On learning to sew

Recently, I saw someone posting about a perfect linen skirt she’d made — the Platonic ideal of a skirt, the sort that would haunt you for weeks if you left it unbought in a shop — and I thought: perhaps.

So I went to The Fabric Store in Auckland and browsed the rolls. I chose three linens, which are both lovely and incredibly easy to sew: a soft, pulsing lilac; burnt orange; and palest dove grey. They cost me about a quarter of all the money I had, but I was in the throes of beauty-induced insanity. The girl who served me had made her own coat and lined it with a London Liberty floral. I’d never felt so underdressed in my life.

I decided to start with the Wattlebird dress, a pattern by Australian indie outfit Common Stitch. I chose it because it’s supposed to be easy, and #wattlebirddress is a sea of glory on Instagram, and it only takes a metre of fabric. I printed the pattern, stuck it painstakingly together with sellotape, and cut out my size; my partner’s mum showed me how to thread her mum’s machine and how to run a line of stitches. I felt, for the first time in several months, excited about something. I picked up my scissors.

My lilac linen dress came out Quite Wrong. It gaped under the arms, it was tight around the hips, the tiny, holey pocket won’t even fit half my phone. But the finished garment is still precious to me: a tangible expression of labour, and fully wearable if artfully photographed (preferably near some distracting shoes and boxes).

The next week, I made the same dress, with modifications, in my orange linen. It was just as flawed, but in different ways (all mercifully hidden in this photo).

I decided it might be the pattern’s fault, not mine, and found a different one: the Demeter dress (View B), by Anna Allen Clothing. I used my pale grey linen and spent most of two days working out how to do something called “bias binding” (an ingenious way of making the neck and armholes neat and sturdy), before turning out something Rhys calls “the Mormon dress.” I think it’s beautiful. I wear it all the time.

There are a hundred things to tempt a swoony sort of person (me) into sewing. The names of the fabric colours alone are a poetry: “Boston fall,” “calamity grey,” “tenderly.” The fabrics themselves can be astonishing (see, e.g., this lawn or this chocolate velvet). More to the point, the Instagram sewing community, which ballooned with the March lockdown, regularly turns up the kind of garments you’d lovingly bother to handwash. The community has its stars, half of whom should really start fashion lines: @meltstitches lives in Brisbane and has sewn virtually every garment she owns, right down to her underwear; @the.social.fabric lives in Ankara and has completely mastered the high-waisted trouser; and my favourite, @tiffathome, lives in Vancouver and makes exclusively understated garments in gentle colours.

The idea that you could make something you love that fits you perfectly is one of the most seductive I’ve ever come across. Which perhaps explains why I’ve done so much sewing over the past two unseductive months, despite my wobbly budget.

Since my first three dresses, I’ve made a fluster of other garments: here are a few.

This is another Demeter dress, this time in deep, dusty pink.

Here’s a Peppermint wrap top, in a dark checked silk-cotton, which has a storied dot of blood on the tie (while making it, I put my foot down on the pedal at very much the wrong time, running the needle all the way through my thumb and snapping the needle tip. Let me tell you, there is nothing quite like observing your thumb speared like a kebab. That was the end of sewing that day).

These are my Ninni culottes, in cocoa linen (v wrinkled here). They are the most comfortable pants I’ve ever owned, if a little blobby.

And this is my Peppermint pocket skirt, in crispest gingham cotton, sewn during a truly terrible week and now one of the things I wear most.

The hardest thing I’ve made is a Paola workwear jacket (I sewed the collar on backwards twice, plus one of the sleeves), cropped heavily and with redrafted pockets. I’m yet to line it or add buttons, but I love it very much already.

And this week, I made this dress, full of wonkiness, out of floral remnant bin fabric I don’t quite love. It’s meant as a “toile”, or practice run, for the same style in white lawn.

There are several projects in the works now. The coming months, no matter how penurious, will feature pyjamas and puffed sleeves, bathrobes and bias skirts, many more colours, and much purposeful joy. Unlike origami, figure drawing, and scratching the violin, sewing seems to have cemented itself as a long-term hobby.

Thank you to Rhys for his patient photography. And his patience with a hobby that has me retreating into a den for several hours, emitting only swear words and chugging sounds. And all his general patience with me, especially lately.