soft thread and pencil marks

A friend of a friend won a free consultation with Clinton Kelly of What Not To Wear, and she was very excited, because she has a plus-size body, and wanted some tips on how to make the most of her wardrobe in a fashion culture which deliberately puts her body at a disadvantage.

Her first question for him was this: how do celebrities make a plain white t-shirt and a pair of weekend jeans look chic?  She always assumed it was because so many celebrities have, by nature or by design, very slender frames, and because they can afford very expensive clothing.  But when she watched What Not To Wear, she noticed that women of all sizes ended up in cute clothes that really fit their bodies and looked great.  She had tried to apply some guidelines from the show into her own wardrobe, but with only mixed success.  So - what gives?

His answer was that everything you will ever see on a celebrity’s body, including their outfits when they’re out and about and they just get caught by a paparazzo, has been tailored, and the same goes for everything on What Not To Wear.  Jeans, blazers, dresses - everything right down to plain t-shirts and camisoles.  He pointed out that historically, up until the last few generations, the vast majority of people either made their own clothing or had their clothing made by tailors and seamstresses.  You had your clothing made to accommodate the measurements of your individual body, and then you moved the fuck on.  Nothing on the show or in People magazine is off the rack and unaltered.  He said that what they do is ignore the actual size numbers on the tags, find something that fits an individual’s widest place, and then have it completely altered to fit.  That’s how celebrities have jeans that magically fit them all over, and the rest of us chumps can’t ever find a pair that doesn’t gape here or ride up or slouch down or have about four yards of extra fabric here and there.

I knew that having dresses and blazers altered was probably something they were doing, but to me, having alterations done generally means having my jeans hemmed and then simply living with the fact that I will always be adjusting my clothing while I’m wearing it because I have curves from here to ya-ya, some things don’t fit right, and the world is just unfair that way.  I didn’t think that having everything tailored was something that people did. 

It’s so obvious, I can’t believe I didn’t know this.  But no one ever told me.  I was told about bikini season and dieting and targeting your “problem areas” and avoiding horizontal stripes.  No one told me that Jennifer Aniston is out there wearing a bigger size of Ralph Lauren t-shirt and having it altered to fit her.

I sat there after I was told this story, and I really thought about how hard I have worked not to care about the number or the letter on the tag of my clothes, how hard I have tried to just love my body the way it is, and where I’ve succeeded and failed.  I thought about all the times I’ve stood in a fitting room and stared up at the lights and bit my lip so hard it bled, just to keep myself from crying about how nothing fits the way it’s supposed to.  No one told me that it wasn’t supposed to.  I guess I just didn’t know.  I was too busy thinking that I was the one that didn’t fit.

I thought about that, and about all the other girls and women out there whose proportions are “wrong,” who can’t find a good pair of work trousers, who can’t fill a sweater, who feel excluded and freakish and sad and frustrated because they have to go up a size, when really the size doesn’t mean anything and it never, ever did, and this is just another bullshit thing thrown in your path to make you feel shitty about yourself.

I thought about all of that, and then I thought that in elementary school, there should be a class for girls where they sit you down and tell you this stuff before you waste years of your life feeling like someone put you together wrong.

Which is a shame, since spinning is really where the "resource provided by the earth" tangibly becomes "object with a use."

Aspects of spinning, such as the amount of twist and the length of the fibers, are impactful upon the thread or yarn created, but lots of fiber crafters don't get to directly play with those variables...

It is so strange how textile production is so utterly dominated by very few fibers, when so many are possible. Industry keeps coming up with new ways to transform bamboo or something into fibers, which is all well and good, but we have yet to run out of easily usable natural fibers that have worked for thousands of years.

For those especially I can't over-recommend the Fleece & Fiber Sourcebook or the Field Guide to Fleece (Deborah Robson and Carol Ekarius.) An awful lot of excellent fiber breeds and species are now unknown, under-used, and in danger of going extinct; Shave 'Em to Save 'Em and the Livestock Conservancy in general are good resources for finding local people working with those. There's a chiengora (dog wool) group on Ravelry that's great, too, and lots of easily searchable info on raising silkworms at home and spinning from hankies.

Fibershed did a spotlight on dogbane, nettle, and milkweed in comparison to hemp and flax. They talk specifically about Native American techniques and current cultivation of all three, particularly dogbane, and ways to spin yarn and make rope. They aren't super in-depth about processing the fibers, but it seems like it's because they have more tutorials/guides on other pages. Bast fibers all have a similar retting->drying->scutching->hackling->spinning (you also have to ripple flax at the beginning) process, generally speaking.

Of course, flax is a really accessible plant fiber to spin yourself! You can plant it yourself, buy unprocessed flax (locally or online), or buy processed but unspun flax. If you're interested in the whole process, this book is the flax bible: Linen: From Flax Seed to Woven Cloth by Linda Heinrich. There are a lot of youtubers who go through it all, too.

If you're interested in kudzu, then may I suggest Oigawa Kudzu-fu Studio! They're located in Japan, but they have helpfully created an English website, too, where they go over making kudzu-fu (Japanese name for the cloth from kudzu). And if you ever find yourself going to Japan, you can take a class from them.

On Oigawa Studio's info page, they also mention that they work with ramie (plant in the nettle family), linden tree (basswood), and wisteria, so do with that what you will. I assume a lot of those resources are in Japanese.

This is my personal experience with dogbane:

I tried retting, but instead of making the fibers easier to separate from the cuticle, it seemed to make them even harder to clean off. What little Ive been able to read about Native American practices of prep suggests that there was no retting process at all, the fibers were cleaned by scraping.

This was roughly what I came to on my own. I have a sickle-shaped chip of reddish chert/quartz, about as long as my palm, and I just pull the fibers against it so the dry flakes of cuticle come off.

My other tools are: a cheap grill brush, the kind with metal bristles, a hair brush with the stiffest hard plastic bristles I could find, and a round rock I took from some decorative landscaping. The grill brush is for combing out the fibers and for using with the hairbrush to agitate the fibers like carding wool. The round rock is for beating the fibers while they're wet and twisted into a tight bundle, which helps them separate into finer threads. Right now I am experimenting with whether boiling the fibers helps any part of the process, and it's inconclusive so far.

A couple reasons why dogbane might be hard to market as a fiber include: the plant while alive is toxic to humans and animals including dogs, as the name suggest, and secondly, the fibers are orange.

I don't know if the color is genetic or caused by growing conditions, since I have gathered some fibers that are a blond color or even nearly white, but most of the dogbane plants i've professed have had orange fibers, ranging all the way into a deep copper shade.

In my experience, from talking to other spinners, very few spinners like processing fibre. Most people would prefer to buy it ready to spin, if given the option, and since its a hobby, they have the option. But only if they buy commonly used commercially viable fibres (which tend to be wool and silk and a little bit of flax.

People who really want to do the full process are actually very rare and you will probably be very popular in fibrecrafting spaces if you are publicly interested in doing it.

One (1) guy showed up to our weaving guild and mentioned in passing that he enjoyed processing wool and suddenly he was the most popular person in the room. It was very striking.

super in love with it, the only thing i would change is that it’s a little smaller than i hoped. i think i should have used one needle size larger. for some reason i have trouble trusting that looser gauges will look right even though i love them when blocked and finished lmao

also this thing had like. a billion ends to weave in because each of those little points created 2 ends so it was a bit of a slog however i think the end result is worth it!

The fabric was pretty torn up (it was shredded by friction, not cut) and I often wear my sleeves rolled up, so I put patches on both sides of the hole.

I used some scrap quilting cotton I've had around forever, attached with lightweight fusible webbing (which I'm trying out for the first time). I whip stitched around the edge of each patch to prevent fraying and then reinforced the whole area with big sashiko-inspired stitches using 4 strands of embroidery floss.