Tuesday, April 24, 2012

I Sew Like a Girl

Longtime readers of this blog may remember the joy with which I discovered Jane Eayre Fryer's The Mary Frances Knitting and Crochet Book, an early 20th century kiddie lit masterpiece in which the title character has trippy (but educational) encounters with an animated pile of craft supplies, a fairy, and a petulant baby doll named Mary Marie.

Well, Mary Frances is back in da house. This week I didn't have to pull extra shifts at the forge and that left me free to concentrate on sewing doll clothes. There is, I maintain, no better companion to that than The Mary Frances Sewing Book, or Adventures Among the Thimble People.

mf-sewing

Everything that makes the knitting volume such a hoot was already present in this earlier volume, in which Mary Frances learns to cut and sew with guidance from such merry, indelible characters as Mr. Silver Thimble; Scissors Shears; Tommy the Tomato Pin Cushion; and Ma Chine, the matronly Sewing Machine. (Ma Chine–see what she did there? See?)

When the tale opens, Mary Frances is cooling her heels during summer vacation at the home of her grandmother. Her father has business in San Francisco (unspecified business, but I like to imagine it has something to do with white slavery as depicted in Thoroughly Modern Millie), and has taken dear, compliant mother along with him.

Brother Billy is away on a long camping trip with the Boy Scouts, leaving our heroine with only Grandma and bitter Aunt Maria for company.

It should be mentioned that there is another child in the house, an implausibly cheerful Irish maid-of-all-work named Katie.

Katie is barely older than Mary Frances; but while Mary Frances has nothing better to do with her time than lie on the verandah like a boneless chicken in a pinafore, Katie has to rise at dawn, scrub the floors, answer the door, cook, clean, carry parcels, and pretend to be delighted by the steady stream of expensive guilt presents that Mother and Father keep sending to their widdle princess from San Francisco.

I earnestly hope that after the Great War, Katie either married well enough to hire her own maid; or joined the American Communist Party and set fire to the ballroom with a Molotov cocktail on the night Mary Frances made her début.

The Sewing Book provides us with an Origin Story for Mary Marie, the prissy porcelain doll whose insatiable demands for warm clothing and accessories fuel so much of The Knitting and Crochet Book. She arrives from California nailed up in a crate–which Katie, of course, has to haul into the kitchen. Katie pries the crate open with her strong arms, toned from long years of work in a spinning mill, and out pops the doll. She's naked except for a frowsy little slip and a painted-on smile.

Where are her clothes? Does she have a wardrobe in the trunk that came with her? No, she does not. She has, instead, a pile of fabrics that mother's explanatory note reveals are for Mary Frances to use in learning to sew. Except there's a wrinkle.

Per Mother's note:

"I've asked Grandma to let you do exactly as you want to with these things, and I ask you not to go to her with your sewing problems: for the doctor said that Grandma must not strain her eyes with any such work. I know you understand."

Understand? What's to understand? You send your daughter a nearly-nude doll and a bunch of dry goods and–then what? Expect her to pull the proper methods for cutting, tailoring and dressmaking out of her twelve-year-old butt? Don't ask Grandma. Who the hell else is she supposed to ask? Katie? Not Katie. Katie pried the nails out of the damned crate and then had to go back to hauling ash buckets and picking weevils out of the grape arbor. And Aunt Maria is only good on days when the pharmacy won't send her any more laudanum or medicinal whiskey until she pays the bill.

This, of course, is where the fairies and the magic needles and the talking pincushion come into play. But is it truly good parenting to rely on that sort of thing happening to further your child's education?

I'll add that this sort of spotty affection has already taken a toll on Mary Frances's budding maternal instincts. It's never openly stated, but is strongly suggested, that she is as capable as her mother of shutting off affection like a water tap. Case in point: When the book opens she's already got a "daughter"–a doll named Angie. After Mary Marie rears her curly blonde head, Angie gets one more brief mention and then entirely disappears from the book. If that doesn't give you a chill, you have no heart. Where did Angie go? Was she put out on the street to fend for herself? Was she buried behind the vegetable patch in Mary Marie's crate? Did Mary Marie eat her?

Don't bother hunting through the rest of the canonical Mary Frances literature for any sort of latter day Velveteen Rabbit-style Angie redemption. That doll is just gone, baby. Gone.

Mind you, all this (and a miasma of C-list Art Nouveau illustration) tends to obscure that The Mary Frances Sewing Book is truly a thorough and well-done introduction to sewing. Though the projects are graded by difficulty, there is no dumbing down. Mary Frances begins with a sampler of common hand stitches; by the end, she's experienced at just about everything an adult dressmaker needs to know. The intended audience for this book may have been juvenile, but it was still expected to learn to do things the right way, not the easy way.*

Example. In my own project–I'm getting to it, don't scroll down yet–I considered using buttonholes,  so I spent some time working them using the step-by-step instructions dispensed to Mary Frances by Aunt Maria. I cross-referenced those with Claire B. Shaeffer in the classic, not-for-dummies Couture Sewing Techniques. The methods are identical.

Bad puns and questionable parenting aside, I ponder this book and then look at the modern equivalents–in which kids "learn" to slap ugly crap together with glue and tape because it's Kwik! and Eezee!–and I think Jane Eayre Fryer was really onto something. In addition to possibly being On Something.

Ethel, Now Half-Dressed

My own doll sewing took the lace I was knitting here and here and put it into a petticoat for poor Ethel, who until now has been nakeder than Mary Marie on the day she killed her sister.

I don't often say this about stuff I make, but this came out better than I expected. I have only the barest prior experience with sewing, but I was able to adapt the two petticoat (!) patterns in Mary Frances to fit Ethel's smaller, more womanly shape. Everything was sewn by hand using methods from the book.

petti-full

I learned a lot about working with handkerchief linen, including that it starts to fray like the dickens if somebody sneezes in the next room. I realized pretty quickly that none of the seams would last if they had raw edges, so every edge (inside and out) is finished. You know what? I'm proud of that. Even if my gathers aren't distributed as evenly as I would have liked. And even if I chickened out on putting in pin tucks.

petti-placket

Attaching the laces was a treat. (If you're curious about doing that sort of thing, I teach a class about it called Lace Edgings: Before, During and After.)

petti-page

Now she needs an underwaist and a dress. This time, I'm putting in buttonholes. If Mary Frances can do it, I can do it.

*Though it's amazing how often in sewing the right way, once fully learned, becomes the easy way.

Friday, April 20, 2012

Playing with Strings of Two Varieties

So, what have you been up to? I've been on the road. Kansas City and environs.

I thought this was my first visit to Kansas, but my father has since corrected me. Turns out that in 1974 we drove through on our way to a new assignment at Davis-Monthan Air Force Base in Tucson. We stopped at a rest area and had barely unfurled our picnic blanket when a sharp gust of wind carried it away. I weighed about as much as the blanket and was convinced I'd be next. I didn't stop screaming until we were back in the car heading for Oklahoma.

Now, Rodgers and Hammerstein said Oklahoma is where the wind comes sweeping down the plain, but they were native New Yorkers and knew bugger all about the Midwest.  On this visit, Kansas gave Oklahoma a run for the money–there was one superfestive night when both states broke out in tornadoes–and if I hadn't been so busy I might have worried once again about blowing away.

However, I was too preoccupied with yarn-related joy inside the hotel to bother with what was happening outside. The Sunflower Knitters Guild (an amazingly good group of people, even by knitting standards) puts on their festival–Knitting in the Heartlands–biennially. This was a growth year for the event, and I was honored to be the featured teacher at the moment when they expanded  to include a keynote address, more classes, and a marketplace that spilled out of one ballroom and into a second.

I love snooping around the vendors at regional events because you so often run into good stuff you haven't seen before. Here's some of what followed me home.

Yarns from KC

From top to bottom:
Before you ask–no, I did not punch up the blues in "Tenth Doctor." That's what it looks like in person. No way was I leaving it there for somebody else.

Not shown, but much coveted: Paco-Vicuñas yarns from Hickory Ridge Farms.  Not for the budget-conscious, perhaps, but dammit that vicuña fiber makes cashmere feel like asphalt.

While I was in Kansas City I did very little knitting. I don't mean I didn't knit much, I mean my knitting was very small. I finished the "Double Rose Leaf" lace insertion for Ethel's petticoat.

Insertion

That's all the lace I need for now, but I find myself feeling at a loss without something new on the US 00000 (1mm) needles. I may have to knit edges for a christening outfit just for the ducks of it, even though there's not an unchurched baby anywhere in the vicinity. Or maybe Ethel would like a fichu?

Meanwhile, the handkerchief linen is awaits cutting.

For Ethel's petticoat.

I'll also mention–in case you missed my jubilant screams on Twitter and Facebook–that while in Kansas City, I launched the pattern for the Anna Shawl.

The Anna Shawl

And that meant I was able to send Iceland Sky to the tech editor. He's making quick work of it, so if all goes well it will launch before I leave for my next trip–the Downtown Knit Collective Knitter's Frolic in Toronto, Canada.

A Floundering Minstrel I

One more thing. I spend so much time using the visual part of my brain–what with the knitting and the drawing and the photography and so forth–that a wise person of my acquaintance suggested I give my brain a rest and a stretch by taking up a creative endeavor that puts a different clutch of cells to work.

Which is why I now own a ukulele, upon which at present I can play three shaky chords.

New Buddy

Life is full of interesting things to do. If you're bored, it's your own fault.

Monday, April 02, 2012

Stars in My Eyes

I went to Iceland to teach knitting on a tour for knitters–and forgot to bring something to knit.

I left with knitting in my bag, sure. I didn't have a hat or neck warmer to wear on the trip, so I whipped them out en route. But that left me with nothing to knit once I landed.

Of course, in Iceland you are never more than two feet from a yarn display and I picked up two balls of Lopi Einband. Einband is Lopi's laceweight. Fuzzy, warm, decidedly on the crunchy side. Takes dye like a mofo, blocks like a dream.

Total cost: six United States dollars.

I started playing with the yarn during the tour, and now it looks like this. I'm calling it Iceland Sky–fathoms of blue studded with stars and draped in the aurora borealis.

skyshawl-collar


skyshawl-full

skyshawl-horiz

skyshawl-vert

Pattern forthcoming. This week, as soon as the Anna Shawl comes back from the splendid new tech editor, Iceland Sky heads out for him to review.

Sunday, April 01, 2012

Wow!

Look out the window, there's a parade! They have a marching band and cheerleaders and Nancy Bush is riding an elephant in a shiny bikini and working nupps!

Ha ha ha April Fool! Made you look!

Love,
Harry

PS Did I fool you? Ha ha!