For Want Of A Hyphen...

While the snow piled up outside today, I thought it would be a good time to replace the ties on my (home-made) duvet cover with the snaps I bought in Rutland last week.

Rutland is the second-largest city in Vermont, and the ugliest.  It even has a  strip on which are stores like Bed, Bath etc., Joanne's Fabrics, a mall with K-mart and Sears.  When we need stuff beyond raw cow's milk or layer pellets, we sigh and go to Rutland.

That is where I bought a little snap-inserting gizmo, which came with enough snaps, I thought, for my purposes.

As the blizzard raged outside, I wrestled the king-size duvet (we have a queen-size bed, but I believe in over-duvetting) out of its cover, and set about unstitching the nine pairs of ties and replacing them with snaps.  The snap-inserting gizmo came with a fairly complex set of directions involving pencil erasers and hammers, but after some false starts I figured out what to do.

No sooner had I inserted the first set of snaps, however, than I realized I didn't have enough--I needed nine sets, and only had four.  How was this possible?  I remembered clearly checking the package label and ensuring that the gizmo came with  more than enough snaps for my purposes.

I pulled the label out of the trash, and here is what it said:  4 size 16 snaps.

Obviously, in the store my eyes had focused on "16 snaps," and that is what I assumed was in the package.  Had the benighted souls who write such things possessed the rudiments of grammar (I know I'm sounding priggish, but too bad), the label would have read 4 size-16 snaps, and I would have bought an additional five size-16 snaps.

As it is, we are going to have to make an extra 45-minute trip to Rutland, past the lake with the ice-fishing shacks, past the snow-covered cow-farms and the country stores selling local goat cheese and expensive wines, to the awful strip to buy five snaps.

But all is not lost.  We can have lunch at Kentucky Fried Chicken.

Adventures In Home Sewing

A very long time ago, in the wild and carefree 60s, many women sewed their own clothes. Some were quite good at it. A graduate school classmate of mine made a Madras sport jacket for her husband. Men's clothes are hard to make--they have to fit just right, since in social situations most men don't move around enough to hide an uneven hem or an ill-fitting sleeve. Sport jackets are especially hard--they have to have padding, and lining, and buttonholes, and in the case of a Madras print you have to match all those lines. I was never in that league.

I specialized in shifts: loose-fitting, sleeveless, collarless tubes, with at most a couple of darts. With time I became more daring, and made a couple of long-sleeved outfits to wear to graduate fellowship interviews, in sober brown fabric to make me look scholarly. I made a robe with flounces at the collar and cuffs for my honeymoon, and a couple of years later I made my maternity clothes, including a cape to wear in winter. And I made cute little dresses for my daughters until, at an amazingly early age, they developed their own notions of cool attire.

The item I remember best, however, is my tablecloth dress, which I made while still in graduate school. My husband and I had been invited to a party, and I wanted to wear something new. This desire hit me with great force on the afternoon of the party, too late for me to run to the fabric store and make even the simplest pattern.

How I made the tablecloth-into-dress leap is not clear in my mind, but I remember holding a dark-green, round, fringed tablecloth in one hand and a pair of scissors in the other and thinking, "this is going to be a snap."

And it was (see below). I folded the tablecloth into fourths, cut a hole for my head in the pointed end, then made a cut about as long as my arm from the circumference towards the center. I threaded my needle and hemmed the neck hole, then sewed the sleeve and side seams. Thanks to the fringe, there was no need to finish either the cuffs or the skirt.

I slipped the tablecloth over my head, thrust my arms into the sleeves, and stood in front of the mirror. The dress needed some interest around the middle, so I pulled a paisley scarf out of a drawer and tied it around my waist.

I looked again. The sleeves were really really long, and the skirt quite short. The thought crossed my mind that people might think I was crazy, but it didn't linger. Those were unconventional times, and I was a grad student, and if those two factors didn't give me license to wear a tablecloth when I felt like it, nothing ever would.

I had a good time that night, despite having to push up my sleeves every time I wanted to stick a carrot into the California dip. But the stiffish fringe prickled on my thighs and on my fingertips, and I wasn't wild about the color of the dress--that deep avocado green which, along with harvest gold and daisy prints and lava lamps conjures up the era almost as powerfully as the smell of pot.

Although, come to think of it, the thing might have worked as a tunic over bell-bottom pants, after the party the bloom was off the rose, and I never wore my tablecloth again.

How To Make A Tablecloth Into A Dress: