Fashion, Embroidery & Stitch

Hello! Glad you made it over to my new blog page. I'll do my best to post here often and I hope that you'll think it's worth popping it on your list of favourites. At the moment it's all very minimal looking which isn't really my style. I'm going to do some work on prettifying it all up a bit so next time you visit it might look a bit more like someone lives here. Over on the sidebar there you'll find a few links to other projects I'm involved with. Hope you'll enjoy checking those out too.

Last weekend I was at Fashion, Embroidery & Stitch. Linda and I have had a stand there in the past and it's a lovely varied show. There's not the feeding frenzy around exhibits like there can be at Festival of Quilts, but nevertheless there's a nice atmosphere and plenty to see. The snow put pay to me taking Amelie along for all four days. She came with us on Thursday before the worst of the weather arrived, but after that it didn't seem worth risking getting stuck on the road in bad weather so she stayed home and played with G'ma. Felt quite strange being out and about without responsibility! 

We did our usual with the stand and piled it high with loads of stuff. Quilts on the wall and then fabric, cushions, threads and sketchbooks on the table. It all seemed to go down quite well. I did have one visitor take it all in and then come over and ask 'What's it for?'. I hesitated to answer for a moment thinking that maybe the question referred to something specific; I had pots of paint, gel medium and a sewing machine with an embroidery unit, all of which might prompt such an enquiry, but no! It was just a general query. Of course the simple answer is that it's not 'for' anything. As all the best things in life are, it's completely pointless.

 My favourite display of the stand was surprisingly the smocks. Well, it surprised me that I liked them so much anyway! Along with the 19th Century examples were miniature versions. I'm sure Amelie needs one so it's on the list.

Apart from the lovely stitching what appealed to me most was how the smocks are cut. Basically, us girls would go to the market and buy a piece of fabric that measured from our noses to the tip of an outstretched arm three times. That would be enough to make a smock for our man back home. We'd cut the fabric into thirds, one for the front, one the back and out of the final third all the other bits such as sleeve, collar, cuffs etc would be cut. All this would be done with straight lines, squares or rectangles. All of the shaping comes from the smocking.

It reminded me of the kimonos that I'd been reading about when doing some research for Orientation. A kimono is cut from a set length of fabric using straight cuts. All of the fabric is used and none is thrown away. In theory the kimono could at any time be dismantled and the original fabric length reassembled. I like that idea. Funny isn't it how these similar conventions evolve in parallel on two different sides of the world, borne out of necessity and economy of course. 

I have more photos from the show to share so I'll get them uploaded and will post again soon.

Laura

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