A story from the stash - Part 3

A year ago I fished a remnant of that blue fabric out again. This one is a little trickier one to explain. Yup, I made a doll.

My one brother is lucky enough to have five older sisters. We don't usually buy each other birthday presents but we make an exception for ages with zeros. Four of us have leapt the latest zero hurdle and all the other siblings have chipped in to buy us a beautiful necklace from a contemporary jewellery shop.

The last time we were organising this, my brother must have started to get worried. He let us know that when his turn came he didn't want a necklace. He wanted a Nudie Suit.

Well that is an excellent idea and he would look mighty fine in one. The problem is getting hold of one. The few that aren't already owned by Chris Isaak go at auction for more than the average annual NZ wage. So I decided that for a joke I'd whip up a wee miniature Nudie suit to be going on with until a real one came into his life.

Then I heard that The NewDowse gallery in Lower Hutt wanted members of the public to make party guests for a doll called Huttette's 21st birthday party. Huttette is the youngest member of late textile artist Malcolm Harrison's "The Family". I'd first seen and loved that exhibition when studying fashion and textiles in Wellington decades earlier. I'm not a doll person but I thought I'd kill two birds with one stone and I made Mr Grifta, pictured above.

So back into the stash I went. For his suit I used that old blue fabric.

Mr Grifta was originally supposed to be the sort of guest you dread having at your party. He's Huttette's naughty friend who she has loads of fun with but hasn't introduced to anyone. He tends to go too far. I'd intended that he'd have fake sick all down his front, nasty stains down his suit legs and that he'd be displayed in the gallery lying in the recovery position. But somehow after sewing on all those beads and sequins, I just couldn't deface him. According to my partner that means "He isn't art. He is just a doll".

His bio was: "Huttette met Mr Grifta on a bus. He made her laugh. She lent him $20. She calls him "The Nine Stone Cowboy". He calls her ATM."

Mr Grifta now lives at my brother's house, probably in the sandpit. I hope a real Nudie Suit turns up soon because I couldn't face making him a life-sized one.

A story from the stash - Part 2

The late 1990s saw me fishing that blue fabric from the London fabric market out of the stash for the first time.

The lining on a favourite 1960s satin coat had disintegrated and needed to be replaced to make the coat wearable. I'd always enjoyed restoring or remodelling vintage clothes, but this time it was purely out of necessity. I had one young child and was pregnant with my second. This coat was one of the few garments to still fit me. I had little money to buy new clothes and a ridiculous number of posh dos to attend, so I carefully unpicked the old lining, made a pattern from it and went stash-diving for suitable fabrics. I kept bypassing this one as, well, it is upholstery fabric. I was big but I wasn't ready to be upholstered.

Finally it won, the job was done and the coat was put back into service. I probably looked like a very shiny Fiat Bambina but I was happy. Every now and then this coat goes on holiday to my daughter's dress-up box but it always makes it back into my wardrobe eventually.

A story from the stash - Part 1

In the mid 1990s I was living in London and working at my dream job. One day while having lunch with a workmate I mentioned that I hadn't had much joy buying useable fabrics while living there.

I'd been to stunning antique fairs, shops and markets and seen beautiful, museum-quality vintage textiles. I'd been to the fabric departments of high end department stores and seen designer fabrics costing more per metre than I earned in a day. I'd been to numerous charity shops and found plenty of treasures but minimal fabric yardage. The few everyday dress-making fabric stores I'd found sold twee or tacky fabric yet charged five times what I had been used to paying in New Zealand.

My workmate was a curator with a special interest in textiles. She was also a sewer. On hearing this she grabbed my arm, got a huntress look in her eyes and said "You are coming with me next weekend!"

So I did. First we went to the V&A and ogled the costumes. Then she took me to what I think heaven looks like. It was a fabric market run by some of her friends. It was a jumble sale in an old hall filled to overflowing with fabrics, textiles, haberdashery, yarn and tools. From the overwhelming assortment of old and new I bought several metres of a clothing designer's surplus hand-printed cotton (since made into a shirt for my partner), some retro printed barkcloth (since made into a skirt for me), several bakelite buckles, some buttons the size of biscuits and some sequins the size of coins. I bought a battered piece of textile jewellery like the ones I'd just seen at the V&A.

And I bought the blue fabric pictured above. It is upholstery fabric and not what I usually buy but somehow I couldn't resist. I have carted it around the world and brought it out of my stash and chipped away at it several times. In the next few posts I'll tell you about some of them. I only have a wee scrap of that fabric left.

If Stash ReHash is only a quarter as wonderful as that market in London I'll be very happy, and my wallet will probably end up considerably lighter.