The Garment

It looks medieval. You look like a hippie. That garment could have been in Monty Python and the Holy Grail. I love it! You made that?

My absolute favorite baby present - back almost 11 years ago - was a blanket made out of recycled felted wool sweaters. It's simple - six inch squares zig-zagged together, all shades of off white, dense and soft and subtle. It was made by Crispina, a woman who - back in the day - used to have a flourishing cottage industry making blankets out of sweaters. In recent years, though, she's scaled back the production and sales business, and now does workshops to teach other people how to repurpose clothing into other things. Because it was an itch I had to scratch, last spring I went to one of her all-day workshops, the sweater/sweatshirt chopshop. Crispina supplies everything you need, and by day's end, my garment was largely complete. It probably would have been finished that day had I not decided that it needed to be knee-length, but finally, after some more snipping and stitching, it's actually finished, six months later.

The schtick is that you cut up two sweatshirts so that you keep the neck/shoulders of one, and the shoulders/sleeves of another. Everything else flows from there. I cut the pieces for the "skirt" in a more-or-less trapezoid shape, so that when they were pieced together, they flared out a bit. The trim piece at the bottom is actually the bottom of two sweatshirts flipped upside down. It's all hand sewn, with six strand cotton embroidery thread, except for the hook & eye tape - that's too stiff to do by hand, so I took it to a costume shop and had them run a zigzag. I probably could have done that myself, except that my sewing machine is old and cranky. Besides, standing hip to hip at the worktable in the shop, figuring out the thread color and making sure the tape was pinned right, you get lines of dialogue like Let me just move that codpiece for you.

I'm so pleased with how it came out. And the funny thing is, people comment on it every time I wear it. Yeah, my 10 year old wishes I wouldn't leave the house in it, but everyone else loves it.