playing with time

a tale of three projects

The great thing about finishing a long, slow gauzy garment—

—is that I’m deeply attached to it before I even put it on.¹

The not so great part is that it is translucent,² a thing I probably need to bear in mind when deciding what to pair it with (and what I do while wearing).

Luckily it is white so almost anything will match (over or under)—though as I am partial to blue and white and prefer to be sartorially truthful in my comics, this much mended skirt may get more wear than ever.³

Of course that’s also hard since every time I put it on the cloth dissolves a tiny bit more.

Happily, mending means I get to think about all we’ve been through together—and all that the mend might allow us still to do.

Spending time contemplating time, however can freak a person out.

Except in this case, committing few days to weaving time meant I got to notice both my tendency to go all earnest about it—

—and word’s refusal to be anything but expansive, colorful and playful.

But—you know—sometimes I don’t feel expansive, colorful or playful.

Luckily I now live with a being who gets more playful every day and who, like the word time, insists that I participate in the delight of the moment regardless of how I feel—galloping around our yard with her floppy red frisbee (at least after the temperature finally drops), until, exhausted, we flop on the bed to pant madly before diving into sleep.

Alas, that leads to dog hair on the bed (the current hot dry weather has her shedding like crazy), so I need to cover my fur-magnet hand spun blankets with something easily shake-out-able.

Actually I’m pretty happy about that since since the cloth of choice is this beloved blue Boro Blanket⁴— and it wasn’t getting much use before Beryl.

Naturally that leads to the blanket⁵ (like the skirt), needing to be washed and mended more often than ever—

—even as incorporating other favorite fragments into the Boro’s history has its own pleasures, including remembering the existence of a lovely linen sheet that might make a yummy garment.

But using it means cutting into said sheet (and I’m rotten at deconstructing large pieces of cloth—much better at building things out of small sections). It also makes me feel sad about the short and specific life of fitted sheets.⁶

Then again I bought these sheets long ago in hope that when the middle wore out I could make things with the edges. And I now the time has come.

(I’ll note here that the hard part about yellow cloth is that it is apparently impossible—for me at least—to photograph the color consistently, even as I love how the camera makes it match the lichens.

And I can’t begin to list the many good parts of passing hundreds of nights enfolded in scrumptious linen of any color, so instead will pause to share the present pleasure of spending daylight hours with lengths of it on my lap.

Though alas, I now see that I should perhaps put as much effort into camera/phone safety as the relaxed stitching I’m trying to record.

Of course that wee accident had its good parts: first that screen didn't crack (yay phone case), and second that it led me to share some of the sewing with a stable mechanical device.

Naturally I got a touch distracted on the way from my perch on the porch to the machine inside (where the temperature was a manageable 85 or so)—

—but how not to be susceptible to ripe snow peas and the myriad ways my spool of thread matches this tiny world?

Or, for that matter, the satisfying sound of a White Rotary treadle being good at its job.

Of course there is always a drawback—this time that the very efficiency of the machine meant that all too soon I was putting in the last few stitches and this pleasurable project was over.

And yet, wow! Suddenly I have a brand new gossamer garment—light and comfortable as air—that together with the translucent sweater almost makes a decent outfit.

Though maybe—not quite.

Oops. Time for bloomers?

I love hearing from you—such great and wise thoughts and interesting lives you have—so remember to comment with the button below rather than hitting reply, for with the latter your words won’t get to me and worse—won’t be seen and enjoyed by everyone in our little world.

1. So many moments of haptic pleasure and connection: choosing the fleece, washing and drying (fiddling with locks all the while because who can resist fresh clean fleece), carding (a half pound or so at a time), then moments, hours, days, weeks, months of spinning and spinning knitting and spinning and knitting and knitting (reluctantly stopping when it hurt), and spinning some more until suddenly I have a wordless wearable memento of a memorable, intense (and often foggy), year.

2. Yarn: spindle spun Debouillet/Targhee from Wolf Point, Montana; 2 ply; approximately 3500 yards per pound (measured on a McMorran Balance; 7.5 stitches per inch; size US 1 (2.25 mm) needles; Design: generic top down raglan.

3. It came into my life maybe 20-ish years ago as a short sleeved linen dress. After a few years I transformed it into a long skirt (cut open the shoulders, removed the sleeves, shaped the waist a tiny bit and put a zipper into one of thesleeve holes).

I wore it a lot but it was hard to walk with full strides so eventually I cut the bottom off to wear with—and without—leggings. (I never used to wear short skirts, but as my legs have grown wrinklier I’ve grown increasingly fond of the freedom of having them unconstrained— go figure).

This iteration has been so satisfying that as you can see the fabric is slowly dissolving from wear and now the entire inside is lined —with the piece I cut off the bottom and other scraps of blue cloth. Repairs are made both by hand and machine.

4. Another long term mending/making project that began as a torn sides-to middle flannel sheet that came to me as casual and insufficient padding for a package of dentable things (that arrived dented). I couldn’t fix the dents but could fix the the sheet by stitching the good bits of my son’s favorite flannel fish sheets over the top. The original sheet is now entirely encased, and eventually (I hope), the fish will slip under other layers too. Time in a blanket?

5. Yes, alas I really do have a LOT of things that are mostly mends. I get attached, don’t cha know. Some day I might have to try to account for all of them here. But not today…

6. Happily, over years with a restless sleeper I’ve gotten better at finding uses for the good bits of worn sheets: making or mending delicate clothes, sewing breathable bags for storing tapestries or fleece, using pieces as window coverings, cutting them into hankies or cleaning clothes for glasses, using them to mend each other. I’ve also come to prefer buying extra large top sheets that can be rotated, top to bottom and bottom to top.