I’ve done a couple projects with rayon velvet in the past several months – first the Ezio tailcoat lining, and later a kimono jacket that I made for a Christmas present – and sometimes I could swear that fabric is possessed. It likes to creep when you try to mash two layers together at the seams, with the result that the upper layer scoots in one direction while the lower makes a break for it in the other. Basting is more or less mandatory, but even holding the fabric still while you thrash it into submission with hand stitches can be challenging—and then it still creeps, because hand stitches don’t flatten the pile the way machine stitches do. And of course you can’t press the stuff properly unless you shell out $$$ for a needle board to protect the pile. (Yeah, I’m a jerk and haven’t gotten around to buying one. If this means I have to spend hours understitching things by hand then WHOOPS OH WELL SO SAD.)
Mind you, I still love the hell out of the final results. It’s soft and fluid in a way I’ve never gotten from synthetic velvets, you can do interesting stamping and embossing things, it weathers beautifully, and the pile and drape make it pretty forgiving of wobbly seams. Besides, I’ve already stashed away about six yards for a pirate coat I’ve been contemplating, and I’m trying to be better about not buying a lot of fabric I’ll never get around to using. I really want to try combining velvet and embroidery, and have been going on 18th-century court costume pinning sprees. Yeah, I totally have time to do something like that!
I also recently scored an intensely cool book to help me out on my next velvet project. This was a birthday present from my folks, and there’s a bit of a funny story attached. There’s a little junk shop around the corner from my parents’ house, and my mom has picked up quite a few weird knicknacks and relics there. We’ve popped in there many times during my visits home, just to paw through buckets of antique handkerchiefs, rifle the vintage patterns and postcards, and linger over weird costume jewelry. So one day my mom was walking by this little gold mine and the proprietor ran after her saying “Oh my god, you have to come in and see this book!” Needless to say, it found its way into my hands shortly thereafter.
As the title indicates, this is a book all about velvet, velveteen, and corduroy. It must have been mad expensive to print, because it’s got two different page sizes, several dozen swatches, and rockin’ illustrations (including full-color photos).
Pile Fabric Primer title page – you can see the swatches are attached to larger pages interleaved with the small text pages
Possibly the coolest spread in the book – swatches of corduroy, velveteen, and velvet from each stage of manufacturing, to illustrate the different processes
The book is illustrated with rad engravings
And also weird atmospheric photographs
The copyright date is 1970, and it’s in great shape – the pile is a little crushed on some of the swatches, as one might expect from a book that’s been crammed onto a shelf for god knows how long, but only one was missing.
I went ahead and dug around in my parents’ basement for an appropriately aged swatch of corduroy to replace it. I can’t vouch for the exact vintage of the scrap I dug up, and the color doesn’t quite match the Harvest Gold extravaganza in the rest of the book, but I think it’s in the right ballpark.
Most of the book is about the history and manufacturing of these fabrics, but it’s got a pretty solid chapter on sewing and garment care at the end.
A pretty amazing find, all in all. Thanks, Mom!
I spent the holidays visiting family in Portland and came back to a gnarly cold, so I’ve been offline mostly. I have bits and pieces of a half-dozen different projects brewing, but not much complete or bloggable due to frequent breaks for interacting with actual living people (you know how it goes). We had a house full of cats this year, including the two year’rounders (Purl and Felecia, aka Puddin’ and the Tiny Murderbeast) plus a visitor (Frederick Bear, who lost no time at all making himself at home.) So between Cat Politics, the photo-shy dog, and a full schedule of family and friends, it’s been a busy two weeks.
A visit to my parents’ basement is always both inspiring and sobering, crammed as it is with the creative paraphernalia of three generations. There are flat files full of art papers, bins of paints, bookbinding and framing supplies, beads and embroidery flosses, origami paper, bits of wire, chunks of wood, bins of yarn that we inherited from my mom’s mother, the legendary knitter, and of course boxes and boxes of fabric and patterns.
A few of the pieces here are my doing, though most of my stash is in NYC with me. Some of it came from my great grandmother, mostly corduroys and polyester prints. Most of it belonged to my dad’s mom, who contributed a good six or eight boxes—the big stapled-together kind with matching cardboard lids that they use to ship oranges (complete with assorted retro branding.)
Grandma had excellent taste, and apparently spent a few of her youthful years in New York being MEGA GLAM. So a few of those boxes contained very fine cottons, silks, and wools. She favored soft, watercolor-y florals, often in pastel colors, vivid batiks, and occasional polka dots, none of which are exactly my cup of tea, but the quality of the fabrics is apparent. There are several yards of pink and turquoise plaid mohair that she once remembered to me in particular, plus a treasured bit of burnout velvet that her mother bought in the ’30s (which I’m a little afraid to even touch.) She definitely frequented the remnant racks, and there are a lot of interesting small cuts of wool and wool blends, some of them with labels still attached.
She also had an impressive collection of sixties and seventies prints, many of them LOUD LOUD LOUD. I can’t begin to imagine wearing some of these, but since I’ll be the first to admit that my own affinity for basic, wearable fabrics is boring as hell, I don’t think that’s a bad thing. Here’s a sampling of prints that made me smile, but there’s a lot more where that came from:
Of course grandma had a pattern stash to match the fabric. She clearly favored Vogue patterns, and she had specimens from the late 1950s all the way through the early 2000s, about half of them with designer names. This included a truly staggering number of caftans and jumpsuits, three envelopes of hats from when people actually wore hats, evening and outerwear options from every era, beachwear, and every imaginable flavor of skirt suit and shift dress, plus a handful of styles for kids and men.
Not all the patterns are in great condition; not all are complete. This was very much a working collection.
Only the dress?! I WEEP.
We’ve even found several garments that she actually finished, stored in her actual wardrobe. V1551 and V6771, for example, both from the mid-1960s by the pattern date:
This one is still totally wearable, no? I did some minor repairs and added a hook and eye to the top of the zipper.
The fabric on this one is a lovely silk or pseudo-silk, but I dare say the print didn’t age so well. I also raided my high school shoe collection for this shoot, because all I’d brought with me was boots. Haw. Yes I know they don’t go.
Possibly the coolest thing was tucked away in various paper bags and envelopes amid the rest of the stash. Grandma had saved unfinished objects dating back decades, all neatly stored away to finish later. Although there are plenty of missing pieces and vanished instruction sheets elsewhere in the collection, these appear to be complete—meticulously folded and packed up with envelope and instructions, so that everything would be all ready to go whenever she found time to return to them. Some are uncut, some are cut and tailor tacked but not assembled, and others are in various stages of construction.
There’s something a little forlorn about these abandoned projects, decades out of style and yet never finished. But they’re also kind of exciting, like a long-buried treasure or a time capsule. Each one is a glimpse of Grandma’s creative mind at a single point in time, and in total they represent a pretty wide span of years. I’d love to pull them out and make them up someday, though I have no idea when I’ll be through with my current lineup of projects. They’ve waited this long; I don’t imagine another year or two will hurt them.
In the meantime, of course, I’ve got my own freezer bags full of UFOs; my own piles of untouched fabric and bins of patterns. Clearly I inherited grandma’s stashing habit, if not her taste for fish prints. From a certain point of view it’s a waste—of time, money, storage space—but I like it. I like having materials on hand for impromptu projects; I enjoy sifting through the waiting stacks and daydreaming about what they might become. No matter how long it takes me to get around to making them up, I’ve already gotten quite a bit of pleasure out of them. And now I’m enjoying Grandma’s stash as well, and I feel like I know her a bit better for the time I’ve spent among her treasures.
In that spirit, whenever I visit home I like to pick out a few bits and pieces to take back with me. This is what I ended up with this time:
Awfully sedate, I know. But it’s a start.