Well Constructed
To make masks for myself, I dipped into a small collection of floral quilter’s cotton that I had saved over the years: fat quarters I purchased on a trip to Amish country with my sister when we were both in college, remnants from a beautiful Rifle Paper Co. print a coworker fashioned into a bolero for me to wear to SPACES’ Wonderland themed gala, a black and white near-damask I bought for a Halloween costume that approximated the static of a Composition notebook. Most of it I felt silly for having; I can sew theoretically, but until last month I was “non-practicing.” Even the Composition Notebook was assembled with iron-on hem batting, which now seems insane; shaping the fabric through cutting and ironing is the majority of the work for a simple piece that requires only a straight stitch. Knowledge is truly power.
But suddenly still having this fabric really was an asset. And holding nearly every piece of fabric in my house to my face to test it’s breath-ability, and then up to the light to examine the weave has revealed some fascinating structural elements of the material that surrounds me but so often I ignored.
Image by Bruno /Germany from Pixabay
When you buy a “good” piece of clothing, you might notice how the fabric just “hangs right.” It looks more flattering on than off by some sort of magic. That magic is often good fabric, it’s made of a material likely found in nature, with naturally desirable properties. More often, for me, when I put on something cheap that looks okay off, if the fibers have no integrity, if the construction of the garment was shit, the piece looks “wrong.” This effect is worse the more you move around in it, and the more times you wear it. Experienced people might be able to see this before even putting it on, before washing it a few times, they know fabric enough that they can feel it between their fingers and know if it’s good or not, they can look at it, name it, and know. But even inexperienced people know these things on some subconscious level.
For my husband’s masks, finding fabric was more of a challenge. We ended up using some dress clothes that no longer fit, and this was notable in my mind because my husband is pretty quick to get rid of anything that no longer holds utility for him. The fact that he saved these pieces reflected that he could recognize they had value, something about the cloth, the construction, and they way they failed to wear out quickly meant that he saw them as worth re-homing. And over the past month, taking apart button downs and trousers taught me a lot about how good clothes are made.
It made me think about constructing LEGO sets, when we follow the instructions. Pre-Dan Steenie grew up loving LEGO, but not directions. I can’t remember ever actually building a set with the instruction book; I often treated it more like a dimensional puzzle, and all I needed was the image on the box. Most of the time I just treated the pieces like raw materials and built my own creations. But there is actually some magic in following the instructions, in order, for even the more modest LEGO sets. Experts put these bricks together in ways I never would have dreamed up, and there are real engineering lessons in those booklets.
Instead of just looking like the picture, building a set to spec actually functions in ways that aren’t pictured: they move in cool ways, they open up to reveal complex insides and funny “hidden” scenes. One of the designer’s favorite moves is to have you build a module of something upside down. As you follow page after page of complex construction, checking the final picture and trying to figure out how this is going to fit into the final product, you may be baffled. Then they have you flip it over, and it’s magic. It all makes perfect sense. It’s brilliant.
Reverse engineering these clothes has given me a renewed appreciation for how all of my clothes are constructed, and how my clothes perform as I wear them. And when I went back to a nice, fresh, flat swath of good quality fabric, suddenly I could see the potential in all this material again.