I spent a whole day making what turned out to be a great piece of fabric  but when I made it up in my favourite skirt pattern and tried it on I didn’t like it at all. The moral of this story is : don’t try to wear stripes if your stomach is not quite as flat as it used to be the last time you had a stripey skirt ten years ago.

striped nuno fabric

Without darts, this would have been a great skirt, but given the non uniform nature of the stripes using the Nuno Felting technique, it was impossible to create the shaping in the waist without the neat, straight darts making the stripes look unpleasantly wobbly. I’ve resolved to make it into a size 10 gathered skirt that will look wonderful on the dummy but will no longer fit my size 14 hips!

Alber Elbaz in The Observer Magazine 17th May 2009

I did take some consolation from an article in The Observer Magazine about Albert Elbaz, the chief designer at Lanvin who told the interviewer - ‘My psychologist says dissatisfaction, it’s the engine that keeps me going. Seems that even the most successful designers are driven by the need to make something better next time.

But something else in the article really got me thinking about the whole issue of making clothes for ourselves.  Elbaz, we are told,  is ‘interested in designing the dress that a woman wears when she falls in love with herself.’ Whilst this may be a little over dramatic (how many items in your wardrobe make you feel that good?!) it is true that when we put on an item of clothing, especially something new,  we want not only to like how we look but also to love who we are in it; we want to feel like the fantasy that we have of ourselves. The big question for me is whether it’s easier to find something in a shop that makes us feel like this, or whether it’s easier to make this wonder garment for ourselves. The do-it yourself route offers so many possibilities for perfection - the right fabric, the right shape, the right fit - but does it have the same ‘mystery’ (for want of a better word) that something ready made by someone else can offer? Do we feel the same about something when we know every seam and when every moment of hassle we had putting the zip in perfectly is still there in the back of our minds?

I talked about this to the fantastic group of talented women we had here in the studio over the bank holiday who were making jackets for themselves and we decided that there must be room for both buying and making, but we didn’t really get to the bottom of the relationship that we have with the clothes that we make ourselves. More on this when I’ve finished Kate Fletcher’s very interesting chapter about the importance of becoming makers of our own clothes in her book ‘Sustainable Fashion and Textiles‘. Watch this space.

Firstly, much of her work is about  suffering and loss and as such is almost bound to have an emotional impact. The piece entitled ‘I will fly south .. for Matthew‘ begun in the year her son died of cancer aged 37 is incredibly moving. Like many of the pieces this one is made of tiny bird bones and a web of taut threads. It’s exquisite - so finely executed - and it is this careful placing of each bone and thread that, for me, contributes much to its power.

In the book by Mary Shoeser written to accompany the exhibition,  this precision and attention to detail in Hawksley’s work is summed up by one of her students at Goldsmith’s College -

‘… she impressed on me the  importance of precision when you are working, that a line cut in fabric should be as precise as a drawn line.’

I came away resolving to work with more care and to give time to line and thread after years spent experimenting with texture.

In many of the pieces she uses white vintage leather gloves. In one seried entitled ‘Continuum ‘a number of  these are nailed to pieces of wood through the palm. The glove is slashed open and disorted - sometimes there is red fabric or dye in the gash. It was disturbing as well as moving (the palms of my hands feel strange just thinking about it) but, like much of her work what really struck me was the careful and exquisite execution - the tiny stitches on the gloves , the placing of each finger. In ‘Pale Armistice‘ made for the Imperial War Museum in 1991, again it was the stitching on the gloves that struck me most of all - the painstaking hours involved in their contruction and the care of the maker and sense of time passing that they carry with them as a result.

Pale Armistice

This attention to detail is something that so often we seem to have lost; we want to make something that can be finished in a day and then move on to something else. Almost every week I hear the same thing from people who come on a course desperate for some time to be creative  -  ‘I have to finish it today or I’ll never find time to finish it at all.’ I often find myself afraid to gives things time. There’s a voice in my head telling me that I’m not getting anywhere if I don’t keep producing. I’m going to slow down.

Many of the glove pieces are lighter, almost funny, certainly clever. This is a woman who must have the most incredible collection of fabric fragments, lace, beads, jewels, braid and bones. The photos of her attic studio are an inspiration in themselves - a vindication for all of us who have carefully stored boxes of treasures that will one day be perfect for what we are making.

The stories that she tells in the short film made for the exhibition made an impression on me too. She was in her late 40’s when she took a course which changed her life. Having told her second husband that something was missing in her life, that there was something that she needed that she couldn’t find, she said that this textiles course with David Green was like someone giving her a key and opening a door and saying ‘look, here it is.’ Wow! What a course. What a testimony to the fact that it is never too late to begin a whole new thread in our lives.

When she was 20 (early 1950’s) it was still hard to get hold of new fabrics. She made skirts out of curtains  and a suit out of her grandmother’s old coat. It looks as though she could have bought it from Chanel though it looks a little crumpled here after a long train journey to a wedding.

When she went to Paris with her friend they make dresses out of white parachute fabric. I love the way the Gendarmes are looking at her!

As a result of this conversation on the wonders of dressmaking I found out that although my grandmother wasn’t a sewing fanatic like my mum, she too had always made clothes for the family. She bought mum a Singer sewing machine for her 18th birthday and later used it herself to make me a coat. She was unpicking a coat of her own that she had worn for years and carried many happy memories in its folds but was now faded and falling to bits, when she found that the inside of the wool fabric was still a rich burgundy colour and well worth saving. So here I am, wearing  that precious fabric in the form of a new coat made by my grandmother, complete with fur collar.

No wonder I have a coat fetish

How fantastic would it be if we still bothered to unpick old clothes that reminded us of happy times and made them into new clothes for our children and grandchildren?

Maybe you have to be under 5 to appreciate wearing your grandmother’s reworked coat …  Will have a look in my wardrobe and see if there’s anything there that I don’t wear that’s made of such gorgeous fabric that even my fashionista daughters would be pleased if I cut it down and made something for them. Perhaps if I tell them it’s ‘Vintage’ it might help.

The sleeves are made of two layers of fabric, one wider and longer than the other. The top layer is held in place in ‘puffs’ on the layer underneath. I used habotai underneath with silk organza on the top layer.

Victorian-inspired sleeve with vintage braid

Now I plan to make a dress using the same idea but using the Nuno technique to make the fabric. I’m really pleased with the sample. Where I placed the wool fibre in narrow lines, I was also able to nuno some vintage lace onto the surface.The fibre easily held the three layers (habotai, organza and lace) together because each one was so fine.

Organza and Habotai Nuno design fabric

S0  - as well as having 19th century bustles on my mind, I’ve been thinking about swirling cream, whipped up fabrics and buckets for dairy maids.

The bucket-bustle skirt for a contemporary dairy maid

The result is a triple bucket bustle made by inserting long tubes into the back darts and into the centre back fold.

A closer view of the buckets

I’m still working on the best fabric and have made a new length of 10 momme crepe de chine in Nuno. It’s hard work to force the fibre through such a dense fabric but the results are good. For the bucket skirt though, I think a stiff paper taffeta will be better so that the skirt is smooth and the only swirls are in the buckets.

Nuno Crepe de Chine (10 momme)

The next toile is made from two egg shapes sewn together displaced (thin end of egg to side of other egg). The openings are then cut somewhere in the resulting asymmetrical bag - in this case about 15cms from the top of one egg so that this 15cms sticks out at the back to make a bustle. The front of the skirt is oval, but I’ve cut the hem straight.

Two eggs make a bustle

It’s great fun playing with shapes and really liberating to work without a block.

The studio on day one

So many people who come here say  ‘wow, what an incredible place. You’re so lucky.’ They’re right - I am. Not having enough space to work in can make it really difficult to be creative, and here I am with a huge space in which to make whatever I want.  But it hasn’t been easy. The overheads are huge and I spend a lot of time working to cover them.

I came here three years ago having left teaching English Literature to college students. My plan was to use the wool processing machines I had bought to prepare eco-friendly fibre to sell to feltmakers, thus paying the rent and leaving lots of spare time for me to be creative and make my name as  a maker of Nuno Garments (more about that another day).

There were two problems with the plan - no time left for making anything and the realisation that I hated feeding a machine. It took three years to get my business to a place where I can sell the machines (two down, two to go) and spend my time doing what I enjoy - teaching and making experimental pieces for exhibition.

I guess my own sense of fulfilment must hover around in the air somehow, because hardly a day goes by without a visitor commenting on the calm and wonderful atmosphere in here.

The studio after one year of work