My friend, Blythe (an eerie Cassandra if ever there was one, and a fantastic author, too. Read her stuff!), referred to me as a dreamstress the other day. I love this term because it is an incisive encapsulation of the sort of sewing I do. I don’t sew clothing. Nothing you can find in a store will ever emerge from my machine, because bo-ring. I have made one ready-to-wear dress that I never ended up wearing and one hippie skirt that I never finished hemming. I’ll sew for mending sometimes, but I only make the sorts of things that you might want to take along on a trip to Faerie.
Anyways, NPR told me this morning that today is the anniversary of the day that the Singer sewing machine received its patent, so it seemed a fitting day to post a progress update on the coat I’m making.
Saturday was cutting, pinning, and Loki-appreciation day at Marie’s. We watched Thor, Thor II, and Iron Man 3 (no Loki in that one, but I so disliked the third Iron Man film that I wanted to give it another chance). Marie introduced me to the wonderfully insightful reviews written by Sonya Taaffe. I love the way she reads films and actors. These are the kind of reviews that make me want to go back and watch films again so that I can look for the nuances that she picks up on. Fantastic stuff.
Oh, and I guess I did some sewing. Mostly, I did some re-patterning to make a man’s coat fit a woman’s shape. I adjusted the front hemline to be assymetrical, and I did a bit of tinkering with the collar and sleeves. I’m a little miffed because the pattern I’m using doesn’t have the same seaming as the coat on the book cover. I could change it, but I really like the way the front hangs. I’m going to wait and see what Beth says. This might be the sort of detail that only another dreamstress would care about.
I took Sunday off (well, no. I did a bunch of work-work and editing on Sunday. There are no days off, only Zuul), and I started the actual sewing last night while I caught up on So You Think You Can Dance. I’m really happy with how this one is coming along. The fabric isn’t slipping or crawling as much as I feared it would, and Thrace only attacked the project once. I’ve pricked myself a few times, but I haven’t bled yet. It’ll happen, though. It always does. The blood christens the work. Makes it whole. Makes it holy. It’s not a completed project unless you’ve bled on it a little bit.
(and this is when Beth emails me and lets me know that, really, she doesn’t need the coat, kkthxbai!)
Game tonight, friend’s birthday tomorrow, and I have proofreading to do for Women Destroy Horror, so I probably won’t be getting any more work done on this until the weekend. I expect I’ll finish the major work on Saturday and do the buttons and finishing work on Sunday.
Ugh. Buttons. I hate buttons. Maybe I can talk Beth into frogs or swing clasps…
Alyc Helms 