Shirts

Now that I had the taste for piecing and applique, I looked around the cottage and found a yellow linen duster that belonged to my mother-in-law. A petite woman, it would not fit me in any case and so I deconstructed it and took a scrap with me to the Quilt Basket to find some batiks that would make it go far enough to be an entire Oneshirt. A cheerful honeycomb and some light florals were just the ticket.

Some people are shy of yellow, thinking it brings out the yellow of their skin, but I think I look just fine in yellow. If the Oneshirt project is meant to be a detachment from forecasted trends, I can choose colors that meet my needs, not the ones that drive people to buy new things.

Either side of the front of the jacket I was upcycling featured some embroidery, with trapunto and silver beads. I carefully cut around the wing shaped embroider and transferred it to the front and back of the oneshirt I am calling Honeycomb.

My adventures in piecing Oneshirts is also driven by problem solving to use what I have in the best manner. Linen Lawn is a good example of this. The soft floral lawn comes from a collection of fabrics that I salvaged from my second paternal grandmother, Annabel’s home when we packed her up for the move to assisted living. I drove home that time from Paduca, KY with a car full of fabric, which I quickly burn tested on the dock of the local Salvation Army, leaving behind a stack of synthetics and carting off the precious natural fibers. Having a stash of heirloom fabric proved to be a bit stressful. How could I cut up this beautiful fabric and what could I make from it that would last as long as my memories of my grandmother Hustvedt? Here the Oneshirt comes to the rescue. I honor the heritage in this fabric by making longevity a requirement for the design: longevity in style because it does not reference any fluctuating external trends and longevity in function because it is resistant to my fluctuating size.

Of course, there was another problem  in this shirt, which is that I made a mistake in the cutting. Trying to make the lawn go as far as possible, I didn’t notice that I cut the second side facing the same direction as the first. These sides begin in the front and wrap around me, with a seam inserted for the pockets and the sides and then meet around the gusset in the back. The back “wing” is taller that the front because it has to wrap up and over the shoulder to form the top of the armhole. Also, the back is on a bias (not quite true bias) so while it extends a bit further over than the front, it isn’t a match.  So, I used scraps from the heavier light green linen I had on hand from an older adventure making a wrap skirt to “fix” the top of the front of one of the pieces to make it like the back. This is why there is a solid green wing on one side and why the edge is pieced, creating the off center green stripe.

 

I used the scraps I had to cut to make the second piece work as an applique of birds on the shoulders on both sides.

The result is a Oneshirt that is more complex and individual that is would have been without this mistake and one that gave me inspiration to piece the next shirt to include an applique.

Now that I have set the stage with a description of the initial Oneshirts and described the digital design element, I want to bring in painting.

I learned painting, starting with oil painting, from my paternal grandmother when I was in late elementary school. One year for my birthday, several years after I was given a sewing machine, my birthday present was an easel and some oil paints. My grandmother, Eula, had a painting studio on the unheated porch that wrapped around two sides of the barn the my grandfather built around the school bus he had converted into a mobile home. During the summer, I could sit next to my grandmother and try to soak up her simple advice. Her interest in art began when she spent high school in the Jewish Hospital in Denver, a public sanatorium for tubercular patients. She cut poems and pictures from magazines for her scrap books.

I stopped painting a few years later and only picked it up again five years ago, after my mother’s death. Since then, I have found watercolor and silk painting to be my preferred mediums, not feeling constrained to attempt realism, a leap my grandmother didn’t make.

Oneshirts can not only be my canvas, they can be my subject. I intend to paint a watercolor of the front and back of each of my oneshirts. To this end, I used Adobe Illustrator to make a basic “flat” that I can transfer to watercolor paper using carbon paper. From there, I can indulge the pandemically suitable activity of coloring.

Origin

Here is the front of Origin, one of the first Oneshirts. Each day I wear a shirt I haven’t yet documented, I stand in front of my phone on a tripod and take a picture of my front and back using the remote in my iWatch. Eventually I will have documentation of every oneshirt and have all I need for a full set of painting.

Origin from the side.

My Oneshirt project has several origins, each of them providing an opportunity to examine craftsmanship, sustainability, design, science, and history. I guess I will start with the word “craftsmanship”. As a lifelong feminist, my eye is often snagged on the word “man” but, as I tell my students, in many cases, the chunk of “man” in a word actually comes from Manual, coming from “hand” instead of from the universal human. This means that Craftsmanship could be rewritten Craftshandship and that feels so real and essential to my experiences as a Craftsman or Craftshand.

Hands are amazing and our relationship with them can be so complex but unexamined. I depend on my hands to do so many things but making or crafting is my favorite hand task. My handiwork, my making skills, makes me proud and fills my day. The subtle vibrations of a surface as felt through the tip of a tool and communicated to my hand tells my brain so much about the world and the shape of what I making or the make of what I am shaping.

I can so clearly recall sitting perched on a stool in the Tailor Shop of my (now) good friend Valdene Mintzmyer in Lincoln’s Haymarket District. As a 22yr old college student, I was grappling with disillusionment over my future prospects. My rush to college began early (I am a high school dropout) but college did not provide the complete realization that I had been promised by literature. How to become, who to become, we all remember that deep concern of our young adulthood. Valdene, who was just becoming my friend, asked me in kindness “what do you want to do with your life”. I answered “I want to become a craftsman and own my own business”. I joke now that she replied “boy, do I have a deal for you” , but whatever she replied, it was almost no time at all that I began an apprenticeship with her and began the journey of my life, stepping through the journeyman door towards mastery of my craft.

Oneshirt has been a project focused on using my crafthandship and making skills to solve a real problem in my life, the challenge of what to wear. Use it or lose it, is what they say, and after years of higher education administrative hoo-ha, I felt I was loosing touch with my skill of touch. Getting back “in touch” with my hands as the vital tools that allow me to realize my inner vision in solid form is an essential goal of this project.

 

Another reason I designed the Oneshirt was to allow me to incorporate some of my silk paintings into my garments. River is the result of my use of both the scraps not used in Origin and pieces of silk painting practice that didn’t end up on a canvas or scarf.

The little appliqué at the bottom front is a painting of a jellyfish I did on the beach in Oahu after I was stung down my neck and chest while swimming in 2016. The top front is a painting I had used in a shell top but once my Oneshirt wardrobe became my only wardrobe, I took the shell apart to reuse the painting and fabric elsewhere.

The dark teal in the back is part of that shell. Trying River on again after a year or so, I remember that this early iteration did not have generous enough sleeves right at the elbow, something I have since altered in the pattern. However, the beauty of a pieced garment is that I can easily expand the sleeves from any of the remaining scraps.

Our house in Nebraska was right along the path of the Solar Eclipse in August 2017. We were exactly along the line of the maximum and this meant we had a full minute of Eclipse magic. I designed these fabrics using colors sampled from photos of the eclipse and then riffed off of various impressions.To find my colors, I looked at dozens of images of this specific eclipse in local newspapers and at astronomy enthusiast posts on Instagram. Based on photos, similar to these, I found that the predominate hues captured were violets and burnt orange.

In order to create my fabric patterns, I did not just simply “adjust” any photo of the eclipse, but instead used flare filters and circles in Photoshop to build my own eclipse effect.

I riffed and then tried additional effects.

The goal was to create an endless repeat that would capture the mood of the solar event. I settled on five different styles of solar images, including one that looked like a pearl in a clam shell, one that looked like pansies, one resembling the photos I had seen and one with a rough but sinister feel with a muted maroon background.

I ordered fabric from Spoonflower printed with these five favorite designs. I had one yard created of each of two fabrics and then two fat quarters and a 5×5 sample square created of the other three. I will post about the resulting shirt, including the applique work, tomorrow.

The origins of Oneshirt are complex. It’s not like I woke up one day and said “I am going to design a garment that I can wear everyday for the rest of my life.” But, at a certain point, I actually did exactly that. To explore the origins of this radical change in my life, I will have to look at who I am, where I was at the time I made the change and what I hope to achieve. To tell this story, I am going to have to talk about my body, my family, my values, my taste, my skills, my job, my students, my reading, my hopes for the future. I want to get the origins story in the right order because knowing that I chose not to own a dryer before I chose to try a capsule wardrobe, or that I decided to try wearing graduated compression tights before I tried wearing compression leggings, or that I was doing silk painting before I tried shibori, these orders matter to the outcome. I have to start somewhere, so I guess that I will start in Denmark.

I apprenticed as a Tailor with a Master Tailor who had apprenticed with a man who had studied at the Royal Tailor Academy in Copenhagen. Sitting at the large padded worktable (that I still work from) at the age of 22, Valdene, my apprenticeship master, told me that she would teach me how to hold a needle, the same way Steen taught her to hold a needle, and the two of us, perched at the end of the 20th century gently inserted the tips of our needles into a mysterious history and opened our hands to drop the needle and the reached inside the fabric to catch it passed through. “The needle is falling, you dropped it and you are catching it as it falls.” 

My work as a tailor, in my little shop in Lincoln’s Historic Haymarket in Nebraska, gave me a clear perspective on the issue of how clothes fit. Making the clothes brought in by me clients fit them (or fit them again) was my bread and butter. Taking in, taking up, letting out, letting down, all in a day’s work. The worst letting down was telling clients that they couldn’t make their clothes endlessly smaller. Two sizes at most before we were confronted by fabric missing in the wrong spot. The seat of trousers or the armscye of shirts, these are both places where a larger curve is cut to accommodate a larger body and, while fabric is taken out to make a garment smaller at the side or center seams, the curve cannot be raised because the fabric needed is already gone.

Another fit issue is one I have experienced first hand but can understand better in light of my tailoring training, the tight sleeve. Sleeves have a long lovely curve across the top, forming what is called the sleeve cap or head. Sleeves are not simple tubes, just like arms aren’t simple sticks, and the distance from the top of the sleeve to the start of the seam down the underarm should depend on the richness of the shoulder it is enclosing. The width of the sleeve at the same point reflects the meaty nature of the arm and the work a good set of biceps must do in a day. The pathetic excuse for sleeves being sold these days, not enough in any direction, speaks of cheapness, of the lack of live fit models to test prototype with even the smallest flex of their arms, of the shame the designer should feel but instead hope that their strong armed customers will feel instead. I tell my students every year that the reason they need to be careful with the fit of their designs is because no one like to be told they’re fat, especially by their clothes, all day long.

I used this experience to plan my Oneshirt with the intention that it would fit in the places life had taught me do not change much on my body while giving plenty of space for change elsewhere. I was driven to the draw board because I have inherited substantial arms. I can remember my great grandmother (who lived to 100 year old) pausing in the small daily chores she performed to do arm circles. She looked slyly down at me, to be sure I was paying attention, learning the secrets to what (she hoped) would take away the soft, warm folds of arm, dangling at her elbows and wrists. What I learned instead is that 80 years of exercise can’t change the shape of a lady’s arm. So, the first requirement of my design is generous sleeves. Knowing that my body gains or loses size in the hips but not the bust means that I can splurge on expensive bras that will fit until they wear out, even if my pant or skirt size changes.

The Oneshirt fits snugly across the shoulders and bust but is generous in the hips and thighs, generous enough to let me tuck a smartphone, keys and a wallet into the pockets without changing the shape. The shape can hang more loosely when I am a smaller but still be comfortable and flattering 30 pounds later.

My research into the main reasons that consumers throw away clothes is that the clothes don’t fit, not that they have worn them out. Making clothes flex with changes in body size is more eco friendly and economical.

Day 5

Why wear a capsule wardrobe? We’ve all read the stories about the captains of the tech industry who choose to wear the same turtleneck and slacks every day as a type of uniform. Wearing a uniform, such as a very nice suit and a small selection of dress shirts, simplifies getting dressed every day.

 I have done trial runs with a capsule wardrobe like we all have, during travel. My first serious travel wardrobe was for the 2008 IFHE World Congress in Lucerne Switzerland. Visiting Switzerland had been a lifelong dream, brought on by a map from an old National Geographic, our goats and the book Heidi. My alp climbing dream didn’t have room for luggage and so I had to plan a capsule that I could carry in a backpack, wear on a hike but also to a plenary session or a banquet dinner. 
My textiles education meant that I could plan a drip dry combination of blues and browns that I could mix and match. A paisley silk scarf was the finishing touch. My plan worked great and I even had room in my backpack for a red circle skirt and a white puff sleeved knit shirt I picked up while there, to vibe the Swiss flair.

My first attempt at a capsule for wear at home started with a slick little experiment. I put together a single outfit that I wore every day for a work week. My students and I had already demonstrated that adults don’t get their clothes as dirty or smelly as the teenagers they were when they learned to do laundry. The only question would be, who would notice or care? It turns out, almost no one. Literally, one person notice by the third day, and not because the outfit was dirty.

The next experiment was an entirely black capsule that I put together for the last 100 day challenge that I started on January 20, 2017. This capsule was black. I will post another time about my relationship with color but suffice it to say, these were the first black clothes I had owned since my Aunt told me (at my great grandmother’s funeral) that I didn’t look good in black. 100 days with the same small set of clothes was enough to convince me that I needed to rethink my relationship with clothes.

Day 4

Piecing a Oneshirt

Another of my goals with the Oneshirt project was to develop a way to use scraps as efficiently as possible. I had some great scraps (green linen and chambray) left over from the first iteration. So, at the same time as I bought fabric for Mum, I bought 2 yards of another batik that would work with the little samples of the scraps I had in my purse.

I am naming this second shirt Origin because I feel like it really let me see how this particular shape and design could lend itself it endless iteration, not just solve my “needs to fit forever” and “have big pockets” issues. The shirt also reminds me of the San Marcos River, which is such an inspiration for me and in a way, the headwaters of my create work since moving to San Marcos in 2009.

The piecing on Origin includes a yoke, center back panel and binding that are made with the chambray and the green linen was used to allow the sleeves to be cut from the portion of the right and left panels that would have wrapped up and over the shoulders. This gives the shirt the appearance of “green wings”. 

The next step in the Oneshirt project will be to make a watercolor painting of the front and the back of the shirt. I enjoy watercolor and I can use scans of my watercolors to also make textile designs that I can have printed on fabric and made into new shirts. This creates a cycle of inspiration from one shirt to the next. Over the course of my 100 day challenge, I will post on some days about a shirt and on later days about the watercolor of the shirt and finally about the design created from the watercolor.

Day 3