I'm no closer to inventing the perfect desk. It probably involves an audit of our scrap wood before I buy new plywood. I should also wait to see what the new electrical cupboard looks like.
Work progresses on my Burda 6875 coat. I am doing more hand sewing on this project than I thought I would. Some of the finishing could have been done by machine but perhaps I've doubted my ability to concentrate well enough to do the finishing by machine. I am doing some things that feel counter-intuitive and I'm doing some things that feel right, but are obviously against the rules.
My bedtime reading recently has been Clare Shaeffer's Couture Sewing Techniques. I have a funny relationship with the concept of couture sewing - while it is clearly more expensive, and clearly reserved for the higher classes, I don't really buy the idea that it is "better" than any other form of sewing. In Threads of Life by Clare Hunter, one of the things that really struck me was the author's assertion that the growth of the home sewing industry (cross stitch kits, sewing machines, patterns etc) began to take away the stitcher's creativity and forced a kind of homogenisation of both design and technique. The book/packet/instructions are correct - everything else is inferior. Knowing that couture is so heavily focused on making one-off designs look like the sketch, so iterative and so heavily focused on hand sewing, why should it be seen as the "best" or most "correct" way of doing things?
Anyway, pics soon
K
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