Early-May 2022
So many people choose to live in search of justice, or truth, and righting those wrongs that can only be rectified in Hell. Those goals are noble. And, yet, a personal obsession with any ideal can take a person very far away from the real.
Living in a real world is starting to become a challenge during our days amidst the cacophony of noxious propaganda, and marketing ploys to pitch abhorrent products (including politics). At such times, it’s best to indulge your imagination in the magic that’s waiting to be realized.
The magic for me begins with a vision of a dress, or a cape, an outfit that is not for sale OUT THERE.
This situation has been occurring all of my life. Whatever garment I envision in my fertile and imaginative mind is rarely sold off-the-rack. Couture designers of the past created them, during an era that transpired long before I was of an age to even dream of those elegant eternal designs. Those sumptuous and spectacular styles appear to have disappeared from the world of fashion for women.
Those images exist only as images, online, in my mind, in my digital files of a world that has sadly and vastly vanished from the uniquely wondrous world of Being a Woman.
Something must be done to correct that wrong! Justice in the name of clothing the female body is one quest I’m up to pursuing, maybe even attaining.
Sewing away to a new outfit, a new dress, a new cape grounds me in my desires for fairness on earth, for truth in woman-ness, for straightening the ghastly crooked picture that’s hanging on the wall of Woman as God created her.
Sewing away also inspires visions for my writing, along with some rather perceptive sensibilities of what’s going on around me.
Several summers ago, in August 2018, I purchased from a fabric e-tailer four yards of faux fur, two yards each of two dreamy colors. The online seller was a trusted source of clearanced textiles. I’d purchased wool from this business just before the Great Recession began in 2008. I noticed an amazing, and alarming, inventory of textiles from Europe, particularly Italy and Belgium.
Hmmmm, I thought. The economy over there must be contracting rapidly, and the factories are off-loading stock.
I purchased those yardages at half-price of a mid-weight acrylic fabric in shades called Glacier Green and Ice Blue. The woven faux-fur was manufactured in Belgium by Tyber Mills. The material is gorgeous, of the highest quality, with backing made of a mixture of cotton and synthetic fibers. The fabric has a very soft hand; it’s not stiff or smelly, ready to warp, stretch, and shed like the typical faux-fur.
The purchase price was $23.95 a yard, with no tax; shipping was $8.95.
I boxed these bulky goods and stored them in the closet of the spare room of the rental dump that Dear Husband and I inhabited whilst awaiting the completion of construction of our Dream Home. The summer of 2020 brought us to that reality. Those boxes of faux-fur eventually found their way into the closet of my Sewing Room, where they’ve been awaiting my decisions regarding their fates!
In view of the world economy that has begun to crater, and the American economy that is in free-fall, I am going to sew two pieces of outerwear from these personally stockpiled textiles. While the world outside cries and rants and raves about the inevitable, and the predicted, consequences and results of corruption on a global scale, I intend to soothe my soul through sewing.
That industrious and inventive activity is what got me through an adolescence of Tricky Dick, my early adult years of the Carter malaise, my child-bearing years of hard times, my child-rearing years of watching quality cotton, wool, silk, and even premium polyester disappear from the factories of America, along with the factories themselves.
The Experts try to forecast the financial future with their whiz-bang blarney. I get a feel for it, a hand and handle on it through my purchases of fabric. When European factories were frantically peddling yardages at cut-rate prices during the summers of 2018 and 2019, I stocked up on — and invested in — the future.
The summers of 2020 and 2021 were hellish for people who didn’t see the wave of Nanny State fraud coming at them. I saw it, though I could do little to stop it, or avoid it. I rebelled against the moronic mask-mandate, and every other idiot edict that got shoved down the gullets of Californians, and Americans.
An unknown percentage of those individuals still live in pathetic and misguided need of the security blanket of Government that does no good, and actually does harm. Those persons go in search of things that I’ll never want. And I go in search of magic to transform to reality, a reality they will never know . . .
A dress that graces a woman with femininity and flair.
A cape that drapes and adorns a female with simplicity and sensual delight.
A blouse that states she’s in charge of who she is, and what she does.
The unexpected but magnificent results of the magic of sewing dreams into substance are the remnants left over from my cutting adventure:
Christmas projects and quilt squares are born of the search for magic that, for a designing woman, does not end!