I did dressmaking this weekend

How to make a skirt, from the no pattern, no zips, let's-just-see-what-happens school of dressmaking.

What do pirates wear anyway? I came across this link which you should all add to your procrastination to-do list. Most of my research comes from Johnny Depp and co., to be honest with you.
Ill-fitting, scruffy, miss-matched. Belts, sashes, shiny things. Weapons.

And what about pirate attire for women? Not much to go on, really. Pirate movies rarely even pass the Bechdel test.

So I regressed in to the bit of me that knows the rules and doesn't like to break them. I had a good rummage around in there and this is what I came up with:

• 1. It's a dance, so I have to be able to dance.
• 2. It's a ball, ergo formal. For me that means I have to wear a skirt, and it probably has to be fairly poofy and full length. You can blame my mother for that one.  Not a rule for everyone, but something to work with.
• 3. I should attempt to pick a time period. c.1700. Empire, Colonialism. That sort of thing. Ergo we haven't invented polyester or screen printing yet.

Then I did a bit of prioritising. Ball first, pirate-themed second. I've been going around making sure people don't feel like they have to dress up and wind up getting scared, so I should really be able to remember that myself, right?. But then my head-voice says "but you're on committee, you're essentially one of the hosts of this bash, make a bloody effort kiddo" and then it adds, "and just think of all the cool things you could do?" and I'm hooked. Line and sinker.

A quite rake around the wardrobe landed a few candidates, but with one glaring omission. A skirt. So I made one.

This one.

See, it's a happy skirt.

And this is how.

First, put on your slippers. This step is crucial.

Next, clear away the tea and the leftover salad from the dining table. Also fairly crucial.

This is going to be a full circle skirt. Circle skirts are awesome, because you just cut out a doughnut and stick a waistband on.

Measure my waist to work out how big the inside of the doughnut needs to be.

I later decided to do without a zip and make an elasticated waist that gathers ever so slightly but will stretch to big enough that it can go off and on.

Get a grown up to help.

Measure the distance from my waist to the ground, which as it happens, is quite a long way.
Do maths

Get the internet to help.

This is polycotton sheeting. It's double width and really quite cheap. I'm starting out with a square 2.5m by 2.5m. 

Fold your square in half and half again, to give a corner that represents "the middle". 

Calculate the radius of your waist. 4 1/2 inches it turns out. That, if you average me out, is the distance from the edge of me to the middle of me. I find that oddly interesting. It's not a stat people often know about themselves. If I was wanting to put a zip in, this would have been the correct size to cut. I figured that out later.

Make a number of marks 4 1/2" away from the corner, and join them up in to a rounded line.

Work out how much fabric is left, decide how long you want your skirt to be (41"), and add to this number the previously calculated waist radius plus about an inch for hemming. Draw another much bigger quarter circle.

 Get cutting. Nothing could go wrong.

 Tada.

 Be shocked by what your waist looks like as a rounded cross-section and measure it again just to be sure.

Realise that a hole the size of my waist measurement won't go on over my shoulders or over my bum. Measure a slightly wider part of me, work out the difference between that and the waist radius, and cut another doughnut out. This  doughnut represents the difference between my waist and chest measurements!

Cut out a strip of fabric that's the same length as the (new) waist measurement for a waistband. Zig-zag it, fold it and press it down the middle. 

Sew the two ends of the waistband together to make a single loop. Pin the waistband on to the skirt, right sides together. Adjust the size of the waistband once or twice to everything matches. Dressmaking by trial and error. If you wind up gathering the skirt on to the waistband ever so slightly so what. 

 Sew!

Well done. Stop for sushi. Only spill a little soy sauce on your new skirt

Soy sauce washes out, right?

The victorious L arrives home with the elastic for the waistband that you didn't have when you started out. Feel quite jammy that you've accidentally made the waistband exactly the right width.

Stop again for more food

Thread some really butch elastic through the waistband. Sew over it vertically a few times to stop the elastic bunching up and folding over.

Proudly display your new Squirrel Pocket. I didn't mention the pocket yet, it was a bit of an experiment. Squiggle the Tiny Squirrel seems to like it.

Hem all 7 metres of hem.

Not photographed. Pair with all manner of piratey things and wear to the ball.

I will leave you with this piratey gem and promise to talk about other things soon.

Equal Opportunities Scottish Country Dancing

Don't Split the Ladies

This is a post about Scottish Country Dancing. It might turn in to a bit of a rant about it, actually. If you came for the picture of Chivers in his pirate getup then I'm sorry for misleading you, but thank you for the pageview.

There are 11 days to go before the Aurora Pirate Ball. A theme chosen at last year's afterparty whilst flying high on success, leftover falafel and a reasonable quantity of alcohol. It has, against all better judgement, somehow managed to sell out. Which makes me a very excited bunny.

Chivers doesn't have a ticket, but promises not to eat any of the food or clog up the dancefloor, so I think I might let him sneak in the back door.

God only knows what we'll come up with next year.

Disclaimer, from here on in, we're wading deep in the waters of Scottish Country Dancing. People who do other dance styles - I'd be interested to know if this is something that you've noticed too.

So we've all been there, I think. I shall set the scene.
It's a 4 couple dance. The last set in the row has three couples made up and needs one more. One of these three already-made-up couples consists of two ladies who have asked each other to dance. The only two remaining people in the room are both men.

This is what I think should happen:

Not-yet-dancing-man #1 to Not-yet-dancing-man #2: "Would you like to dance?"
Not-yet-dancing-man #2 to Not-yet-dancing-man #1: "Yes"
Not-yet-dancing-men #s 1 and 2 become 4th couple, one of them on the men's side and one on the ladies side. 
Nobody dies.

This is what actually happens:

Not-yet-dancing-man #1 to not-yet-dancing-man #2 and/or the MC: "We'll split the ladies."
Already-dancing ladies #s 1 and 2 (who asked each other to dance, remember) say nothing, but are manoeuvred on to the ladies side and plonked in front of new male partners. 

Because God forbid two grown men have to hold hands, and one of them has to do a bit more thinking.


Now as with any pursuit the size of SCD there's a whole spectrum of schools of thought on how to do things. And in some of those places I have some sway. In some I don't. I like to think I have the social skills to know which is which, and to know when to put up a fight and when not to.

Those places in which I am in a position of some sway, I like to use it. They tend to be the University class and at Aurora - an independent club in Aberdeenshire. I mentally picture these places are the laid-back liberal side of SCD.

One of both the joys and the downfalls of University-circuit dancing is that each September you're faced with a whole new crop of keen newbies all ready to find out about what this Scottish Dancing thing is. They don't necessarily know what it "right" or "normal" or "the done thing". So this is how I sell it.

This is a traditional form of dance. I skip over the Miss Milligan years because I'm not sure what I make of them, but that's another topic for another day. This has come from a place where this is what you go out and do of an evening. Your local hall, and some local musicians, and everyone dances with everyone else. Regional variations abound. There are no pointy toes and matching costumes. This is the original social network. The dance form is pretty ancient in origin, and since then we've been re-writing it, and tweaking bits, and adding bits as we see fit, because that's actually what tradition means. It's organic. If a thing someone thought of was good, it stuck. If it wasn't any good, it got forgotten. Someone writes a dance, tries it out, if it's fun it gets picked up, and it travels around, and all of a sudden it's a classic. We've turned Miss Milligan's creation back in to a folk art by quite literally voting with our feet.

I quite enjoy it, you may guess.

So those of us who are here and currently practising SCD get a shot at looking after it and leaving our own stamp. But we can't and shouldn't hide the fact that the style comes from a time when the men would dance with the ladies and that was that. As the dancing population somehow skewed over to a surplus of women, we learned to dance with each other.

How do you take that and add a modern, equal opportunities stamp? How do we make this really fun thing open and available and welcoming to to people who may not identify 100% with one side or the other?

Here's my take.

There's the two sides. The people on the mens' side have their left shoulder to the band/stereo/top, the people on the ladies side their right. That's what the sides and the places and the positions are called, because it's true. We're not leading or following as such, so those terms never really felt like they fitted.

Step 1. Ask anyone in the room to dance with you. If they say yes, then you've got the next dance, you lucky sod.

Step 2. If one of you fancies dancing on the mens' side and one of you fancies dancing on the ladies' side, do that. If the two of you are of the same gender, go for the side that's closest.

Step 3. Enjoy the damn dance!

Simples.

Dealing with the brainmush

Evening all,

Tonight I am a slightly stressed-out rambling (potentially incoherent) version of myself. Not much different for the normal state of affairs, probably. I'm off out to the gym to balance out the brain tired : body tired ratio.

Because my brain is mush right now.

How many things at once is sensible. How do you all deal with the normal amount of stress that is part and parcel of the attempt to function as a passable adult?

I feel like I'm being stalked by animate email account monsters of my own making. How many email accounts do I even have? A quick tally give me a total of 4 main ones. A couple of other abandoned ones. But then there are online contact forms coming at me from I think 3 different places that spit out in to a strange combination of those accounts. My mother has discovered 3 of my email addresses and like to email me in triplicate now. Every time I open each of those inboxes I do it whilst leaning away from the computer, looking sideways and squinting a bit. As if that's going to save me from any monster question or task that might jump out at me.

So I fill my life with things, some of them thrust upon me, many of them of my own choosing. I have a job because it's nice to eat and have somewhere to live. I have a car because I'm lazy and have a terrible internal need to get out of Universal Lift Debt. I go dancing because I want to. Likewise we decided to take on this whole tent hire thing because we wanted to. The Aurora May (Pirate) Ball is in less than three weeks. I try and remember that I really quite like doing all the things I do.

These are all of the things that fill up my headspace. I imagine my own brain as a series of boxes with little tunnels connecting them, like a really fancy hamster cage, if you ever wanted to know. That's my headspace. I don't know if it's a real word, but just stay with me here because I'm about to use it a lot. It's all the things I'm trying to mentally juggle, and the space I'm trying to juggle them in. And it's nearing capacity. They're all interesting exciting things that I want to be good at doing. I do them all because I am an interfering cow and I like to know what's going on. It seems I like to jump in with both feet and see what happens.

But sometimes it's raining and your headspace is full.

This was me when I got home from work this evening.

So what do you all do to cheer yourself up when it's grey and rainy and the world you have internally created is out to get you? It's either

Me - what do I do?

Here are some bullet points:

• Remember that I am not surrounded by idiots*.

Not statistically possible. Statistically you're all of average intelligence. Unless the hobbies I partake in attract people of significantly above or below average intelligence? Yes, let's go with that. Scottish Country Dancing is like a magnet for geniuses (nothing makes you feel dumb quite like having to google the plural of "genius"). You're all too smart for your own good. Maybe it's a self-fulfilling sort of thing? Are we inbreeding for bunions and pattern recognition and a slight absence of social aptitude. Our children are all going to be ace at their 8 times table if nothing else.

I digress. You're probably not all idiots. You can't statistically all be idiots. Remind me every once in a while to just trust you to do a thing. Sorry I'm a control freak. Sometimes I have to consciously remember that the rest of the world includes other people who are actually quite good at adulting and stand back and let them do a thing.

• Disconnect and get out of my own headspace. 

A full headspace isn't always a relaxing space to be. Sometimes I can manage to really let my train of though wander off in to the wilderness. This morning I was picturing myself spinning poi. Which I'm rubbish at, and would like to be better at, and that make me a little bit sad, but that's not the point. Does fire weigh anything? What is the difference between spinning unlit fire poi and then spinning flaming fire poi? Does the fire add or take away anything? It goes "woosh". Does that mean it has resistance?

Tell me, you geniuses!

Sometimes you need something else to drag you away from your own headspace. Like this awesome, if slightly spaced-out programme about Iceland. It has volcanoes, and glaciers, and cute fluffy foxes in it. That helped.

• Plan the next exciting, slightly-further-away thing. 

I just googled "June temperature Toulouse**", for instance. If a Thing is happening now, it's fun, tomorrow = fun, a week or two away = stressful as heck, 3 months or a year away = fun. I'll try not to worry about the partially-finished dressmaking or the dances I haven't yet memorised. That's for the stressful period about 2 weeks before we go.

• Look forward to the next thing. 

Like how there's dancing on Sunday, and how there's going to be mushrooms for tea.

• Get something out of my headspace

It's my space, and I get to choose what matters enough to be there. Two ways of getting rid of things, one to temporarily hit snooze on them and decide to worry about them in a few days, or to fix it in tomorrow's lunch break, or after X. That only really seems to work for me for certain things. Other things just nag. The other way is to just sort the thing. Like right now I feel ten times better about everything than I did yesterday because I came home past Halfords today and got one tiny step closer to getting new brakes on Daisy the tandem. It's not the most urgent thing and it has no bearing on anything else, but I did a thing and so I feel ever-so-slightly more productive. Does that logic hold up? Who knows.

• Indulge in a happy thing

Like going out for food, or drinking one of my special Birthday reserve of glass bottle coke, or watching Masterchef in bed. I am a big fan of escapism.

Do you ever cut up some cheese in to tiny pieces, eat it on Mini Cheddars and pretend to be a giant?

• Have a good moan about it all to you lot.

This serves the dual purpose of getting some of the fuzz in my little brain out and in to words, and making me feel smug that there goes one more week when I've managed to keep up with Tuesday Blog Time.

Even if I did come home and put on my giraffe onesie immediately, I have achieved one small thing.

So it turns out my phone had a "selfie" function all along. Found it tonight.

As for this evening, you will probably find me tuning out by watching this mesmorising, artsy, BBC4 thing. You're welcome.



*Unless you work for Halfords, who seem to be selectively employing idiots. Welcome to your interview. What we're looking for here is someone who is scared of telephones and can't read or add up. 

**Historical averages of 13 degree low and 26 degree high temperatures, if you were interested.