The Big Project

I've been feeling ready to dive into a Big Project. You know, one that will take not hours or days, but weeks, maybe months. I love Big Projects I can work on and sink into and settle down with (with which. . . .) Sometimes I just want to make something--anything: a book, a necklace, a bag. I don't really care what it is; I just want to start something from scratch and see what happens. But other times, I want something that's ongoing, that I can think about and ponder when I'm doing yoga or falling asleep or any of those times when my brain needs something to mull.

I've made Journal Skirts before. Lots of them. You've seen them. Here, perhaps. (And, whoa--do I need to go do some repairs to my website or what? Yikes--I have no idea what happened there, but I'm going to have to take a day and fix it. Sorry about that.)

Anyway, I have very few of those skirts left (which means that the "fixing" of the website means taking down those pages, since I have neither the skirts nor photos of them). I sold almost all of them except the ones I couldn't bear to part with--some of the ones I made on trips, for instance. The problem with them is that they're straight skirts:  they'll hike up when you sit down in them, and you have to sit Like a Lady, meaning I can't sit cross-legged, which is how I usually sit. So I'd quit wearing them almost entirely.

For a long, long time I've been fascinated by gores. I don't know why, but I adore them. There's something about a hidden part of a garment that expands to create more space, almost like the pages of a book. Here for a couple of months I've been wondering about making a skirt from Levi's and adding gores. Now, a normal person would go find instructions for adding gores to a skirt. Look online, maybe. I went to the fabric store and found the simplest pattern that had gores and looked at it and said, "Nah". I decided I didn't want to know how to do it The Right Way; I wanted to see if I could make it work my own way. And, boy, isn't *that* a surprise.

I had a pair of 501's that needed some serious mending, right at the knee. I'd been avoiding it because I hate mending that area--unless you open up the leg seam--and I'm way too lazy to do that--you have to squeeze all that leg up on the arm of the sewing machine. Ick. Plus this pair had some funky glitter stuff I bought at the quilt show in Houston years ago that turned out not to be as permanent as they touted but way, way more permanent in a bad way:  the ugliness stayed, but the cool glitter look faded quickly.

To the chase:  I cut apart the jeans just as I would for a regular skirt, but instead of making a straight skirt, I added in gores made from some of The EGE's falling-apart-to-shreds jeans. Here're some photos, taken at Starbucks, of course--my new plan is to take this everywhere with me and stitch on it all the time. I love doing that--it's much more sociable than reading because you can talk to people while you're doing it. So here's the skirt:

You can get an idea of how it's constructed. 

I had a heart I'd cut out long ago, made from some velvet--either silk or rayon or, most likely, a blend--left over from a dress my mother made me when I was about two (that I gave to my niece, who wore it when she was a baby). I've beaded it heavily and will have to remember to get photos of that. That elastic loop above the pocket on the right is for holding a pen in the pocket for when I wore the jeans out walking. It keeps the pen upright and secure, theoretically. 

I've begun stitching some of the joins of the seams to get them to lie like I want them to. 

Wardrobe Break! Here's a linen tunic (clearance last year at Old Navy), tie-dyed and shortened. I actually saw these for the first time at Starbucks--a friend was wearing one, large and loose and white, and I started hunting for them, knowing they'd be perfect for dyeing. I ended up with quite a few and have given some away. I love these jeans so much I bought three pair when they were on sale. The shoes are, of course, Borns. From Nordstrom's Rack or, maybe, on clearance one year at Dillard's.

Back to the skirt:

Then when the tsunami hit last week, I was watching a video taken from a news helicopter. It was the eeriest thing I've ever seen: the sky was gorgeous, the sea was lovely, this huge beautiful wave was rushing to shore, silently (from that height), beautifully, inexorably. I watched it for what seemed forever, knowing what I was seeing but unable to reconcile the beauty of the wave with what it was going to do, imagining so vividly being someone standing on the shore, knowing what it was that was coming and unable to do a thing to change it. Horrible in that beauty.

For as long as I can remember, I've periodically had a nightmare in which I'm in a large building, like a gymnasium, and I'm backed against one wall. In front of me, rising up and up and up, is a huge wave, cresting, preparing to crash. When it does, the room will be filled with churning water and I will die. There's no escape. I stand and watch the wave get higher and higher and higher and stand, terrified, open-mouthed. This brought that dream back very vividly.

The news footage haunted me, and I remembered this Japanese woodcut. The title is

 The Great Wave at Kangawa

and it looks like this:

I found it and printed out a black-and-white copy. I knew I wanted it to face the other way, on the panel of the skirt that had the icky glitter remnants. I could open it in Acorn and flip it, but then I couldn't get it the right size. (I still haven't gotten Photoshop Elements for Mac. Sigh.) Long story: I finally printed it the size I wanted but facing the wrong way, went over Every. Single. Line. with a Sharpie, then flipped it and used carbon paper. I tried using fabric transfer paper, but it was all too light. I wasn't about to go buy anything--this was doing what I wanted to do without having to have fancy supplies. So I tried the carbon paper I had, but it was either too old or just too funky. Getting a little pissed by then, I got out some old iron-on transfer paper, from the days when I did a lot of that. I printed it out on fast print, so it was pale and black and white, and when I flipped it to iron it on, it was facing the right way. Yay! To get rid of the slick polymer, I ironed the image to the denim and then covered it with waxed paper and ironed that and peeled it--I did that 3-4 times. This is the trick I learned and used to teach when I did workshops. Once you get that polymer melted into the fabric, you can use fabric paint. So I did that--and this all took forEVER--and then painted. The paint was ancient and dried up and funky, and so I was mixing with water and mashing lumps with a popsicle stick and grousing. I finally got that done and then let it dry and heat-set it The Right Way (my YouTube video shows that--how you don't just run the iron over it but iron it for several minutes on the hottest setting to let the paint bond with the fabric).

Then I mounted it on stretcher bars.

I've gotten quite a bit of stitching done since I took these photos. Yesterday afternoon our best and oldest friend showed up and surprised us, and we spent the rest of the afternoon sitting on the front porch with him, just like we said we'd do 25 years ago: we'd said that when we were all old, we'd still be hanging out, sitting on the front porch talking. Indeed. He was our kid for a while--while we never wanted children, we were happy to have him around when he was a teenager--he had a key to our house and had dinner with us maybe a couple times a week. While he's not technically young enough to be my kid, we were happy to claim him, and after he left yesterday, The EGE said, "We did a good job helping raise that kid."  I would say he's become a fine man, but he was always a good person, so it's not like he's changed a lot. He and his family live far away, so we don't get to see him often, but yesterday we picked up right where we've always been, talking about everything. There aren't a lot of people with whom I can be myself, voluble and opinionated about politics and sex and religion and race and gender, without worrying about giving offense or toning it down so I won't inadvertently hurt someone else's feelings. You know, when you can use the big words without someone thinking you're uppity and you can voice opinions that make other people sigh, like when you say, "No, I still don't like kids; you were just special." You know. He grew up listening to us argue about everything from education to sports to politics, so it's normal to him.

Anyway, so we sat for hours, and I got a lot of stitching done. And my new plan is, as I said, that I'm going to carry this with me and work on it, and then I'll wear it for a while and then work on it some more. It's a big skirt with a lot of room for embellishment. I'm going to use it as a real Journal Skirt, not planning what to do but just doing it as it strikes me. I can't wait. The other thing I'm trying to do is my on-going effort to get everything in my life well-enough organized that I have TIME to do this. Just typing that makes me laugh. If I haven't gotten it down by now, it's probably never going to happen, right?

Time for yoga~~XO