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You all know by now that the #1 rule of Selfish Seamstressing is, “Don’t sew for others, only for yourself.” If you aspire to be a Selfish Seamstress and have managed to achieve this perfect equilibrium in which every item that passes under your presser foot goes straight into your closet, you should pat yourself on the back- you have reached an extremely high degree of proficiency in Selfish Seamstressing.
Of course, sewing only for oneself is often easier said than done. Perhaps you don’t want to make an enemy of the gossipy lady at work who really wants a pencil skirt “just like yours.” Maybe you don’t want to look like the b who can sew but is still too selfish too make something cute for her neighbor’s toddler, about whom you are SICK OF HEARING ALREADY. Or maybe you think your mom is the kind of person you don’t want to turn against you. For those of you who are still working on your Selfish Seamstressing skills, you might like to refer to my handy guide “Selfish Seamstressing for Beginners,” which I put together a few months ago, to help the novice avoid the most frustrating and hair-pulling-out experiences of sewing for others.
Today, however, for those of you with very high Selfish aspirations, or those who have mastered the art of sewing for oneself and are ready to move on, I offer up this guide to Selfish Seamstressing for Experts! What more is there when you’ve gotten to the point where everything you sew goes to you and you alone, and people know not to ask for fear of the eye daggers you will shoot them? It’s quite simple:
You can use sewing to exploit your friends to get stuff you want.
Oh yes. Advanced Selfish Seamstressing moves beyond sewing things that you want to using sewing as a weapon to manipulate the people around you to do your bidding. Any hobby seamstress has been approached with a request like, “If you make me such-and-such, I will pay you back for the fabric,” or “If you sew some new pants for me, I’ll cook you dinner!” And any seamstress worth her salt knows that these are unfair trades through which she would undoubtedly get the shorter end of the stick unless the friend in question is Thomas Keller. And when faced with such a request, the natural response is annoyance. (Check out Carolyn’s brilliant and eloquent post on this topic!) But the truly truly selfish seamstress should regard this as an opportunity. After all, only the very feeble minded would assume that paying someone back for the fabric is somehow a square deal, right? And when you’re an expert Selfish Seamstress, the question should not be, “How do I get this person off of my back?” but rather, “How can I exploit this friend to my best advantage?”
The secret is choosing the right friends. Like with fabric, patterns, tools, etc., if you can’t use them, lose them. Think of them as objects in your strategy to use sewing for world domination. Case in point: my adorable friend Nienh:
Nienh is fantastic in her own right, no question. She’s smart and fun, always up for doing stuff, and has a brilliant sense of snark which puts the Selfish Seamstress to shame. She drinks tea with her dog, which is kind of awesome. But, more importantly, she serves as an excellent case study from which to draw lessons about picking your friends for selfish seamstressing purposes.
1) Choose friends who have excellent taste and really nice stuff. You’ll notice in the photo above that Nienh is wearing a Coffee Date Dress, sewn by yours truly. Now, before you gasp that the Selfish Seamstress actually sewed a whole dress for someone else, allow her to show you what Nienh gave her in return:
Oh yes. Nienh gave me those in return for a Coffee Date Dress, which at this point I can pretty much sew in my sleep. $10 worth of ivory stretch cotton sateen from Vogue and a couple of hours of easy sewing parlayed into a gorgeous pair of black patent Nine West wedges. Needless to say, Nienh has great taste. A win for the Selfish Seamstress!
2) Choose talented friends who can do awesome stuff for you. In exchange for the Coffee Date Dress, I got more than just shoes. (Negotiation skills are crucial! Who said trades have to be one-for-one? Always aim for at least two-for-one!) Nienh also painted me this cityscape of my favorite bridge in Chicago:
That’s right! Shoes and a beautiful piece of original artwork, custom made for me! Are you starting to see the advantages of advanced selfish seamstressing? With a few more years of practice, I’m thinking I can easily parlay a half dozen basic sheath dresses into a chateau in the French countryside and a beach house in East Hampton.
3) Whenever possible, choose friends who are a convenient size. Sounds weird, right? It’s not. Advanced selfish seamstressing is all about minimizing your effort and maximizing your reward. Choose friends whose proportions don’t deviate from the back of the envelope or who are perfectly symmetrical or otherwise easy to fit. Case in point: Nienh is just about the same size as the Selfish Seamstress which means no tedious fitting! The Selfish Seamstress made up that Coffee Date Dress in her own size, handed it off to Nienh as is, and claimed her prizes. Easy! Another advantage of choosing friends who are exactly the same size as you? If you make something for yourself and you don’t like it, you can pretend you made it for them and use that as yet another opportunity to wheedle shoes out of them.
See? It’s as simple as that. And with a little practice, you too can use your sewing skills to turn the tables and take advantage of the people around you.
As a final story to inspire you to reach ever higher in your Selfish Seamstressing aspirations, I’d like to share a tidbit from my recent surprise trip to Montreal in which I pulled off perhaps the greatest selfish seamstressing coup of my career. Dan arranged the surprise trip to celebrate four years together, Montreal being the city where he first told me he had a crush on me (aww!) back in 2006. In light of this anniversary, I had undertaken a simple S.W.A.G. project for Dan, using the secret fabric I alluded to buying at Whipstitch. Here is the fabric itself:
Sock monkeys and bananas! And here is the S.W.A.G. present, modeled by Dan himself, sporting a little bedhead on account of me dragging him out for a photo right after waking:
Super simple drawstring pajama pants! I sneaked a couple of early morning stitching sessions, and he was none the wiser.
And now you are probably nodding along in full understanding of these advanced concepts. After all, the Selfish Seamstress sewed up a quickie pair of jammy pants (which she has yet to hem), and in return was whisked off on a romantic surprise weekend trip to a beautiful city, put up in a beautiful hotel suite with a whirlpool tub, treated to dinner at a lovely French restaurant, and patiently accompanied to more than a few fabric stores in Montreal. Great deal, right? She milked that boy for all he’s worth!
Except he had one more thing up his sleeve during that trip (remember what I told you about aiming for at least two-for-one?):
You know you’ve mastered Selfish Seamstressing when you manage to exchange a pair of sock monkey print pajama pants for a promise of lifetime commitment. That’s a pretty sweet deal.
Fabric addicts, tell me if this sounds familiar to you. You’re at the store, eyeing some pretty yardage. But you don’t need any new fabric, you feel like you shouldn’t spend any more money on fabric, it’s not 100% what you had in mind, and you reluctantly put the bolt back on the shelf. You walk out of the store feeling proud of your sense of restraint, your frugality, your ability to rise above and not succumb to the sick fabric addiction characteristic of mere mortal seamstresses.
But then a tiny pang of regret bubbles up, and you bravely push it aside and tell yourself you’ll work it off at home with 50 bicycle crunches, feeling smug about your clever idea to replace fabric with exercise. As the days go by, you find yourself thinking more and more about that fabric- the one that got away. It starts to seem like every pattern in your collection would look great in it. You look through your fabric stash and realize you have nothing like it. You look through your closet and realize everything in it would go with that fabric. You search online and realize that everything out there is inferior. Meanwhile, the fabric you’re obsessing over is long gone, or perhaps you left it behind in another state or another country. In any case you didn’t get it and now you can’t get it, and you also never got around to those crunches, did you?
This has happened to me a couple of times, and those fabrics still haunt me like the plaintive puppies at the shelter that I couldn’t bring home. But, it did NOT happen to me this weekend when I was fabric shopping in Montreal! And this typically long preamble brings me to my story:
I mentioned in my last post that the good folks at Sam Textiles offered the most cheerful service I encountered at the fabric shops on St. Hubert. I have to say that they were certainly the exception, and I was at first taken somewhat aback at the aloofness in most of the stores. I was surprised that I generally was not acknowledged or greeted in most of the stores- even in NYC (not generally recognized for warm and fuzzy service, and I say that as a native New Yorker myself), a hello is pretty standard. But perhaps it was just a strange coincidence in the stores at Montreal, or perhaps it’s just a cultural difference – no big deal in any case, as the staffers weren’t rude, unpleasant, or unprofessional… except for one!
While prowling through one of the fabric shops (pictured above, and not one of the places recommended by readers), I discovered a black and white striped knit, and as you may remember, I’ve been trying to find one for a while and still haven’t quite found what I’m looking for. This one wasn’t quite what I was envisioning either, perhaps a little too much sheen, perhaps a bit too heavy and coarse, but it was the only one I’d found that day and might have worked. It wasn’t marked with a price, so I brought it to the table. The woman measured out the remainder of the roll and finding that it was only 1.7 meters told me that she would not cut it- I would have to take the whole piece or none, at $10 per meter. Fair enough. I stood there waffling for a minute on whether it would be worth it to buy twice as much as I needed, whether it was too shiny for what I wanted, Dan making sympathetic “hmmmm” faces. In the meantime, the woman was looking grumpy and impatient as though I were wasting her time. (Hint: if you want to minimize the necessary interaction with your customers, perhaps putting prices on stuff would be a good first step.) Finally I said thank you but it was not what I was looking for. In response, the woman gave me about three seemingly endless seconds of the stink eye and then wordlessly turned her back to me and started rolling the fabric back onto the tube. Dan and I looked at each other in shock before suppressing giggles.
The first thing I said to Dan when we left the store was, “Wow, I wasn’t sure about that fabric in the first place, but she made me really glad that I DIDN’T buy it!” Thank you for that, impressively rude fabric shop lady – it’s three days later, and not the merest hint of regret over fabric not bought, nor tiniest twinge of guilt over bicycle crunches not done!
I don’t know what’s gotten into your beloved Selfish Seamstress, but lately she’s not feeling all that selfish. Oh, don’t get me wrong- I’m not going around giving hugs and offering to make skirts for co-workers. It’s not so ridiculous as that. But lately I just kind of feel like I’ve got enough fabric. Some of you praised my restraint on my recent trip to Vogue, admiring my prudence in walking out with just a wool remnant and a couple of Husqvarna feet. But to be honest, I wasn’t really holding back; I just didn’t see anything else that I wanted. In all FOUR enormous rooms of fabric. And this past weekend during my unexpected abduction, thanks to all of your wonderful suggestions I headed up to Rue St. Hubert, with tons of fabric stores crammed into a few blocks. There were stores ranging from miniscule to fairly large, couture quality to questionable, immaculately organized to jumbled. Many of the stores were primarily home dec, but there was more than enough to keep the home fashion sewer well-occupied for hours. And yet, I VERY NEARLY left Rue St. Hubert without any fabric at all.
I had Dan in tow and was pressed for time, so I didn’t take too many photos nor take much note of the shop names, but I was sure to hit two that were highly recommended by my trusty readers:
The former, Couture Elle, is beautifully organized and definitely a place to go if you, say, get nominated for a Best Actress Oscar and want to make your own gown. Many of the fabrics are beyond “special occasion” territory and well into the”once-in-a-lifetime” realm. And the latter, Sam Textiles, reminded me of a smaller Mood- comprehensive, high quality, and well-organized as well. Sam Textiles also had the friendliest service I encountered on my jaunt- the super cheerful employee praised me for being “smart” and knowing how to sew my own clothes (surely this would make most of their clientele “smart”?) and offered a hefty discount too when I was waffling.
Okay, so like I said, I nearly didn’t acquire anything at all. It wasn’t that there wasn’t anything good- I just wasn’t feeling tempted. I have a decent stash of wool basics to work through, and a stock of pretty prints and knits (more than I need considering that I rarely sew with either), and there just aren’t that many gaps in my collection at this point. Except for this:
I’m not 100% sure, but I think this is ultrasuede. If it’s not, it’s something else that feels very realistically suede-y, without actually being suede. Here’s a close-up where you can sort of see the barely-there nap:
The back side is sort of satin-like, though not exactly in a standard satin weave:
Whatever it is, it’s soft, it’s luxurious, and it’s mine, thanks to the aforementioned hefty discount the Sam Textiles guy offered to entice me to buy stuff that I don’t need. Or do I?
After all, doesn’t everyone need a sassy leopard trench, like this one from Karen Millen? Perhaps another good use of my McCall 5525 pattern, already nicely graded and altered to fit me? If you’ve been keeping score, you might remember that I already made myself a leopard trench back in 2007:
But that trench is made of velboa, which in the intervening years has gone sort of limp and matted, and I rarely wear it now because every time I put it on, I kind of feel like I’m wearing this:
So I think it’s time for a grown up version! It’s funny, I never thought I would have *two* leopard print coats. Leopard print (and its buddies cheetah and jaguar) is one of those polarizing things. People generally either find it chic or tacky. Where do you stand on it?
The Selfish Seamstress 