sarah in nyc

Friday , S asked me to meet her at her dressmaker’s with the wedding sash. I was invisioning a visit to the dry cleaner near her house. S gave me an address on 71st Street I went. I was humbled by what I saw. This was a workshop of highly skilled, mostly Russian women who really get garment construction. They had taken S’s off the rack dress and had done a small alteration for modesty that didn’t look like a pathetic attempt to be covered up but just made the whole dress better.   I was a little nervous by what they might say about the sash. As I sat there with the sash in my back pack each flaw loomed big in my head. Instead, Iris pinned the sash on the dress looked at it hard with her critical eye and declared it a good [piece of work. That’s high praise from a woman who knows her stuff.   I don’t get my clothing altered. Ready to wear ( when I used to wear it) always fit well enough.  Women like S who are shorter than the average always need a good alteration...

 When I was in college, my friend Alan used to tell us how his family fortune was based on a patent held by his grandparents. The patent was for a material that could be used to create machine made lace. This material could be stitched to recreate traditional lace patterns and then when the stitching was complete, the material could be washed away leaving the lace like fabric. My friend Alan used to say that this is what created the lace table cloth industry. Now, it is possible for home sewers to purchase the same sort of stuff. It has been on the market for a long time. It is sold as wash away stabilizer. When you pull the roll out of the package the stabilizer feels like a rubbery plastic.when it gets wet it feels like gelatin. Over the years I have read several articles about using the fabric to create not just traditional looking lace, lots of people use machine embroidery motifs to do just that but wilder more organic looking lace similar to the work of the designers tha...

My buddy came to town on Wednesday for a New York fix. The wonderful thing about having a sewing buddy come to town is that it becomes possible to do the wall to wall fiber touring that my family can do only in small doses. Thursday we did lots of running around. Our day began at the Museum of the City of New York and the Valentina exhibit. Click here for a video about her work. http://www.style.com/video/fashion-moments/fashion-moments/1896809784/valentina-schlee/9341623001 We saw the Fashioning Felt exhibit at the Cooper Hewett. You can visit virtually http://http//exhibitions.cooperhewitt.org/Fashioning-Felt/ . The exhibit was fabulous. It was just plain fun. It is such a tactile intense exhibit that I had to control myself from not just touching, but also rolling around on the pieces exhibited. Clearly, I wasn't the only person who felt this way, ( pun NOT intended) because there were small samples of the felt to touch near the exit of the exhibit. We also went to the Kips Bay...