Osborn Fiber Studio

Merry Christmas, dear friends! I feel like I’ve been in a haze of work and anticipation since… August maybe. It hasn’t been bad, it’s just been a lot. Fall and early winter is a juggernaut of family, work, and community events that builds and builds until Christmas day pops the balloon. Boxing day felt like coming up for air when I didn’t know I was underwater. My subconscious has spent the last few days telling my conscious mind where I’m at, and I’m ready to spend a few days reflecting as our year comes to a close.

But I’ll start by catching you up on a couple of big projects I recently completed – one which took a long time, one which was a whirlwind whim that went start to finish in a week. I’ll do that second one first.

This coat started when I accidentally cleaned out the storage space under my bed. Jared was working on rebuilding the girls’ trundle bunk bed into a triple bunk…

(Good job honey!) and he wanted some help looking under the bed for some of the spare parts. As I pulled things out to look, I quickly forgot about his part (which we never did find) and started going through the treasures I have under there. It wasn’t a total dumping ground; I had some organization. But there had been a little stuffing, and a few things really had to go.

I did manage to get rid of a few things. I threw out two bags of extra-low quality qiviut that there is just no reason for me to use; I have too much moderate-to-high quality qiviut for my time as it is. There was some flotsam and jetsam that wasn’t worth its space. I reorganized my fleece and breed stash, which left me literally hyperventilating; I cannot believe how much I’ve amassed. I reorganized the qiviut blending project to reflect where I intend to take it, though it likely won’t be a project for this year.

But one bag stood out. This was a bag of handknit socks. Older handknit socks which I have repaired at least once, most of them more than once, which had developed more holes and were no longer worth repairing. I had the vague idea to cut them up and sew them into a sweater of some kind. I couldn’t bring myself to throw them out, as they represented so much work and history for me personally. Nor could I bring myself to put them back in storage, where they would mock me with their “project pending” status. I had to use them NOW OR NEVER.

The best way to get a project done is to take the first step, and my favorite part of a sewing project is the cutting anyway. Besides, that would commit me to the drastic step of cutting into my knitting, and cutting up the pieces would show me whether I had enough to make a decent-sized piece of fabric.

I really didn’t know what I was making until I started laying them out. All I could think was to make a solid piece of fabric out of them, and I didn’t want another blanket. I wanted a garment. Then the lightning rod struck: make a bog jacket.

If you’re not familiar with the idea of a bog jacket, let me nerd out a bit for you. It originated in one of my other passions, archaeology. One of the best ways that living remains have been preserved, to be later found by archaeologists, is in ancient peat bogs. The oldest human remains ever uncovered have been found in such bogs, and in one Danish bog, one of the oldest garments was discovered. I cannot for the life of me find a picture of the original find, or even a coherent reference to it, despite digging past all the sewist, weavers, and knitters who have taken this idea and run with it. But this is the basic idea of the bog coat that is currently in circulation:

As you see, this was one of the original “zero waste garments,” as we say nowadays. You start with a rectangle of fabric, make a few cuts, a few folds, two seams, and you’ve got a garment.

With my cut up socks, I was mostly concerned to know if my rectangle would be big enough. It had to be wide enough to encircle my body with a roomy fit, and tall enough to give a decent length and make roomy sleeves. I didn’t mind the sleeves being shorter. I used painter’s tape on my dining room table to mark out the minimum safe space, and arranged the sock patches to fill the space. It looked like I would make it, even leaving out a couple pairs that had fabric too pilly to save.

I did, by the way, have to iron these sock patches. Fun fact: if you steam iron socks, even if they are fairly clean, they smell like feet.

This project was happening in the week before Christmas. Fully insane. It’s also a testament to the fact that I was able to be fairly relaxed about Christmas this year, leaving enough room for me to lose my mind on some totally superfluous project. But, being in that space, there was no careful planning. There was a lot of improvisation, guessing, and trial and error.

I discovered, first, that zig-zagging the edges of the patches stretched them out. The best way to connect them was to sew them right sides together, like quilt patches, with large stitches.

When I had my layout, I kept a record with pictures. Then I paired random patches up, sewed them together, laid them back out, took another picture, and made more pairs.

Those L-shaped pieces were a mistake; for the most part I did not attach those together well, but I didn’t bother my head too much about it.

Soon I had what was undeniably a textile. But the texture of it was a hot mess. The seams inside were truly gnarly, and the integrity of the fabrics was all over the place. The answer to making a stable textile was clear: quilt it.

In that below-the-bed stash, I just so happened to have some quilt batting pieces that easily came together to the correct size. And I just so happened to have a leftover piece of nubbly fleece from re-backing Mini-Mighty’s quilt that was exactly the right size, with enough leftovers to make a bit of binding with.

The walking foot on my sewing machine handled this mess admirably. I quilted a diamond pattern that was largely eyeballed. No marking or measuring here – I taped a magnet to the side of my machine to act as a sort of guide, to keep my lines about right relative to each other. Good enough.

I wasn’t sure sewing through all those layers would work, but it did. I lost part of my feed dogs somewhere in there though. Will have to order new ones. Cut cut cut, sew sew sew, bind bind bind.

The only hand sewing I did in the end was fixing a few places where patches didn’t connect, sewing the binding, and loosely whipstitching the thick inside seams so they’re a bit protected.

And what is this thing I made? Well, it is successfully a garment! It’s very heavy and warm. It’s not as big as I hoped it would be, but with a belt it works OK. The collar is stiff, and just a little far forward; I need to find a way to fix that.

I was worried I’d look like hobo-fashionable or some nonsense. But I think the effect is more granola art-teacher, which I can totally rock. When I took the first picture of it on, 10-year-old Stringbean said, “Are you going out in public like that?” To which the answer can only be YES. Yes I am, child.

This project accomplished a few things for me. Finding and using the socks started a process of housecleaning and junk-purging that has been key to this coming-up-from-underwater feeling I’ve been enjoying. Taking a few days to do a low-stakes project like this gave a huge creative boost. I honored my past work in making all these socks, which mattered to me – they are mostly from the two Nancy Bush sock books I knit through in their entirety, from 2010 to 2016. And, as an added bonus, I got a big cozy thing. I’ve even worn it some! Will see how that continues; I do need to fix the collar somehow.

How are you feeling post-Christmas? Does your fall and winter have a shape that you can discern? Mine has certainly changed overtime – I actually prefer this juggernaut-and-release shape over the seasonal affective disorder that shaped my winters before I had kids and all their business. I’ll talk more in a future post about how my awareness has shifted over the last year. I look forward to sharing that with you. Stay cozy, my friends.