Our local library is itty bitty. It is so small that I hardly ever take the time to browse the few shelves they have. I usually just stop for a quick run in, to pick up the books I have ordered online from the huge downtown library where I hate going because there is never any parking. Anyways….

All that to say, I can’t remember what led me to pick up a copy of Alabama Stitch Book at our itty bitty library that fateful day. I think it caught my eye because the binding was bright red (my favorite color) and it was a book about stitching in the cookbook section(two of my favorite things). Whatever the reason, I checked it out and as I flipped through the down home recipes and unique sewing projects, I fell in love.

It was written by a woman named Natalie Chanin who started a cottage industry in her Alabama home town selling hand made clothing for women out of cotton jersey. You know, the stuff they make tee shirts out of? I have sewn with a lot of fabrics, but I never thought to use jersey. I never thought you could make anything nice out of t-shirt material, but this woman was creating art work with it. And every stitch of it by hand.

I loved the colors she chose, the patterns she used, the time tested sewing methods she learned from her grandmother, and her old fashioned, waste not, want not approach to crafting. But her products are hardly old fashioned. They are like nothing I have ever seen.

I bought my first yard of cotton jersey shortly after that, the hubby bought me her other two books for Christmas, and I have hardly worked on any other project since. Some of her methods I have had a hard time getting used to. I mean, she doesn’t hem anything for goodness sake. What would my mother say? Her clothing is an interesting mix of simple and elaborate, rustic and elegant, but I love it because she gives you all her patterns, all her methods, and lets you make it yourself if you want. And since her ready made pieces are not exactly affordable for me at this point in my life, that is what I started to do.

One problem, of course. All this takes time. Lots of it. And I struggle with feeling guilty for spending hours and hours on a dress just for myself. Then my sister had a baby girl. I had plenty of scraps around, and a nice used t-shirt is just the right size for a baby dress. I sized down the patterns and stencils and finished the dress in a drastically shorter amount of time. An idea was born, and I am going with it. I don’t know where it will take me, but here are a few more dresses I posted on Etsy yesterday.

Oh, and Natalie Chanin is coming to town next week. I am going to try to meet her.

As yesterday’s post indicated, I have been sewing for a while now.   I learned to operate a sewing machine around age eleven, and while I enjoyed fiddling around with it, I did a lot more hand sewing in those early years. I went through a long cross stitch phase, and much of my free time in high school was spent making little exes on fabric. If that confession makes you think I must have been a lot of fun in high school, you may be thinking wrong.

 I never knew what to do with the finished products, so my mother was usually the recipient. Like all good mothers, she still has many of them stuck on her walls.  The last cross stitch I attempted was some floofy ice fairy or something, which I got well into before I realized that stitching a white ice fairy on white fabric was boring me to death!   And what was I going to do with it if I ever finished?   I needed to find something more useful to do.  So I went back to the sewing machine, and started making clothes for myself and eventually quilts.  The practical side of me was satisfied.  Am I boring you yet?

Fast forward about fifteen years.  Picture me married with three little boys, living in a tiny apartment in Memphis.  We moved there temporarily to be close to the hubby and his job, and we brought only the bare minimum with us.  We had no t.v., no computer, not even books .  I had no friends, no car most days, and no sewing machine.  And did I mention it was 180 degrees outside everyday?  I thought I would go crazy from housebound boredom.  

Digging through the few boxes we brought, I found my fabric scraps.   I was pondering how I could make use of all the tiny bits of random calico with no sewing machine, when I thought of my grandmother and her tin box of hexagon flowers.  She had left the beginnings of that quilt to my mother, who had attempted at various times to finish it without success.    I also remembered a conversation my aunts once had about how many depression era women, those women who used every scrap of everything, had similar boxes in their attic.  No one ever finished one of those quilts, they laughed.  I took it as a personal challenge. 

For the three months we lived in Memphis, I did little else but work on that quilt.  And over the next three years, I did it sporadically.  It is now in it’s final stage.  It may be in its final stage for another three years and my aunts might be proved right in the end.  

But what I have come to realize is that sewing by hand is the best deterrent I have found to counteract my tendencies to sloppiness, cutting corners, and generally rushing a job, just to say it is done.

 I am not a detail oriented person, and zipping an item through a sewing machine usually means more time undoing mistakes because I am not paying attention. Or I just leave the mistakes because who has the time to fix them, and I have to get this sewing machine out of the way so I can get dinner on the table.  In short, sewing by hand allows me a quiet corner to sit, relax, and do better work.

It also means my boys won’t crawl under the table, push the pedal on my machine and run my fingers over with the needle.  It’s the little things, right? 

Staring at a blank page can be daunting. So many words. Which to choose?  This page has been blank for a few days now and I have resorted to asking my boys what I should write.  My oldest boy, all innocence, suggests I tell about how grumpy I was yesterday  when I couldn’t figure out all this technological stuff.  Man, that boy is starting to pick up on things.

That is as good a place as any to start, I suppose. It is the main reason I have never attempted a blog like this.  I don’t do computers well.  Oh, and I am no photographer, which it seems is a prerequisite for anyone truly serious about blogging these days.  And yet here I am, despite my lack of expertise and sans fancy camera, obeying a nagging in the back of my mind that won’t let up.  “Start a blog,” says the nagger. “Just start it and see what happens.”

But what kind of a blog is this? What is Climbing Vine clothing?  I am not sure myself yet.  It is going to be an organic process, which is great, since it goes along nicely with my garden-esque theme.  Climbing Vine Clothing is my itty bitty Etsy shop with two whole items listed for sale and priced very optimistically.  A girl can dream, right?

The climbing vine motif carries over into every day life. I pull up a lot of climbing vines in my jungly yard, and am always amazed at their seeming weakness and yet their amazing ability to climb around every obstacle, stretching out curling fingers for necessary supports as they reach for the sun.  Some vines strangle and choke, but others cover ugliness with beauty, like the vine that has slowly been obscuring the unsightly barbed wire on our neighbors fence, bearing blossoms and berries along the way. They don’t wait for ideal circumstances before they start their journey. They bloom where they are planted.  That is the kind of vine I would like to be.