Author: Jodi Green

a new dress (sort of)

For a few years now I’ve kept a practice of making myself a new dress for my birthday. This week as I was finishing up Cobbled Bodice Attempt #5 on a dress by a careless and sloppy designer I both love and hate (Tina Givens, IYKYK), it occurred to me that I should be making myself a new dress to celebrate my Gramma’s birthday instead (or in addition to). My Gramma was a professional sewist, making and altering things for people right up to the day she died. She gave me the skills and the confidence to make my own clothes. She taught me how to read and use a sewing pattern while guiding me through making the most fiddly and ridiculous shirt I’ve ever sewn, with cuffs and buttonholes and an asymetrical closure and an incredible ruffle that ran all the way up the front opening and around the collar. She bought me my first sewing machine, and bequeathed me her last one, which I still use. She would have turned 99 today.

As I should have expected, the bodice fix I was attempting didn’t work out (um hi, it took me five tries to realise it’s not the bodice that’s the problem). That dress is back on the sewing room floor, destined to become a skirt or rags, and I’ll make a whole post about my struggles with Tina Givens and her beautiful yet deeply crappy patterns another day. Fortunately, I had another dress nearly finished so I had something far better and more beautiful to wear today than that utter failure.

meandthecaptain

Pattern details: like most of what I make, this dress is a pastiche. The mullety two-layer skirt is from the Metamorphic Dress by Sew Liberated (pattern link: Metamorphic Dress). I had at first made this using the same bodice pattern I used for my thesis dresses, an apron-ish style I still love but the shoulder straps of which tend to fall down constantly from my narrow shoulders. I’m working my way slowly through my closet and remaking everything that’s not perfectly comfortable, the majority of which have that irritating strap problem. I adapted this new bodice from the Orchard Dress by Helen’s Closet (pattern link: Orchard Dress). I wore it to the public library knitting club today and the straps didn’t fall off once!

The top layer fabric is pieced together from large flour sack towels that I dyed with tea and screenprinted with all of my favourite motifs: cartoony flowers, clusters of floating arches, twisting segments of warped spacetime, and layers of gritty monoprinting blocked out with paper cutouts. The bottom layer is my old standby, the SCA’s favourite chemise cotton from the Bleachery in Aurora, Illinois, dyed a softly mottled pale olive tan with goldenrod flowers and iron water.

The Captain, whose pose I’m trying to copy here, is wearing my Gramma’s ribbon full of pins won in the Senior Games, along with my Granddad’s steam show hat full of badges.

important Shorty update!

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You might remember a few weeks ago I mentioned that Shorty had shown up here after an absence of more than three weeks. That was 3 January, and she didn’t show up again until this past Saturday, 8 February. Long enough that I’d done all of my rationalising, reminding myself four years old is pretty old for an urban squirrel et cetera. And then Saturday morning I looked out my bedroom window and there was her familiar bald back and scraggly short tail popping up out of the hole in the lid of our neighbour’s garbage bin. And today she came and sat with me and gently took walnuts out of my hand while I froze on the concrete step in my bathrobe in -12°C on her behalf. I’m so relieved to have her back.

blue sketchbook, pages 30 & 31

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Lots of layers on the verso with spirograph, fungal growth, folding spacetime, and a bird. The recto is a tipped in newsprint bingo card (this is the back) with some stuff Profesora was saying in Spanish class. That little antler wiener character is giving a bit of side eye to Tito wishing his girlfriend would drink some beers.

Ballpoint pen, Sharpie marker, coloured markers, white gel pen, opaque white paint marker.

drinks diary, 18 january 2014

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Ballpoint pen (black, blue, red, green) and markers.

Working midnight shift at the bingo hall on a day when I had foolishly thought would be my first day of giving up coffee and I lasted about five minutes in the dismal bingo hall lighting where you can’t tell if it’s day or night. Giving up coffee was a bad idea anyway, I’m never going to do it.

One woman got bingo four times in a row that night.

studio update

I’ve been moving furniture and presses around in the studio for the past month, trying to figure out a way to get the natural dye operation into the same space where the printmaking and bookbinding happen, because it’s the space with all the good lighting and the ventilation. It’s a big, exhausting job. But it’s starting to feel like it’s going to work out, and it’s shaping up to actually feel more spacious than before. If I can find somewhere for all the STUFF to go.

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This is what the south wall looks like as of yesterday. I moved that gray table on the right, with the extremely heavy Nolan flatbed press on it that’s too heavy for Peter and I to lift together anymore, all the way over next to the doorway by shifting and scooching, shifting and scooching kind of like how the Easter Island heads were put in place. That was literally the only work I could do that day. Then the press table, which used to jut out into the middle of the room, got pivoted against the wall (with that Chandler & Price Pilot press on it, which is very heavy but not too heavy to lift), and the drying rack in the corner also pivoted 90°. And suddenly this whole space feels wide open, and for the first time in this studio all the letterpress furniture and spacing is on the same side of the room as the presses. Now I can’t wait to get back to printing in here, except for the chaos I’m not showing you over on the other side of the room.

That handpainted Tabor Metal Fabricators sign came from the business my Granddad came to Canada to operate. They made those truck trailers that carry cars, and when the business folded my tricycle, which my dad had taken into work to fix, got abandoned in the locked-up building and when I was a teenage I would regularly stop by that still shuttered building on my jaunts through the industrial park, peering through the murky windows trying to spot my trike in all the abandoned junk that was in there.

I use that sign to block the studio doorway, moving it into place every single time I leave the room so this very cute asshole won’t try to come in and poop on the floor. She has a thing for concrete.

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Don’t let that sweet face fool you. This is an absolute monster.