bottles smoothed, shaped and frosted by the sea – which I aim to turn into re-used, wearable, treasure-able jewels.

Scanning the stony, sandy shore for shards of glass glinting in the sun is a peaceful preoccupation. Tortoiseshell butterflies camouflaged amongst the stones take flight, disturbed by my inquisitive fingers. Birds strut, squawk and glide silently against the slightly eerie watery-Whistler-esque-scapes flecked with diamond light. But this is just the beginning of the process – how to join the sea glass pieces once I’ve drilled them? It’s a work in progress.

 Last weekend I attended a course at Cockpit Arts in Holborn, “a social enterprise and the UK’s only creative-business incubator for designer-makers”, on making silver jewellery. It was the tutor’s first time tutoring, just as it was my time silversmithing, which was …interesting.

We sawed sheet silver with blades, hardly wider than a string on a bow, which snapped with the slightest sign of inappropriate pressure – “This is really a magical… mystical process,” the tutor said to me when I told him I had  gotten through 6 of my 12 blades in a morning. “You have to be calm. Meditate. The metal knows if you are angry and it fights against you.”

Madeleines, memories & moustaches

But patience has to be partnered with brute strength I reckon. I sustained a groin injury from trying to push metal through a press and nearly seared my eyebrows off with the blow torch. But I soldered on (sorry – couldn’t resist)… quietly focussed on creating ‘something’ – despite the fact my outer-circle-frame-thingy pinged off and set me back a tad, meaning I ended up with a pendant instead of the planned ring.

However, going with the flow worked like a charm. As luck would have it I’d wanted to make a pendant in the first place, seeing as I’m collating a hummingbird (?) of charms in order to create a necklace for my sister, in celebration of the birth of her first child. Did you know a group of bedazzling hummingbirds is a ‘charm’? I wonder what the collective noun for memories is…a Madeleine, perhaps?

Make Your Own Memories:
Designer Courses – Expert tinkering tips
Flux Studios – Vicky Forrester’s courses aim to be affordable
Jewelry Lessons – DIY demos

Sock Tactics

Part 3:
Socks & Tights

If you were to cast your mind back… oooh, say, to February, then you may remember reading Part 2 of a series of 3 blog posts on Foundations and have been eagerly anticipating the third… Yes, I knew it! Well, here it is at long last. Having paid too much attention to balancing cherries atop a partially baked pastry shell I find myself here, 3 months later, writing the last in this series – oooh, it sounds so fancy! – lying in a pool of jam amongst pie debris, all too familiar with what happens when your foundations are flimsy.

If I’d heeded the warnings emanating from my wardrobe, I may have realised that the Norah

Sock of doom

Batty-esque wrinkling of my over the knee socks was a harbinger of foundation doom. I mean, if the the actual look of flagging footwear isn’t bad enough, it’s the feel of it sliding slowly down your leg – a kind of creeping sensation I imagine they are referring to in vintage horror films when they say, ‘Oooh, that ghastly face at the window really gave me the creeps’.

Speaking of which, hosiery meets eco-horror in this spoof film, The Sockfather – Part 1 …

As this film demonstrates the humble sock can be environmentally devastating. But like most things, it’s not the socks that ruin the environment its the feet that wear them – leaving their carbon footprints all over Mother Nature’s clean floor, tut. However the sock, like the brief, is now available in a range of eco-friendly materials, notably lenpur and bamboo, which are breathable and deodorising – phew.

Obviously comfortable, well-fitting, hosiery should never be underestimated, but I also have certain style prerequisites: I like a long sock, in either a black or ‘natural’ shade, all the better to hide that flash of fuzzy, white,

A good sock is hard to find

 bruised flesh when your trouser hems ride up as you sit down. However finding eco or ethical hose which reaches my standards has proved perplexing. Boots has a pretty good range of basic green black socks and tights, but for the longer length I desire I’ve had to trawl the net, and at last I’ve found G=9.8 which are made from the aforementioned lenpur – tree cellulose no less.

All well and good except eco-friendly tan tights / stockings / pop socks – yes, the most unsexy footwear known to woman after orthopaedic sandals, but a necessary wardrobe evil, I find – is still proving as elusive as the Scarlet Pimpernel. So until I discover such an item I am going on with the regular ones and endeavouring to find ways to re-use them. Having rejected the bank robber’s mask as too cliched, I was really at a loss as to how else to re-use my hole-y hose. But then I came across this little gem: why not turn your tights into a necklace? It just goes to show that off the right feet and in the right hands anything can be transformed into treasure…

Re-use those hose…

Stuff ‘n Nonsense – The Woolworth Heiress & the Cathedral of Commerce

 I was walking past the soon to be defunct Brixton branch of Woolies last month watching people snap themselves in front of the shop shutters, shutting for the last time and I got to thinking about stuff.

Inside the shelves were as bare as Old Mother Hubbard’s cupboard, save for a few things you’d have to pay people to buy and I thought of the stuff infesting my pre-purged room. Stuff waiting to be adapted, adorned and updated, mostly with other stuff I’d buy from Woolworths on the way home from work. Stuff which I enjoy mending and making into more stuff I will enjoy wearing, but which I suspect may actually be the stuff of procrastination.

Oh, the path of procrastination, how familiar is its meandering terrain…  I used to procrastinate by way of creating the perfect capsule wardrobe. Now I am creating an ethically sound and spiritually up-lifting wardrobe and I have to stop and ask myself, is this more stuff ‘n’ nonsense? Am I seeking a material solution to my immaterial desires?

Because if there was ever a cautionary tale concerning the trappings of excess – or stuff – then it is that of Barbara Hutton. Babs and I first met on the cover of Tatler. Well, actually, it was a modern-day zebra-striped, fur-clad, jewel-dripping, forties-style faux Babs; perched neatly in the white tuxedo-ed arms of a Gillette-the-best-a-man-can-get guy in wayfarers; their perfect smiles glinting against the painted desert backdrop. The strap line read ‘Too Rich to Walk’.

Barbara was the granddaughter of Frank Woolworth, founder of the Woolworth discount stores, known more familiarly as Woolies in the UK. And she was the Woolworth Heiress  life-couldn’t-get-better-than-this American dream princess.

Cathedral of commerce

When Barbara was a little girl she found her mother dead, like a discarded doll, on the bathroom floor – broken spirited, broken hearted. Her daddy deserted her. Her aunts passed her around like a mis-addressed parcel. While her grandfather, Frank, was ever busy with business and building his ‘Cathedral of Commerce’ – a Neo-Gothic tower of Babel, the tallest building to grace the golden streets of the Big Apple, the tallest building in the world, poking up through the clouds, like a finger held up at heaven.  Only to be trumped, in a New York Minute, by the futuristic, crystalline Cathedral of Cars, the Chrysler building.

Eventually over-shadowed by the World Trade Center the Woolworth Tower was relegated to making cameo appearances in feature films like Cloverfield, where it played itself crushed under foot by the Godzilla-gargoyle-esque creature as if in some sort of hubristic retribution only mildly worse than the American-based stores becoming Foot Locker.

More recently the building has found its acting niche, playing the headquarters of Mode magazine in the US TV series Ugly Betty. What with frivolous fashion being shorthand for crass consumerism the building seems fated for such a role. And I cannot help but imagine the tormented ghost of the Marie-Antoinette-esque Millionaire Heiress haunting its [s]hallowed halls.

Dubbed the Poor Little Rich Girl by the mock sympathetic press, Babs sought solace in upmarket candy stores Cartier, Asprey and Van Cleef buying the love she’d been deprived of as a child, marrying numerous husbands including silver screen Prince Charming Cary Grant, who said:

‘Barbara surrounded herself with a consortium of fawning parasites – European titles, broken-down Hollywood types, a maharajah or two, a sheikh, the military, several English peers and a few tennis bums. If one more phoney earl had entered the house, I’d have suffocated.’

Being an American Dream Princess is not enough when you feel worthless.

And so Babs did not live happily after, dying pretty much penniless. Her Regent’s Park pad, in some curious homage to the American Dream, becoming the U.S. Ambassador’s London residence.

I guess the stuff of dreams, the immaterial, best-things-in-life-are-free stuff we truly yearn for, is often mistakenly believed to be the material stuff we convince ourselves our [American] dreams are made of – a bit like the rubbish dump the short-sighted mole has mistaken for a fairytale castle in an animation I saw some years ago. Stuff in itself isn’t bad, but it can be a glaring distraction that can tempt you to over-look the wardrobe for the clothes.

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Fear & Loathing in Marks & Spencer’s – Where have all the Good Pants Gone?

Angst In My Pants:
Part 2 – Pants
An ill-fitting or unsightly pair of pants can  curb your enthusiasm no end, just as the perfect pair of everyday drawers can help you work, rest and play. Their inherent power is such that not only do superheroes sport briefs, but some have long since worn them over their tights – with pride.  Like the power behind the throne and all that, the role of pants is kinda taken for granted and they are used and abused with little to no thought, until one dares to bare, or they reveal themselves, usually via VPL or low slung slacks.  But more worryingly still, aside from causing low grade unease, according to the film, More than Pretty Knickers by Eco Boudoir, a really bad pair of pants can be bad for the planet.  Yes, the humble brief can be a toxic, energy guzzling, sweatshop produced menace.

So, armed with the knowledge your knickers could be more evil than Evel Knievel you try to find some kinder, ethical, eco-friendly, everyday underpants at a reasonable cost to you and the environment. 

How bad are your pants?

This, dear reader was my pant plan.  Setting out with a jaunty air of optimism and anticipation at some planet-loving pant action  I entered the underwear aisle of ‘your’ M&S only to have my hopes dashed and my plans foiled.  The place was awash in Fairtrade Cotton t-shirts and vests, yes, but knickers – nada.  I had hitherto not considered such an eventuality and this left me stumped.  The question was: where could I get me some good-for-everything, everyday briefs at an ever so nice price?

Fear not! I not only come armed with some good pants solutions, but also, I have some brief advice as to finding your perfect partner in pants anti-eco-crime.

Colour
The 70s penchant for the beige and brown colour palette has left a certain someone I know marred by the memory of being presented with a pair of brown y-fronts adorned with a fetching stamps of the world print, trimmed in orange – not to mention some vague consternation at his mother’s misguided notion that he was into philately. 

Everyday underwear should be understated, colour wise, I reckon, but, also there’s the whole dirty dye issue, which begs the question, do your patterned pants have something to hide?

The 70s was pants for pants

Fabric
Same guy, same pants, that other 70s obsession, nylon knickers, and a pair of polyester slacks, with cowboy and Indian print pockets – result:  sweat pants.  How a pre-pubescent boy could perspire that much has a remained a mystery to this day, but he has harboured a grudge against them postage stamp pants ever since. 

Cotton, of course, is the fabric of choice – as it’s supposedly kind to your behind, but it’s not always so great for mankind.  More sustainable fabrics like bamboo and Lenpur, a fibre made from cultivated tree clippings, are becoming popular alternatives – whatever doesn’t tickle your fancy is key to fabric choice… ahem.

Style & Fit
Once, on a camping trip with my family, I awoke to find I was wearing a huge pair of man’s olive green, tanga pants.  Was this a Jekyll and Hyde type situation I wondered vaguely. Had I been a fully grown male at night, only to awake my usual seven year old, girl self in the morning?  The truth was only slightly less sinister.  My little sister, her mind ravaged by days of Devon’s version of Deli Belly, had been awakened in the night by some strange grumbling noises she cunningly detected were coming from the vicinity of my knickers – this information from the same person who heard Rudolph get his antler stuck in the chimney.  So, naturally, given her past performance, my bleary-eyed parents took her at her word and finding it to be completely unfounded, continued in their somnambulist states to put me in some over-sized, misshapen, manky coloured dad pants – eergh.  So, yeah, style and fit maketh the pant.  

Go commando? I don't think so...

How to Wear
First wear your own.  Second wear one at a time – the aforementioned sister once wore about ten pairs she had taken a shine to, only for them to slide down her legs, gather in a heap at her feet and slip off into the street as she was being pushed along in her buggy.  Third, wear, some… If you’ve negated to wear your knickers, do not hold your skirt aloft in the middle of the Post Office and announce, ‘Mummy, mummy I’m not wearing any knickers!’ to all and sundry.  The apparent power inherent in going commando is totally diminished by scenes like these, but then again, going commando is pretty overrated unless you’re doing it for the fear factor – for most of us a good pair of pants is like an adult security blanket.

The Good – Bog Standard – Pant Guide
Make your tatty tees into new knickers – supernaturale
Say ‘pants’ to poverty and be a real do-gooder in the Pants to Poverty, Purely Natural, organic and fairtrade pants
Bag yourself some anti-bacterial bamboo briefs – Spirit of Nature

Part 1 – Bras

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