Letters from Wetville

Here it is, the latest crafty project, draped over the chair back.  You can't tell the triangle shape as it is all bunched up circular needles behind the chair.  If it looks home made and home dyed and homespun, that's because it is, though the only homemade part that I have contributed is the knitting. It's quite thick wool, which makes it grow fast and warm, and I quite like the colour.  But it's not going to adorn a ball frock anytime soon or a work outfit.  I see a great future for this shawl as I sit up in bed and read. I spent much of the day practising for using the shawl by sitting up in bed and alternately reading my own book (Kate Atkinson Life after Life ) and reading White Boots by Noel Streatfield to Brighid.  Thyroid care, you understand.  Preserving and nourishing my health so my children don't have to step forward into this world with an unwell mother. Last night I attended a rather notorious organisation - the middle class ladies' ...

This week's inspirational blogpost read comes from StephC at 3 Hours Past the Edge of the World: Not Buying It: Styles for Body Shapes .  Steph writes persuasively about the ridiculous tyranny of style guides which categorise us accord to certain body shapes, and hector us on appropriate choices of clothing.  I agree with everything she says, and rather than precis it here, I recommend you click through and read it for yourself. Soon after, sitting on the side of the local swimming pool eating supermarket sushi while the kids had their swimming lessons and before I went back to work for a marathon series of evening meetings, I read in our regional newspaper just the kind of style guide Steph wrote about.  Apparently the article is the beginning of a series about to run in the Christchurch Press .  I quote: "We welcome readers' input on their body shape problems and fashion solutions." There is no other permissible language than that of problems?  Acceptan...

Not so much writing at the moment.  I'm knitting a cowl, and while I can more or less read online and knit at the same time, I do need two hands free to type a blog post. The cowl is an interim project before I start my Miette cardigan (ravelry afficionados may already be familiar with this pattern).  I started unravelling my shapeless excuse for a cardigan which happens to be made in lovely wool, and thought I'd better do something more than just unravel.  I had advanced knitting techniques lessons with my friend Ruth on Saturday night and I'm feeling almost ready to start the Miette. I've been seething about Rosemary McLeod's opinion piece in yesterday Sunday Star Times , but I'm waiting for it to be posted online before I dissect it here.  The short version is that she is wrong and annoying, and so is the layout/images editor who placed a photo of Catherine Deneuve wearing underwear only alongside the article rather than McLeod herself in clothes.  It...

I've had a splendid start to the school holidays.  Last night I went to a 40th birthday party and had a marvellous time.  Parties are good.  I like them a lot.  They're as scarce as hen's teeth for me for the most part, due to no longer being a young university student, and I find I leave somewhat earlier and less inebriated when I have a babysitter to return to.  Yesterday I also gardened.  Holy grail of wonderfulness, scarcely ever achieved during term time this year.  I pruned my blackcurrant bush, making a solid attempt to create a 'vase' shape like the gardening guides advise.  I planted three of the prunings in the garden so that I can have more blackcurrants in future.  At least this time I will know that they need three years from twig to fruit. Today it occurred to me, as the scales of the outside world fell from my eyes and just after I paid a bill of $120 to get rid of 300kg of windows which were given to us, were torturously d...

Lefties, the pure kind, don't seem to like royalty.  It doesn't take much analysis to deduce why campaigners for a level playing field kind of society abhor institutions of inherited wealth and privilege. Once again, it seems that I am impure.  Firstly, I didn't grow up in a left-wing environment.  My freezing worker dad thought that there was nothing wrong with capitalism, except that he was at the wrong end of it.  My mum never ever came from Addington when she introduced herself to people, always Canterbury .  That should tell you enough.  It's not their fault that I did or didn't like royalty though.  Dad's heroes were All Blacks and Mum had her own weird mix of wealth and privilege and supposed meritocracy in the form of her allegiance to the Pope.  Books on the royal families were in good supply at the Richmond Public Library when I was a kid.  I had a particular interest in Queen Victoria's progeny.  I recall writing up family...

I'm still admiring and thinking about Cheryl Buckley's article on sewing, "On the Margins", as per the thoughts I started last night .  Buckley talks about the skill in designing that the women she interviewed exhibited, with nary a pattern in sight.  She notes that women across different classes made clothes (England c.1920s - 1980s), but in that this activity was consistently marginalised. Before we pull out the standard line of women just not having enough time any more, what with paid work and running a household and all, I think it's worth noting that Buckley's women sewists were very busy women, women who put in long days in their paid jobs, raising families and assisting in family businesses, before sitting down of an evening and sewing at the machine which was on the corner of the kitchen table or squashed in the front room.  What is different is that clothes were much more expensive to buy then, relative to making them at home (particularly 1950s an...

Today's new experiment: making herbal teas for my sore throat and headcold using herbs from my garden.  I've planted them all on purpose in recent years, but until now I've only used the culinary herbs.  Today, mindful of the rising price of the various potions I buy to scare away lurgies, I opted for some diy, using and checking the knowledge I already have on the properties of specific herbs. I gathered some thyme, lemon verbena, bergamot bee balm, borage, sage and lemon balm and put it in a tea pot and covered it with recently boiled water.  The resultant brew was quite nice.  Maybe we will survive peak oil after all. I carried on a little with my kelly green scarf.  After I saw this in a recent Press article: I decided that I will make scarves (or at least this one green one) which I will eventually stop using as scarves and sew into a big blanket for our bed.  The picture above is of some yarn bombing which took the form of loads of pieces ...

I seriously hope this Simplicity 1945 crossover top turns out to be fantastic and I make six of them (even sixteen). The idea behind this sewing for myself lark is that clothes fit me. It's not that shop clothes never ever fit me; but it is hardly ever and actually then it is a matter of them mostly fitting me rather than a really good fit. Somewhere along the last year or two, I came to the conclusion that it wasn't 'my fault for being fat' in terms of finding clothes to fit but that sewing for myself could deal with some of this. After a bit longer and more experimentation, I realised that fat wasn't necessarily the most salient issue either. Which is how it came to be that while I currently measure 45-38-45 (inches are more appealing), which technically (as in according to the pattern sizing instructions) puts me at a size 22W, I am actually cutting a 16 at the neck and shoulders and an 18 everywhere else except grading to a 20 from the waist to th...

Ah the joys of second hand books. Last night I finished Andrea Levy's Fruit of the Lemon . I liked it. The protagonist initially denies any interest in Jamaica, living as a modern young woman in London, but then has something of a breakdown and her parents send her to Jamaica for a holiday. Good and classic (if by now standard) Levy stuff. Small Island is still her best novel. Next stop, the library. It is holiday time after all. I chose Still Here by Linda Grant (whose entire collection I may also work my way through after loving The Clothes on their Backs . I may have to request that the Wetville library purchase her The Thoughtful Dresser . Another Geraldine Brooks, this time People of the Book . Then I found one I'd read about and looked for last year, Sweater Quest by Adrienne Martini. I'm currently uninterested in knitting, but maybe this will fire me up. Here are the photos which I couldn't persuade blogger to uplaod for me last night. Tonight it...

My favourite sister in law and brother in law are visiting in just six days time. This is wonderful. There is that not so small glitch in between in which we have to magically transform the house into a place with space to put things. Like feet. "We" means what it usually means round here and so I am in avoidance. Instead, I emptied almost all of the mending & altering pile and sewed some more of the Colette crepe yellow dress. I came back from Auckland with some clothes which used to be my Mother in Law's and I'm slowly making them mine, whether by pairing them with different things to make them 'mine' or by adjusting them to fit better. I opened up the waist band on two skirts and resewed the elastic more tightly and fixed a couple of holes on the skirt which I like best. As for the Colette crepe, I am a bit sick of it hanging around. Much as I love dresses, I don't think I'll be sewing any more in the near future once this one is done. ...

Complete: the dressups for the Christchurch kindies are all packed and down at Brighid's kindy ready for someone from Christchurch head office of Kidsfirst Kindergartens to collect this week. We made quite a few dressups and were gifted lots more by the Sallies, who also gave us some play equipment and powder paint for the project. It took a while, but I'm really pleased to have made my goal of a personal, handmade contribution to Cantabrians a reality. Incomplete: everything else. Apart from the last wine bottle. I resisted buying some tonight and now I regret such virtue. I've been thinking about the planned slutwalk, which has given me much to think about. I've not read comprehensively on the subject, though I have read all or nearly all of the posts on The Hand Mirror on the subject. I posted about it on my facebook page and was disappointed with several female responses claiming that men could not control their sexual urges and women must cover up as a kind ...

What I did today: Took all the glass down from the very top cupboards and took almost all of it to the dump. Bought some more bread for the freezer and some sterilising tablets. Cleaned some plastic bottles and gave some to Mary K for her emergency water supplies. The hardest thing for me personally about yesterday was finding Mary K shaking with fear beside the radio, listening to the news of the quake and unable to reach any of her family who live in Christchurch. Thankfully, within the next two hours we found that they were all safe. Not everyone has had such assurance. I know that my cousins are all okay but the stress for my aunty was such that she is now in Chch hospital, having suffered a heart attack last night. Back to today. I went to the supermarket and grabbed some more bread while I could. Last night I spent up big time at the supermarket - $340 is an enormous shop for us. I was grateful that I could, that we have financial resources to enable us to prepare (and a...

This morning I read a post on clothing for big busts and feminism . I'm not here to take issue with that specific post; as I type, the comments count stands at 45 and no doubt will rise further, so there is a forum at The Hand Mirror if anyone wishes to debate the issues around feminism and a facebook thumbs up to a clothing shop which offers clothing for smaller women with larger busts. (I am deliberately using the term 'bust' rather than any alternatives given the nature of google searches) But the link to a shop called Emma dovetailed nicely into some things I have been researching of late. The clothes on her website look pretty, not anything I expect to fit, and indeed smaller than my size. I'm not bothered by that - why would I pick one shop out of the majority of shops purporting to sell clothes for New Zealand women? But when the Wellington Young Woman's Collective published this on their fb page: Hey ladies, here is a shop I disc...