Redemption, Repurpose, and Wooden Egg Cups

The jacket lay sprawled across the bed as if it had just returned from a shopping trip to Morocco, without so much as a Turkish coffee stain to show for it. Forget Morocco, a visit to the local fish market would have been a jaunt for this poor jacket, which had not been off its hanger in more than two years. I feel the accusation more keenly now as I look down on its pristine condition, and I am resolved to remedy the situation at once.

Not by wearing it – heavens no! By creating something entirely new with a lot of forethought, planning and inspiration, plus my trusty old pair of dressmaking scissors.

While I have never seen myself as a jacket person, this one caught my eye years ago when my husband and I were on holiday in Paris. Blame it on the city’s famed pink light that tends to make everything seem fifty pastel shades more tempting, or maybe a particularly bad case of museum overload. I cannot say for sure. But I was excited about the prospect of shopping for it, despite the hurdle of having to sell my husband on the idea, given our limited time and budget.

Being a walk-in, buy item, walk-out kind of guy he has always loathed browsing, but I can usually woo him into an hour or two of shop-hopping if I can specify, in precise detail, what it is I am looking for. Paris bought me a day. And this jacket had me well and truly hooked with its age neutral, effortless elegance – not at all like the stiff, corporate armour I’d suited-up in before. At least, that’s how it looked on those lovely French women and I was convinced it could do the same for me. Except, it didn’t.

So, now this lovely, expensive, 100 per cent Irish Linen veste longue that’s been a captive of my closet for most of its – I’m ashamed to say - inert life, is about to get a makeover.

Not that it’s the first time I’ve fallen out of love with a piece of clothing – there have been many fashion skeletons hanging in my closet. But I’ve come to realize I can do so much more than merely ditch a garment. Just because you’re no longer right for one another doesn’t mean you can’t remain friends, and sometimes the simple act of holding on pays dividends. Tastes change, trends return, and with a little reshaping and a decent pair of scissors, you might find yourself falling in love all over again.

When I was growing up, the only new clothes we were given were those our mother made for us, and we loved them. We could afford to purchase only a few store-bought items. So, while I appreciate the mindless ease of buying new things – hurrah – I reject the easy come, easy go, decadence of contemporary living, where almost anything is expendable on a whim.

That is why I intend to make this jacket work for me – in another way. It will not find itself on the rack of a second-hand store or, worse, badly photographed on a self-sell platform (although I confess to having tried this once). It will be transformed, reinvented, reshaped and repurposed. This time will be different. What happened with that other jacket a lifetime ago, when I was just 17-years old, was a dark, but indispensable, milestone in my development. A valuable lesson on the limits of what is possible, not to mention, a cautionary tale for elder sisters contemplating weekends away. Here is why I can say with 99 per cent certainty it will not happen again:

Full of ideas and a blimp-sized confidence in my own abilities, I took a lethal shortcut and did the unforgivable: I started cutting into fabric without a pattern or any firm idea of what I was doing. The feeling of regret and guilt was instant and overwhelming. I remember it well. To be clear, this was not my first foray into clothing construction or, in this case, deconstruction, but it was my first attempt at bespoke alteration. To put it bluntly, it was an abomination. And, if that was not enough, the jacket was not even mine.

I have often wondered, if my passion had run to forensics rather than fabrics, if I might have made a more successful coroner? It is obvious that I had been nurturing a Dr Frankenstein complex, right down to stealing the object of my experimentation - not from a crypt, mind you - but from my own sister’s closet while she was away for the weekend. The result being a pitiful, mutilated, white satin corpse with the scars of seamlines intersecting at various angles, some of them misaligned, where I had tried to repair the damage and failed miserably.

It was a horrible sight. I couldn’t bear to look at it and considered burying it in the backyard. (At night during a thunderstorm would have been eminently appropriate). Instead, I hung it back up in her closet as if nothing had happened. I may have even pressed it. My sister returned home and screamed at me for a week. I replaced her top with a new dress using all my savings, she still has it to this day. At least once a year she reminds me of the ‘hacking’ incident, which is probably why it is so vivid in my memory. But, she doesn’t scream at me anymore, so we’re good.

To recap – this gorgeous Parisian closet-dweller, now to be repurposed, belongs to me – tick. I have a truckload of dressmaking experience under my belt – tick. I understand there are limits to what can be achieved but sometimes it really is possible to make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear - tick.

I’m thinking … skirt, just above the knee, deep patch pockets, wide waistband, back zipper. I want to use the front jacket opening as a main feature for the skirt back and the existing jacket hem for the skirt as well, with the buttons from the front opening complete with the opening band itself used for the back waistband closure. I find it just as easy to use what is already there as much as possible. That way, it looks authentic and seamless. And why make unnecessary work for yourself?

I pick an A-line skirt pattern from my collection and lay everything out on the dining table. I fetch the iron and board, press the linen jacket one last time in its present form and replace it on the table with all the care one would accord an autopsy patient. I retrieve the pattern pieces, lay them over the fabric, carefully measuring for straight of grain, and start pinning.

I realize I am thinking about my mother when she suddenly appears in my head. She is wearing the familiar sweat cloth and tape measure around her neck that I remember from my childhood. I think of her now because she never used pins to keep patterns steady on fabric. She said it was a waste of time and that pins were a luxury.

I see her standing at our polished hardwood table, positioning wooden egg cups on the pieces to secure them in place, the same egg cups we used for our breakfast (I hope they were clean). I have tried doing the same using teacups and glasses, but there is too much movement, and I cannot cut with precision. The task is too important to risk getting wrong for the sake of a few extra minutes and the one-off cost of reusable pins, so I say out loud:

“Pins are fine, Mum. They work for me!”

My mother shakes her head and gives me one of her looks, a mixture of reproof and approval. It was crazy out of character and, sometimes, deeply uncomfortable, for her to give praise. So, when a stray compliment or word of encouragement did manage to escape her lips, as it did when she said I had “potential” and should “keep trying”, I sat up and paid attention. I remembered.

In my mother’s lifetime she never knew that her side of the family had 300-years of dressmakers in its lineage, as I later learned through tracing our family history. Ergo, she would never have considered the possibility that, through her words, the love and support of long-gone matriarchs were cheering me on, too. But she did not have time for abstract thoughts. Six children have a way of making life remarkably concrete.

The praise I speak of came when I was 13-years old. I had made a shirt from an old, ugly, green floral remnant I found in Mum’s sewing stash. On presentation, she studied it inside and out, and said:

“It’s not right, but you’ve done a good job of it.”

She explained that while I had not used proper construction techniques, I had made the basic concept of a shirt. That is, a garment with sleeves, a collar, pocket, and buttons down the front. It was a wearable article that fitted well, and I should be proud of it. I was, and I wore it plenty. But it was still an ugly shirt.

The only two words of criticism my mother spoke that day, “not right”, challenged me more than anything else, to make right any future projects. Had she known of their positive effect, she may have spoken a few more. But she took me under her wing and taught me some basic techniques, starting with easy patterns. Before long, I had acquired a little knowledge, which, as we know, can be a dangerous thing. My sister’s jacket says it all. I credit her influence as the inspiration and underlying reason for my love of anything creative, from clothes to curtains, quilts to coverings, even Christmas Tomte.

Lately, that influence has led me back closer to home, to an appreciation of the familiar, humble and, at times, prosaic. Recognizing the merit in things I have around me, and the need to reuse and repurpose rather than replace. Repurposing projects often beg the most creative and deeply satisfying solutions. Which brings me back to my skirt and that feeling: a wondrous blend of excitement, terror, and trepidation.

Everything is ready. The front and back sections are pinned. The pocket pieces are to be formed from the upper areas of the jacket where the natural curve of the sleeve cavity lends itself perfectly to the scooped style of the pocket. The waistband pattern will be placed once the main pieces have been cut. I try to incorporate as many elements of the jacket into the skirt as I can, like a chef making stock from leftovers. The only thing left for me to do now is …

The sound interrupts my thoughts like an echo of a distant memory. A deep, rhythmic, croomp, croomp, croomp of scissors slicing through cloth over a polished, hardwood table. I’ve never heard anyone but my mother make that sound, and I see her now as she moves with the skill and speed of a seasoned shearer. She is making a skirt for me. It is pale blue, with deep patch pockets and an A-line form. My mother mops her face with the sweat cloth around her neck, glances up, and gives me that look:

“Well, you’d better get on with it,” she says.

And with that, I pick up my scissors, and start cutting.

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