Most Thursdays Arthur and I, go to Spitalfields and Brick Lane to photograph.
Although the background look's grey when we took these photograph's last Thursday, the weather has steadily deteriorated. Today, Thursday, we are actually snowed in. With the heat at full blast, in our old Victorian house situated in hills high above the city.
Trying to entertain a 14 month old who has just learned to walk, eager to get his little fingers on anything new and because I wanted to do something useful with today, I decided to pull out my sewing kit and adapt and repair cherished old clothes.
I have always been interested in sewing, perhaps because my mother worked as a seamstress for Norman Hartnell; then the dressmaker to the Queen. I remember as early as a 2 or 3 year old sewing with my mum. She often brought home dresses as cut pieces that needed to be sewn overnight for one of his client.
One of my earliest memories was playing the game “dressmaking”, which my mother and I played like jigsaw puzzling.
My first job-helping Mum was to separate the silk pieces from the paper pattern, which were still pinned together after having been cut from the roll of fabric. Next, I arranged on the floor all the silk panels in the order I would need to pass them to her to sew. The game really got started when mum asked, “what comes first” and I would hand her Norman Hartnell’s label and the back panel of the yoke, which she attached with a hand crank Singer sewing machine, as we assembled the dress and I learnt clothing construction at an early age.
However, Arthur seems to still be too young, to be interested in anything other beyond playing with the dangerous needles and sharp blades or scissors in the sewing box but I hope that one day he will want to learn all the tricks of the trade.
Meanwhile, I guess we'll spend the day blogging and playing the floor while watching music videos on the web with Arthur...