Another fancy dress party

As I said, my father was artistic and imaginative.  He was also a keen leader in the Boy Scouts  so one year (1955) we had themed birthday parties. This was my tenth birthday.  We were a bit unusual because this was an era when the opt out for parents was to hire a film projector and show short films and I can remember sitting in darkened living rooms a lot.  I seem to remember my sister had a Winnie the Pooh party and I had an Alice in Wonderland one.  My father went to the books of games he had for the Scouts and all the games were themed.  What I really remember about my party, though, was the blanket hung across the door into the sitting room so that you had to bend down to get in there.  This was to represent the rabbit hole in the original book.  I know we played games that had been adapted to suit the theme.

The food was also themed.  We had a tin mould in the shape of a rabbit so the centrepiece was a white rabbit made from 'delicious pudding', an old family recipe that I have managed to find in Victorian recipe books although the only other people I knew who ever made it at this time were those in my grandmother's family.  It was sitting in green grass (jelly) and I think it had red eyes, presumably cherries.  My mother was also very good at making 'mushrooms' from meringues with whipped cream decorate with cocoa powder on the underside and stalks of pieces of apple and I am sure there were some of those in the grass too.

Here are the party guests on our front lawn.  I am not sure if you can enlarge the photo so I will briefly summarise the costumes.  In the front row on the left is my sister dressed as Alice and next to her my little sister who was only four so did not wear a costume.  Then there is another Alice, me as the cook (people came as characters from both Alice in Wonderland and Alice Through the Looking Glass) and a white rabbit on the end.  The person on the left of the back row was the Carpenter, the person second from right is the Queen of Hearts and the person on the right was some kind of animal although I cannot remember what.

This was the only year we had themed parties as by the next year we had decided we were too old and began to have a three or four friends for a meal and then go to a film at the cinema.  How different from today's parties!

Fancy dress

I am sorry there has been a pause in my textile related posts but here is another one.  We were walking through Sainsbury's earlier this week when I noticed a rack of children's fancy dress outfits.  How different from the 1950s.  As I remember it you had to make your own in those days unless you had a lot of money and could afford to hire the costumes.  I do not think we went to fancy dress parties much and there were no 'festivals' for which you wore fancy dress so I was not surprised that I could only find two relevant photos.

I remember this event clearly.  It was a Christmas party for children held at Government House in Wellington in December 1954.  This was our second Christmas living in Wellington. I remember that the party was held on the lawn, that there seemed to be a lot of children at it and that my sister won the attention of the Governor-General during the lolly scramble.

My father was artistic and imaginative so he always rose to a challenge such as creating costumes.  Needless to say, my mother was the one who had to do the sewing.  So here we have my sister as 'Mary, Mary quite contrary' and me as a Christmas tree.  As I remember the dresses were made from green cotton.  My sister had bells round the neck and waistline, flowers on the skirt and a row of what look like real shells round the hem.  The flowers appear to be made from tinfoil.  This was when milk bottle tops were tinfoil so I think it was quite easy to get hold of.  I do not know how my parents attached the shells as having tried to attach them to quilts I know it is very difficult.  Her watering can hat was made from corrugated cardboard.

My Christmas tree dress was made with several tiers with pointed lower edges.  The packages were empty boxes wrapped in Christmas wrapping paper and there were strings of tinsel draped round the entire dress.  My head-dress was a wreath with a star in the middle.  We wore our school Clarks sandals - remember Christmas is in summer in New Zealand.

Down sizing - how to start

I have known for several years that we will have to leave this house as it is totally unsuitable for someone with disabilities.  For a start it is on three levels so I now have two stair lifts.  It only has loos on one floor (upstairs) and there is no way of putting one on the ground floor.  Then there is my studio which we converted from the garage as a combined utility room/studio.  Here it is when we first moved in.

I used to work in the bedroom.

To save money, not least because we did not want to lose the wall between the study and studio, we did not put in an internal door.  This means going out the main door and across the yard every time you have to do anything with the washing not to mention any art work.  I can no longer do this in case I fall out there, which I have done in the past, but when I was much less disabled than I am now.  It has been a brilliant studio because although the ceiling is low and the light levels not good (the back wall is built into the side of the hill) it was a totally cat-free zone!  After years of working round cats it meant I could leave my work out.  I also had two sinks, a long workbench and the kitchen table from our old house so there has been plenty of room for wet work.

You may have seen a couple of recent posts featuring my Bernina which I have brought inside again as I cannot bear to think I will never sew again, although following another nasty fall three weeks ago I have not been able to do a thing.

My husband has now agreed in principle that we will have to move.  Decluttering can start instantly  so last week I invited the local creative textiles group to come and select what they wanted from the studio. I really wanted them to take all the wet work stuff and the large quantities of fabric for dyeing.  I was not able to get out there myself though, so when I finally stepped over the threshold I discovered they had been very enthusiastic and helped themselves to all my rotary cutting equipment and a large basket of batik fabric that I am currently using.  I am glad to say they have now returned it.  Just shows you how you must spell things out if you want to give away or sell things I should know having taught.  I see the group also took all my machine embroidery threads which were not on my list.  However, I have decided to let them keep those as I know in my heart of hearts I will not be using them again.

Now I can ask the car boot sale person to come and take away all the empty containers!  This is how you do it folks.  When we had our house fire in 1999 I lost absolutely everything down to the last needle and pin and it is amazing how quickly you build up a studio again.  But you need to grieve for the things that are going.  I am glad I no longer have all the stuff from my youth as it is making this whole process much easier. I will post some photos if I can find some suitable ones.  Now it is on to the bedroom where most of my stash has always been.

Sewing machines 2

I have owned four sewing machines as an adult.  When I left home access to a machine was not important as I finally discovered you could buy clothes!  I also found that in the UK dressmaking patterns were behind shop bought clothes in terms of fashion whereas in New Zealand the time lag for bought fashion meant they were current.  And I never learnt pattern cutting.  My mother encouraged me to go to evening classes in tailoring after I had finished university and these proved useful but I left New Zealand part way through the academic year.

I can remember making a winter suit when I was an au pair but that was not made on my machine.  I did learn quite a few dressmaking terms in German, though, as that was where I was living.  I can also remember borrowing my aunt's sewing machine when I was flatting in London but cannot remember what I made on it.  I then  spent a year in Italy but did no sewing.  I met my English husband in Italy and we decided to get married.  We had very little money but I had bought a white and gold sari in Singapore on my way to Europe and I decided this should be made into my wedding dress.  I began by making a Laura Ashley cotton dress in the pattern I had chosen.  This was when everyone was wearing long dresses and the Laura Ashley dress plus a pinafore that went over it was very useful as I could wear it to work.

Sewing the sari was a different issue, though.  It was so fine that it would not go through the machine so in the end I made the entire thing by hand.  Here are two photos of the work involved.  There is a photo of me wearing it on the Hats post.

Then I closed the bank account I had in my maiden name and spent the money that was in it on another Elna.  I seem to remember that I went for the model below the supermatic as I did not think I would use all the stitches that had.  I remember calculating that by the end of the first summer, this machine had paid for itself as I had made so many clothes on it for both myself and my husband.  I had this Elna for many years but when I began to be serious about quilting, I realised it had one big disadvantage: you could not lower the feed dogs.

Partly for that reason, I decided that I should have a new sewing machine for my fiftieth birthday.  This was the point at which I moved over to Bernina.  I really appreciated its features and ability to deal with machine quilting.  However, this machine had a short life.  After four years we had a terrible house fire and I lost absolutely everything related to my textiles because it was all kept in the attic.  After the fire there was no sign of the Bernina which I thought was perhaps because it had melted but it may have been because what was left of our thatched roof had to be swept up.  Somewhat to my surprise the Elna survived although I never looked at it again.

You can just see it in this picture, marked by a red arrow.  

I was very lucky because the insurance assessor was very understanding and I was allowed to replace the Bernina with a brand new one  It is even marked as being a Millenium Quilters' Edition.

This is the one I am still using.  It has spent most of its life in the studio that we created from the garage but after Christmas I brought it back into my bedroom. I do not think I should be using the studio much because of my disabilities and the possibility that no-one would hear me if I fell (which I have done in the past).

In 2009 I bought a second Bernina to take to workshops.  This replaced a very cheap machine that I had bought because I was worried about taking the big one in the car.  About that time I stopped going to workshops so this machine has hardly been used and this is the one I gave away a couple of weeks ago.  I found the receipt when I was sorting it out to give away.   It had cost much more than I had realised but I regard it as a legacy and it is good to think that two generations will benefit from it.

My sewing machines 1

A couple of weeks ago I gave my Bernina 330 to the daughter of our oldest friends. She has never used a sewing machine although her husband (who grew up in Canada) has and she now has an eight year old daughter so I felt they were the logical people to pass it on to.  I bought the machine in 2012 as something to take to workshops but I promptly gave up going to workshops so it is virtually unused.  I recently thought I might try using it so I plugged it in and turned it on.  It immediately started making a nasty noise which people told me was probably the result of under-use and meant that it needed oiling so I have told the friend that I will pay for it to be properly serviced.  Luckily there is a Bernina dealer in their local market town.

Giving away the machine is one step in my attempt to down-size.  It seems that a lot of quilters now qualify as ‘older generation’ and are wanting to shed fabric, books and equipment.  This has prompted comments on both the Contemporary Quilt group’s Yahoo site and the SAQA Yahoo group.  For those of us with no children and currently no connection to quilting groups it can pose a problem thinking of how to dispose of all the supplies, not to mention the quilts and hangings that we have made but do not have homes for.   It is easy to build up a sentimental attachment to things you bought years ago but have never used. In my case, a terrible house fire in 1999 destroyed everything I had made, started making or bought for my craft work, so I only have seventeen years’ worth of ‘stuff’ to dispose of.  It is enough and this photo only shows a fraction of it!

Parting with this machine (not the one in the photo) started me thinking about how I learnt machine skills and the sewing machines I have used.  I have difficulty remembering when I learnt to machine but it was very early on.  I think I was only about four or five years old.  The reason I was allowed to start sewing on the machine was that we had an old Singer hand machine which was originally my grandmother’s.  I can remember it sitting in the room in her house where we children slept when we stayed there, but at some point it was passed to my mother.  It was of course pretty safe for small children to use as your right hand was occupied turning the wheel and there were no electric components.  I recall making pot holders from off-cuts of tweed stitched onto green cotton left over from my mother making us school knickers!

When I was about six I was given a ‘toy’ sewing machine for Christmas; one of the ones that did chain stitch.  It was a sore disappointment and I soon reverted to using my mother’s.  She made clothes for herself and three daughters on this machine.  My grandmother was a knitter rather than a dressmaker and I seem to remember that she used the machine for tasks such as ‘sides to middling’ sheets.  This was where you cut the worn sheet down the middle and sewed the sides together so that the worn part was on the edges. Make do and mend was the order of the day in the mid-twentieth century, no doubt partly because of the War but also I think in New Zealand because new bedding was generally imported and therefore expensive.

My mother struggled on with this sewing machine until in the mid-1950s my father bought her an Elna Supermatic.  It was the only thing that he ever bought on hire purchase.  I can remember her going to sewing classes (it may have only been one) at the Elna dealer.  The Supermatic had discs with fancy embroidery stitches on them but it was my father who tried all these out.   My father should have been an engineer so he really enjoyed the machine and the fancy work was usually his.  The Supermatic also sewed zips in and did buttonholes so a lot of techniques that we originally learnt to do by hand became machine techniques.   Sewing at home did cause some disruption as we had to do it on the dining room table.  Later I used to put it on a folding card table.  My memories of weekend afternoons as a teenager are of sewing to the noise of rugby being played on the park across the road.  And of course we had to negotiate when there was more than one of us wanting to sew which was most weekends.  I do not have any photographs of this machine but found a website with plenty of details anmd lots of photos.  Elna in the 1950s  In writing this post I have also learnt that Elna sold out to Janome.

My mother sewed because you had to, especially with three daughters, but she was obviously happy when I showed a taste for dressmkaing and started making clothes rather than just things for dolls.  I know I had learnt to use a machine before we started dressmaking classes at school.  These began in the second year of secondary school.  We were taught by a wonderful Welsh woman who insisted that we learn everything properly so we began by stitching on lined paper without any thread.  The aim was to learn to stitch a straight line.  From there we moved to making samples of every technique under the sun including all sorts of buttonholes and plackets, inserting zips etc. The samples were glued into an exercise book and marked out of ten.  I do not remember any other year at our school doing this real apprencticeship but it certainly stood me in good stead.  At the same time we made ourselves simple garments.  I can remember making a skirt the first year and then summer pyjamas.   I found it very frustrating using the school sewing machines.  All but one of them were treadle machines and I never learnt to use them.  (I also failed to master the art of using a potter’s wheel which I think used a similar technique.)   I preferred to do hand-stitching at school and my machining at home.  As teenagers we all made clothes for ourselves and, if we were the eldest as I was, for our younger sisters although I think my younger sister has never got over the summer ‘duster’ coat I made her!

We went to university in our home town so did not leave home and my student days were also filled with dressmaking.  By this time I was making dresses to wear to balls (yes, it was all very old fashioned in NZ and so we dressed up like middle-aged women).  The sixties did not arrive in NZ until the seventies by which time I had left home.

I used to pride myself on using Vogue patterns, not just the simple ones but ones which were advertised as Paris inspired or couturier designed.  Fashions in New Zealand were generally a couple of years behind Europe so the patterns were as up to date as bought clothing, not that we ever bought clothes other than heavy winter items such as coats and suits.  I think I did not even really know what size I was until about a year before I left home.

I am afraid this post is short on illustrations.  This is partly because of copyright issues and partly because I have very few photos of my past, having lost most of them in the fire we had in 1999.

I will continue this story in a second post.

Childhood hats

I had forgotten what a big part hats played in our New Zealand childhood until my sister suggested I write about them.  Now that I have looked at the old photos, I am wondering whether we wore hats a lot because of the climate or simply because everyone wore them.  My sister also reminded me that our mother used to make them - those dressmaking skills again.

Toddlers wore bonnets which now strike me as something out of Jane Austen, but the New Zealand sun can be ferocious and this is probably the reason for protecting children.

When we were a bit older we graduated to 'proper' straw hats although I remember that they always had elastic that you put under your chin.  This was probably partly because of the New Zealand wind which is particularly strong in Wellington.  Look at this photo of a picnic in 1950.  Obviously it is quite windy because the brims are moving like an umbrella turning inside out.  I guess the elastic stopped them blowing into the sea!

We also always wore hats to church.  This practice continued until about 1960 by which time I was a teenager and hated the whole idea.  As small children we had white panama hats that my mother decorated with artificial flowers: poppies, daisies and cornflowers around the brim is what I remember.  And bear in mind that we never saw any of these flowers except in gardens as they were not part of the New Zealand vegetation.

In winter we had berets.  I remember my mother making these.  She would take a piece of thick fabric (usually corduroy) and make a circular template of newspaper by drawing around a plate.  This was for the top of the beret.  I think she then made a second circle but with a hole cut in the middle of it.  Presumably this was a template from a smaller plate.  She must then have bound the edge with a bias strip.

I do remember knowing about Kangol berets early on though, so maybe some of them were not home-made!

Hats became distinctly unfashionable around 1960 but we always wore hats to school and you were given an 'order mark' by the prefect on gate duty if you did not wear one as you left the grounds.  In summer we had cream panama hats with a blue and green hat band.  At Easter our mothers had to take the hat band off this hat and attach it to the green felt hats we wore with winter uniform.  The reverse happened in October when we started wearing summer uniform again.  We also had green berets as neither the panamas nor the winter felt hats could cope with rain.

Hats were also obligatory on formal occasions so here are two photos of family weddings.

The first one was in 1957 when I was 12 and my sister 10.  Our younger sister was a bridesmaid so does not appear in  this photo but do note that our grandfather even had a top hat!

This one was at a wedding in 1967, the year I left home.  I notice my younger sister is not wearing a hat but she is wearing gingham!

I think the family practice of wearing hats must have  had a strong influence on my later fashion choices as when I got married in 1972 I spurned the idea of a veil and bought an expensive straw hat from Libertys.

And now hats for children have come back in the southern hemisphere, I think because people are so much more aware of the dangers of UV light because of global warming.

Gingham: the fabric of my childhood

We children wore a lot of checked gingham in summer.  I always think of it as being red and white although I also remember dark green and white.   A quick search of ‘gingham’ on Google throws up numerous websites illustrated by photos of adults wearing the fabric in a variety of colours.  As a teenager, I remember wearing multi-coloured check shirts but even though these were made of cotton I would call them ‘plaid’ rather than gingham.

If you look at websites about the history of gingham you will find it has been around for a very long time.  The word appears to come from Malay ‘ginggang’ and originally meant striped.  It’s first mention in an English dictionary is dated 1615.  One distinctive feature of gingham is that it is woven from threads of the two colours rather than being printed after weaving.  In the nineteenth century checked gingham appeared and by the mid-twentieth century it had come to be associated with the American West, cowgirls and general country style.   I suspect the movies and musicals such as Oklahoma might have had something to do with this as film stars were frequently photographed wearing it.

Here is my sister, dressed as a bride in a gingham dress.  (I think the veil was a curtain and I am very impressed with the 'bouquet'.)

And here she is in another gingham dress, this time with smocking.   This photograph has been hand-tinted so I would not guarantee that the dress was blue and white.

Since gingham was hard-wearing and cheap it was also popular for household objects.  I can remember gingham tablecloths (I even made one but from linen rather than cotton gingham), aprons and tea towels.   It was easy to embroider because the checks meant there was a ready-made pattern to follow and I can remember embroidering it with stranded thread when I was at primary school.  The same went for smocking as it meant you did not have to iron dots onto the fabric.  Interestingly, I cannot remember gingham school uniforms in New Zealand.  I expect some schools had them but primary school children in our generation often wore ‘mufti’ and it was only fee-paying schools like the one I went to which insisted on uniform.  I remember being struck by the wide use of gingham dresses for primary school age uniform when I first arrived in this country.

To show you how central gingham was to our lives I want to describe an incident which I have been told happened when I was three years old.  I think it shows that I had an early interest in clothes which also meant sewing and dressmaking since everyone in New Zealand made some or all of their clothes in the decades after the Second World War.  Until I was eight we lived in Hastings in Hawkes Bay as my father had been born and brought up there and had a job to return to when he got back from being a ‘potato peeler’, as he would put it, in the forces during the war.  My mother came from Wellington and she found living in Hawkes Bay very hard, especially as at first we lived on the edge of Havelock North, a village which was only two miles from Hastings but felt very cut off.  I assume we did not have a telephone and my father commuted to Napier so was gone all day.  His mother and sister lived in Havelock North too, so were an important part of my life but I know my mother found her mother-in-law difficult.  I think this was because my grandmother was from pioneering stock, that branch of the family having left Scotland because of the Clearances and arrived in New Zealand in 1837 which was very early.   People who could trace their roots back that far were often people who had done very well in colonial society and that was certainly true of my grandmother’s family, who considered themselves a cut above many of the other people in the area.

My mother’s parents would visit us two or three times a year, driving the two hundred miles from Wellington which was quite a journey in those days of poor roads and unreliable cars.  While staying with us they would take my sister and I out and this incident occurred on one of our trips into Hastings, presumably to go shopping. 

http://transpressnz.blogspot.co.uk/2012/08/traffic-in-heretaunga-street-hastings.html

 I do not remember the occasion myself but it passed into family history and was brought out as an example of what little children say and of my interest in all things textile.  Apparently my sister and I were sitting in the car with my grandfather.  I assume it was parked in the main street since as far as I cannot remember any car parks.  We were waiting for my mother and grandmother to return from shopping when a large woman walked past.  She was wearing a black and white gingham dress and I remarked ‘Look, Garg, (the pet name I had for my grandfather), black and white check.  How awful!’   And the fact that the woman was large obviously influenced the remark. 

What are your memories of gingham?