stab, slash… stitch

I’m trying to convince Grace to start a blog.  She needs an outlet of some sort for discussing/showing off her various needlework projects, and right now she’s only got us.  We do understand and appreciate what she does, my clone and I (because, contrary to the idiotic stereotype, real men do sometimes know one end of a sewing machine from the other), but we lack her obsession extreme enthusiasm.

I’ve been watching her do battle today with a most terrible piece of garb.  Someone from the local LARP group had paid someone in Texas or wherever to make him a cloak, and when he finally received what he’d paid for… it wasn’t what he’d paid for.  WAY too small.  (How does one even make a cloak too small?  Too tight in the neck, sure, but that is easy to remedy.  At worst, the hood — if there is one — has to be removed before the neckline is re-cut larger.)  This thing is too narrow in the shoulders.  Whatever happened to the tried-and-true half-circle cloak, no pattern needed, just string, a push-pin, and a pencil?  Even though the fabric this particular cloak is made of would still need at least a center-back seam (it’s a faux-fur velour, so the nap — the way the fur lays — has to be dealt with), it should not have seams closely shaped to the line of the wearer’s shoulders.  No wonder the guy could barely move his arms while wearing it! Whoever the bozo is who made this cloak, he’d better hope he never meets the buyer on the field of LARPish battle… or Grace, who would trounce him on general principles:  he charged money for incompetent garb work, and that is not acceptable.

Can you tell I’ve heard all about this a few times already?

Anyway, the guy who bought the cloak asked my twin if he knew of a way to make it wearable, and he did, so he brought it home.  He’d intended to fix it himself, but Grace volunteered.  She feels about bad needlework of any sort much the same as I feel about bad writing, and she’s been cussing almost as much as I do while attempting to edit a particularly ugly manuscript — the kind where I can’t even figure out what the author is trying to say half the time, so I don’t know how to make it say that.  (What the hell is a reppip toor?  Oh, he means repertoire.  Well, it’s the wrong word anyway.)  So we’ve already started joking about ‘editing the cloak.’  Makes as much sense as ‘doing battle with it.’  Grace thinks she will be able to save it (“Poor thing — even polyester doesn’t deserve to have this done to it.”), but some of its problems cannot be remedied, only worked around.

And speaking of sewing and fighting… By coincidence, I saw a blog post today titled “Real Characters:  She Can’t Be That!”  Blogger P. H. Solomon discusses the stereotype of female warriors being “unrealistic” despite there being plenty of examples in both history and literature to the contrary.  What I especially liked about the post was discussion of how a woman who normally sticks to “domestic” things — sewing being just one of them — may still take up a weapon to defend her home.  She need not choose between knowing how to cook and knowing how to swing a flange mace, because there is no reason why she (or her male counterpart) cannot know how to do both.