Prettying up the prosaic

My crafty inclinations lately have leant towards repurposing neglected embroidery. Today's project was refurbishing my peg bag – a phrase that I realise might make me sound like some Martha Stewart wannabe domestic perfectionist, which I'm really, really not. However, I've had my old peg bag for several years and while it's perfectly functional, every time I hang my clothes out, one more tiny fraction of my aesthetic self despairs and dies. Mundane chores like washing should be jollied up as much as they possibly can, I reckon, hence my desire for a more pleasing peg bag than this one.

Before: plain, serviceable, dreary.

 Among my many unfinished craft projects is an embroidered tablecloth I started straight after either school or uni – in other words, a good long while ago. It had two bouquets of cross-stitched roses along each side, and the only thing I can remember about doing it was that I seemed to be at it for years, and it was tedious beyond belief. I finished six-and-a-bit bouquets before giving up about twenty years ago, having realised, I think, that even if I did finish it I was never going to use it as a tablecloth. It was another example of my tastes being much more nanna when I was young than they are now – and nanna in a daggy way, not in a cool, ironic, retro way.


So I decide to chop it up and give it a new life as a peg bag. I went slightly astray along the way – because I like doing things but not planning them, most of my projects are made in a fairly random and ad hoc way. So it was with this. I made a sort-of pattern from the old bag, but cut out the embroidered piece for the front of the bag before realising I'd positioned it so that the opening would cut away part of the embroidered design. That meant I needed to cut another piece. The binding and seams on the front needed to be unpicked and resewn at one point too – despite having the old bag right there, did I consult it for guidance? Did I bollocks.

But in the end it came together. I reshaped the top and used an old wooden coathanger rather than the nasty plastic number from the original bag. I even covered the wire hook with some bias binding (umm, what was I saying about not being an obsessive domestic perfectionist?). In fact I took a lot of care with the whole thing, despite generally being horribly impatient. Doing something properly, when I've got the time, ends up being so much more satisfying than just finishing it quickly.

After: bright, practical, bigger. And a bit nanna,
but in a good way, I think.

The final step was a rigorous pressing, because it's linen, which creases like a bastard. I'm rather chuffed with the result, and I'm sure washday will be a bit less dull with this hanging cheerily on the line.

And now it must be time to put a load of washing on.

Lessons in being ladylike

A rainy, cold, appointmentless Sunday seemed destined for craft, and some neglected embroidery took my fancy. This hasn't been bothering me as much as many of my other unfinished projects – possibly because it takes up less space than, say, a knitted jumper and a barrowload of yarn – but it must be one of the oldest unfinished objects I've got.

I started it about 25 years ago and it's a dressing table set consisting of two small doileys and one large – further proof, if any were needed, that I spent a lot of my youth channelling my inner nanna when more age-appropriate activities might have included wearing blue eyeshadow, sporting big hair, drinking Malibu and dancing to Duran Duran. I didn't even have a dressing table back then; I do now, but I also have no desire to gussy it up with embroidery.

I still like the design of violets, though, but I'm aware my taste is a bit suspect, so I showed it to my craft-group friends. They're all much younger and groovier than I am, and they didn't make gagging noises, so it can't be that bad. I decided it could be repurposed, and that one of the smaller doileys might make a fetching pincushion.

Step 1 was to trace around the violets using two glasses; the inner line was to embroider on and the outer one to cut out along.

The idea was to chain stitch around the edge of the two pieces, cut them out then join them together using whip stitch.

This is a technique I learnt about a few years ago when I was editing an embroidery book. I mentally filed it away as possibly being handy in the future, but I'd never actually used it until now – or so I thought. However, when I was making this pincushion I had a sudden flashback to embroidery class at school when I was about seven, and the first thing I ever embroidered; a pincushion whose two circular pieces were joined in just this way. That weirded me out more than slightly. It's craft Groundhog Day again!

For a long time, that pincushion remained my only embroidery project. I didn't like sewing as a child. I was a tomboy, and also apparently an infant feminist. I  disapproved of having to learn to sew; this was about 1970, yet it could have been 1870 or even 1770. Mrs Gilchrist, our sewing teacher, insisted that any thread we used should be no longer than the distance from our fingertips to our elbow; this wasn't so it wouldn't tangle, or to prevent us from stabbing a fellow tot in the eye while flailing about, but because working with long threads wasn't 'ladylike'.

I thought then, and I still think, that no little girl at any stage in history should ever be expected to concern herself with what is and isn't ladylike. I continued to cut my threads as long as I wanted and to get into genteel trouble for it, and once I'd finished that pincushion I didn't pick up a needle again until I was about fifteen. Then I went berserk and was obsessed with embroidery for about ten years. The violet project dates from then.

So, back to the present. Once I'd chain-stitched the inner circle on each piece I cut them both out, leaving a small seam allowance, which I finger-pressed to the wrong side. Next I whip-stitched the two pieces together, remembering to make sure the grain on both ran the same way.

I sewed about three-quarters of the way round, leaving a gap through which I could stuff it. Traditionally pincushions are stuffed with sawdust, but all I had was polyester fibrefill. Despite its small size the pincushion soaked up stuffing at about the same rate as a Romantic poet imbibing opiates.

Once the seams started straining I finished sewing it up then pummelled it about a bit to settle the filling more evenly.

A suitable accessory for a lady.

In retrospect I could have machine-sewed around most of the outside for strength and just whip-stitched the embroidery for show, but it doesn't matter. The whole thing took me a pleasurable couple of hours and I like the result.

What to do with the rest of the dressing table set, though? I think I'll make a little needle case out of the smaller doiley. At the moment I can't think of a possible use for the larger one, and even if I could, I'd have to finish the embroidery first.

Check back here in another 25 years.

Back on the job

It's all very well prattling about crobots and my crafty father, but this blog is supposed to be about unfinished projects, so yesterday I steered myself back on track. I dug out the cream-coloured wheat-ear jumper, allowed myself a sneer or two then got stuck in. First I inspected it for moth holes, and found none – it's been stored in a camphorwood chest since last millennium, so perhaps the smell really does deter the pesky blighters.

I recall now that one of the reasons I gave up on the jumper first time round was that the front had more embroidery than the back. My fondness for symmetry warred with my fedupness with the whole thing, and the fedupness won. Really, though, does this jumper need more embroidery? I think not.

The sleeve seams were already sewn up, so I only had to sew up the side seams and join the sleeves to the body. The proportions of the thing worried me a bit – the armholes were so deep it looked as though it was designed for a woman with a normal-sized torso but the Incredible Hulk's biceps. However, the bits fitted together okay, so perhaps the Chunky Upper Arm look was all the rage back when the pattern was written.

I'd forgotten that the sleeves were slightly puffed – how special.

In my haste to finally get it finished, my backstitching started out rather large and I had to go back over it more neatly; this was slightly annoying, but as the jumper had already sat in a box for fifteen years, spending another ten minutes on it hardly seemed onerous. And this was the result:

It's not perfect – or even nice! – but it's a second project to tick off the list.

All up it took me about an hour and a half, including a lunch break. I feel relieved that it's done, but also foolish to have sat on it for so long when so little work was required to get it out of my hair for ever. I'm going to give it to a women's shelter or the like.

And once that was done I could skip off to meet a friend with a light heart and a glow of self-righteousness. A good day's work, I say.

In the waiting room at the procrastination clinic

Jumper for newborn Oscar, who is now in his third year

When my friend Jacqui said she was having a baby I started knitting a jumper. I chose the wool carefully – it’s a wool/silk blend which I thought would be soft and non-scratchy on infant skin, in a shade of blue that would do for either sex – and finished most of the body in only a couple of evenings.

Partial garment for an unfeasibly small person

Then I got spooked by having to use double-pointed needles for the sleeves (two sticks good, four sticks bad!) and flung it aside. (In my defence I did make him a cot quilt, which I finished and delivered a couple of weeks before his birth. Go, me!)

I briefly picked the jumper up again when my friend Rhiain became pregnant, but I couldn’t overcome the dpn fear, so instead made (and, yes, finished!) a pretty cot quilt. I felt sure her baby would be a girl.

He wasn’t.

I found that discouraging, so baby Tom never got a present, the girly cot quilt is still pointlessly living with childfree me, and the little blue jumper languishes yet. None of my other friends is, as far as I know, pregnant, but I want this project out of my hair.

Optimistically sized jumper with ill-advised embroidery 

My not-my-real-aunty Barb taught me to knit when I was about seven, but I didn’t take to it. My mother was a good knitter, making garments half from commercial patterns and half out of her head. She knitted constantly for the three of us and for various other relatives and friends, and I wanted to knit too; I tried to like it, but never did. That irked me.

When I was about 28, I determined to give it ‘one last try’ – and I was hooked. For whatever reason, it all came together in my mind and my hands and I was away. My first project was a forest-green crew-neck jumper than I finished in a respectable amount of time and wore for several years. The next project, a cream V-neck jumper, fared less well.

I had to get Mum to help me over the phone with the V neck as I couldn’t work out all the slipping and passing of stitches, but I eventually managed it, and the whole thing was only about an hour away from finished when I abandoned it. All I had to do was sew up the side seams! While I’m sure it wouldn’t have fitted me, I’m not sure that was the reason I gave up on it. I recall thinking I could give it to Mum, always a more modestly sized woman than me.

But what truly baffles me is why I ever decided it would be nice to include some folksy embroidery on it. Perhaps I thought it was 'too plain', a concept I no longer recognise. But wheat ears?!

'Naive' embroidery – so called because it's naive to think it could possibly look good

The mere existence of this jumper goads me, as it reminds me of both my procrastination and my dearth of fashion sense. I’m going to sew it up and give it to charity. There must be someone out there who isn't repulsed by embroidered knitwear.

Too much craft is finally enough

When I was eleven, my Aunty Lola taught me to crochet granny squares. I took to it like a profiterole to chocolate sauce, and within a few months I had finished a single-bed-sized granny-square rug in the glorious shades of the 70s – mainly gold, orange and chocolate brown, with some purple and aqua thrown in.

I used and loved it throughout my teenage years and it is significant for two reasons: it was the start of my enduring love of craft, and it’s a project that I actually finished.*

In hindsight my teenage years might have been more normally spent chasing boys or actually going outdoors occasionally, but instead I practised enthusiastically for old ladyhood – crocheting doilies and traymats, cushions, slippers, ties for my father, potholders, and lampshade trims; making patchwork cushions (they’re still on my mother’s sofa, worn to shreds); teaching myself to tat; spending endless hours on Spanish blackwork and bargello embroidery; and fashioning macramé potplant holders (some of which are still, to my astonishment, on display in my older cousins’ houses). At university I once spent three days embroidering a cushion rather than going to lectures. But for every item that I finished, two or three projects were abandoned along the way – because I didn’t like the technique or the stitch or the colour or the fabric, or they didn’t fit me or suit me, or I gave up instantly as soon as I hit a tiny snag, or because something newer, shinier, more challenging, less challenging or just different came along.

‘Why don’t you finish one thing before you start something else?’ my non-craft-obsessed mother used to ask. Meanwhile my father was busy in his workshop creating, tinkering with, swearing at, buying materials for and abandoning projects, just as I was. Poor Mum.

Thirty-five years after that crocheted rug, the pattern continues: I start many more projects than I finish. I have hundreds if not thousands of dollars’ worth of fabric and yarn in my stash, and my cupboards and drawers are increasingly crammed with UFOs (unfinished objects). In fact I considered calling this blog The UFO Project until I realised it would attract more conspiracy theorists, Roswell obsessives, X-Files fans and general nutbags than I was willing to tolerate (to wit, any**), and that they would end up pretty annoyed, too, after typing their way into an alternative universe not of greys and government obfuscation but of craft.

And now I’m finally really sick of it. All this moribund craft is a waste of money, time, energy and space. I’m tired of scrabbling through drifts of it whenever I want to find a needle, buying more and more furniture to store it, and generally having it on my conscience. It ends here! This blog*** is about finishing stuff off, getting it out of the cupboards and giving it a life. Setting goals is alien to me, so there’s no time focus here; I’m just going to do it till it’s done. Blogging about it is a way of keeping it on track; if it’s out there and I think (even deludedly) that people are reading about it, hopefully sheer shame will make me do it. So pile on the shame, crafters of the world, and let me know what you think. (But do feel free to leaven the shame with praise and flattery if you feel inclined.)



*Some people might argue with this, as all these years later the yarn ends are still not darned in; however, I’ve accepted now that they never will be, and as the rug has been used and loved for many years without any of the squares coming adrift, I reckon it counts as finished.


** with apologies to X-Files fans; you have my allegiance, and I admit to a lingering fondness for David Duchovny, but this blog is about other things.

*** Thanks to Kitty for navigating the sea of my incompetence and helping me to set this blog up. Without her it would still be a Word document and a bunch of photos I didn't know how to extract from my camera.