the wormwood » the knitting needle case & star treckian fabrics

orihime: japanese word meaning seamstress

what is it about sewing that fixates me so? it’s many things, but overall its about the careful rituals of the machine…and i so looove rituals.

preparing the machine for use is just the start…cleaning and oiling its parts, threading bobbins, weaving thread through precise points, checking tension and finding the right stitch pattern, levers and dials and needles…oh my. it just makes me feel all warm and fuzzy.

my grandmother was seamstress for an entire town yet she could never find the time to teach me how to sew with a machine. i didn’t get my hands on a machine until i was around 23 years old. i purchased my first machine from a friend’s mother and it was old as the hills and about as heavy as the earth. it seemed to weigh a ton. it was bird’s egg blue and 1950’s all over and sometimes i wondered if a black hole was at its center. i can’t stress enough how heavy this thing was. it was somehow affixed to a wood table and could be folded beneath the table’s top when not in use.

i was so excited when i got it…but excitement soon faded. alas, the ancient manual was terribly vague and the thing apparently had been curled up in an attic for the past 25 years, so the dust bunnies had snuggled into its gears to prove it. so much dust and grime….and i had no idea how to clean it. it had levers in places that made no sense and dials with odd and arcane symbols. 15 places to effect the thread tension and it hissed like a pissed off go-go dancer every time it felt i was trying some “funny business” of getting it to actually do its fucking job. it’s motor sent out a foul aroma and every time i tried to sew with it things would go wrong. terribly….terribly wrong. now on the surface the stitches looked correct. but you’d turn the fabric over and the stitches were tangled like loose loops of spaghetti.

i gave up at that point. i tried again six months later when i purchased a little mini sewing machine from a questionable catalog (that shall remain nameless) that sold lots of tacky knick-knacks and other delectable bits of cheap trailer-trash ephemera. i thought “how hard can it be?”.

somehow at that point in time (i was taking a lot of medication), it seemed logical to assume that a small sewing machine must be easier to use than my large heavy machine….ya know, because it was small…and the little picture of it in the tacky catalog showed a grandmotherly female apparently hemming heavy curtains with it…ya know, goin’ to town on the thing. that picture made my addled mind assume even more –though i pride myself as being someone that is not easily swayed by pictorial advertisements (once again…i stress…i was taking a lot of psychotropic medications as the time).

the little machine arrived and i jumped for joy. then joy quickly mutated into sorrow: there were no directions….and it seemed as if pieces of the puzzle were missing. disgruntled by how stupid that little thing made me feel, i gave it to goodwill. i never got the thing to sew a stitch. i gave up yet again.

a year or so later my dad sent me the fail-safe christmas gift…he gave me $150. some may scoff at this amount but you gotta realize something…this occurrence actually stands as a small miracle since my father hasn’t given me money since i was around oh, say, 17 years old…but who am i to look a gift horse in the mouth…even if it had taken that horse 8 to 9 years to trot its ass out to me, at least it got to me.

i quickly used the money to buy the sewing machine i have now. i named her sasha-bell…partially after a super dollfie i know i shall never own and partially after the little fairy tinker bell (disney is evil…but tinker bell…tinker bell is ultra precious). produced by ‘brother’ she’s slick, light-weight, plastic and clean as a whistle. the machine even had its tension dial set correctly when i pulled her from her box. the manual was written clearly with great, easy-to-follow pictures. the best part was that for the first time there was no guess work involved. i almost shed tears when i was sewing a patchwork pillow case only three hours after getting the machine home from the store. and the stitches were perfect. everything was perfect.

it makes me giddy just thinking about it….because i’ve been addicted to the act of sewing ever since. i ran out and bought the book Sewing For Dummies and it was super helpful. patchwork do-dads eventually lead me to sewing all kinds of things: taylor made clothing for ball-jointed-dolls, little articles of clothing for myself, stuffed critters and voo-doo dollies, pillows, blankets…all kinds of things. anything to dive into the ritual.

i love eyeballing pattern envelopes and picking out fabrics and finding the real oddities. you know, the fabric time forgot about, that’s all crazy colors and freaked out patterns from 1969…yet you find it by shear accident and its like an acid trip just holding it in your hand and imagining what on earth you’re going to make with it.

then there’s all other the little things you can buy…the embellishments: candy-vibrant buttons, rickrack, laces and bows. it can easily get out of hand in the best of ways. but that’s creativity for you. the ritual is most happily cathartic when you let things get a little out of hand…every now and then.

i’m always looking for crafty projects to add to my weekly ‘to do list’. last friday, i purchased more knitting needles (this time i wanted to try out bamboo needles, double-pointed needles and circular needles…but i accidently bought the circular needles waaaay too big, lol) and a few other much needed tools and quickly discovered i was in need of a case to house all these nifty things…cause a box or a coffee can just wasn’t gonna cut it. so on saturday i sat down to sew up my very own knitting case. it was 8 am–the crack of dawn for me considering it was saturday and i don’t like waking up before 9:30 on weekends– and i was rubbing my eyes and yawning my way towards my craft closet. i pulled out a wide variety of some of my yummiest fabrics and spent my first hours watching old school star treck, sipping strong coffee and trying to find the right fabrics. i didn’t want a dull boring combo and watching star treck first thing in the morning was really inspiring me into wanting something wild and colorful, full of bold contrasts w/some kind of 1960’s inter-stellar fashion sense sprinkled on top.

many of the knitting case ideas i found called for sturdy upholstery fabrics, but i don’t commonly keep upholstery fabric laying about and i surely didn’t feel like moving out of my p.j.’s and speeding down to the craft store. my opinion was that i had plenty of pretty fabrics i could use…but it wasn’t lost on me that a strong stiff upholstery fabric would rock because it would lend stability to the case. diving into my fabric bin i quickly found some strong beige canvas material, and decided that though it was far too plain to be the outer fabric it would actually work perfectly as the supportive inner-works of the knitting case. from there i set out to make up my mind about the main fabrics involved and quickly measured and cut them into the appropriate sizes. i don’t like to work with premade patterns on things that really entail simple geometric shapes and such and i really like creating my own patterns. not to mention, every pattern i found only had like 1 pocket group for the tall knitting needles. there were no pockets for shorter double pointed needles, cable needles, stitch holders or other tools of the trade.

after noticing this i sat down and drew up my pattern pieces…. and instead of creating just one pocket group i decided on creating four and a large inner pocket for grid-paper knitting patterns to be slipped into.

this was a super fun project and easy to boot. there was alot of repetition, making sure the fabric pieces were lined up perfectly, poking myself with pearl-head pins and fighting with my taylor’s chalk pencil. and for a project like this, where quite a few pockets need to be sewn, the guidelines for the pocket stitches have to be as perfect and straight as possible. this wasn’t easy on the silkier fabric i used in this project just because my tailor’s chalk was a bit hard as a rock and extremely reluctant to draw on the fabric unless i pressed down way to hard and held the fabric and the ruler in just the right way(i’ve only got two hands, for crying out loud).

after some wrestling it all came together though i had to break out the seam-ripper & re-work a few lines of sewing a couple of times to really get the lines perfect. i could have slacked a bit more on precision if i had been using a thread that could easily get lost in the fabric but because i decided on a contrasting pink thread precision was a must or else things would look a bit half-ass.

this project took about 6 hours to sew in its entirety…a person could probably pull it off faster if they didn’t stop periodically to do things like eat, watch the tellie or go potty. the most time consuming aspect was the sewing of the pocket-defining lines, everything else took relatively short amounts of time to sew.