Osborn Fiber Studio

Today’s entry is sort of related to knitwear – at least as much as jersey cloth can be considered knitwear.

My dear friend Rachel, who got married on Monday, had the highly sensible idea to have all her bridesmaids wear chocolate brown, but we all got to pick whatever dress we wanted in chocolate brown. This sounded perfect: I love brown, and I could find any dress that would fit me at 33 weeks preggers that qualified as brown.

One problem: this fall and winter, nobody is making brown. Brown is not a color that the fashion world acknowledges as existing.  Why?! Brown is great! Brown is a neutral! Brown looks great on all kinds of people! Who doesn’t love brown? What makes teal and purple so great? Why is 1985 suddenly the height of fashion history? Why must every brown be in some sort of hideous pattern mixed with blacks and tans? I will never understand you, fashion world. You are a fickle partner in life success.

After endlessly scouring every maternity store and its respective website, I ended up finding a dress in what I can only describe as an African American Church Lady store. (It’s called “A Woman’s Touch,” and it’s in the Monroeville Mall.) In this little store, almost every bright color is available, along with an incredible selection of hats, purses and exotic-looking jewelry. We went in there on a whim after yet another dismal failure at Macy’s, and right away found the most perfect chocolate brown jersey-cloth dress. It was a generous a-line shape that kindly accommodated my belly, and it came with a nifty open-backed jacket. And it was on sale. Can we say WIN?

Over the next month I accumulated accessories – gold necklace and earrings, maternity hose, sparkly gold shoes. All as a procrastination for the actual hard part: re-hemming the dress.

Because here’s the hard part – this otherwise perfect dress had a very odd kerchief sort of hem that just wouldn’t do. I would need to hem it to tea length, and to do this in time, I would have to do it on the machine.

Working with my sewing machine is like trying to negotiate with a demonic two-year old dangling your keys over a cliff. There’s a good bit of begging, bribing, and cajoling, paired temptation to shove the whole ensemble over the cliff and forget it. I learned that there’s just no point trying to convince my machine to do zig zag stitch in its present state, but it can do a pretty reliable straight stitch. Hence the nine seams – I ended up doing three lines of (theoretically) straight stitch on each side of three slits in order to keep things in place. I also learned a lot about the inner workings of my pedal – as much as it sounds like a small electrical fire is starting inside it every time I go slowly for a long stress, it actually contains a giant capacitor-like thing called a “rheostat” that acts as an ineffective heat sink and small noisemaker. And I know, by the way, that it’s my own fault for giving this particular toddler so little attention that it feels it needs to dangle my keys over a cliff to get some love.

Also my own fault is the fact that the big camera was nearly out of battery when the wedding came, so the only pictures we have so far were snuck by my husband on his new phone. But you get the idea. Despite the arguments it took to get there, I was awfully pleased with the results.

This humorous shot of us attempting to arrange ourselves for the photographer is probably the best one of the hem at this point.

It was an amazing day: New Years Eve in South Carolina, with sunshine in the blue sky. Congratulations, Rachel and Magnus, and thanks so much for including me in your day.