Make Do and Mend, Ministry of Information/Imperial War Museum (365 Books, Day 76)

[rushthatspeaks]

This is the other book Thrud picked up at the Imperial War Museum in London some time ago, along with the cookbook from two days ago. (By the way, over in the Dreamwidth comments to that entry Zeborah has both made and reviewed those potato truffles.)

This one is about clothes: keeping them, mending them, making them, reusing them, and preventing them from wearing out. I suspect it of being a lot more useful than the cookbook to a modern audience, because knitting tips have not changed that much since WWII, but I also think it's a lot less likely to be of general interest, as it is quite technical. Large chunks of it boil down to 'to mend x sort of tear in x kind of garment you should use x stitch', and although I would consider myself at least intermediate at sewing (i.e. I have made entirely by hand garments which were worn in public by myself and other persons), and I live with at least one person who is professional-caliber at it, I have no idea of half what they are talking about. Stitch names may have changed in the interval, or across the ocean, is one thing; and also the fabrics that are common today are not the fabrics that were common then, but I also think the skill set of sewing has changed generally, at least in a local way.

I mean, I am not joking when I say I am living with a professional-caliber seamstress; Thrud has done everything from genuine eighteenth-century costuming to a wedding dress. We were just talking yesterday about the fact that no one in the house has the vaguest idea how to darn anything. The thing is, we don't have to. You can't darn synthetics and the other things are, like, socks, which are cheap enough to us that it would be worth more in labor to fix them than to get new. (If I ever knit anyone in the house socks, well, that is when we will learn how to darn.) And that is one of the major differences between Now and Then: labor, and our time, are by far the more expensive thing, and as far as clothes go, throughout history the reverse has been true more often than not. The skill set of a person who is very good at sewing, in our particular first-world academic-upper-class milieu, is centered around making things, and making them to look pretty, and also if possible to last. The skill set of this book is centered around making things and making things to last, and last, and last, and, if possible, to look pretty. So not orthogonal, but not overlapping much. This could therefore then be a useful reference book to me, assuming I can extrapolate from it to mending modern fabrics-- and assuming that I want to take the time.

Because I have that option. Of course, one of the things this book is good for is reminding one that other people didn't and often still don't.

Also, of course, it reminds one of many other things which are actually past as opposed to just not right here-- for example that women used to wear rubber corsets, and a whole lot of other garments which have gone out. The sections on the care and maintenance of corsets are sufficiently arcane and technical to be by themselves reasons I am glad I've never had to wear the things. I have seen small animals with less complicated life-cycles.

Oh, and if you have a lot of leather boots, you can certainly learn how to keep them in good condition from this. Mostly I have learned I am doing everything wrong.

I shall leave you with the place this book became not just history but living at me and basically kicked me in the stomach. This is a chapter heading:

Here are some ways in which a man's unwanted garments can be converted to your own use, if you are quite sure he won't want them again after the war.

I mean. Ouch.

Comments

[jinian.livejournal.com]

Yes, ouch.

(For hand-knitted socks, I recommend catching holes before they're holes and duplicate-stitching over the weak bits. Maybe it's just that my darning is crap, but the result is much more comfortable. I almost always fold the laundry, so monitoring is trivial.)

[coraa.livejournal.com]

That is an ow, indeed. A whole tragic story (and a story repeated, of course, thousands of times in as many households), summed up in one matter-of-fact line.

[nipernaadiagain.livejournal.com]

I cannot resist psoting a quote from "The Fifth Woman" by Henning Mankell:

“Linda poured herself some tea and suddenly asked him why it was so difficult to live in Sweden.

“Sometimes I think it's because we've stopped darning our socks," Wallander said.

She gave him a perplexed look.

"I mean it," he continued. "When I was growing up, Sweden was still a country where people darned their socks. I even learned how to do it in school myself. Then suddenly one day it was over. Socks with holes in them were thrown out. No-one bothered to repair them. The whole society changed. 'Wear it out and toss it' was the only rule that applied. As long as it was just a matter of our socks, the change didn't make much difference. But then it started to spread, until finally it became a kind of invisible moral code."

I am so jealous of Americans for not having had to darn! So much of my life has been wasted on darning (the worst being when I had to put patches on padded trousers for the eldest and I was so very tired that I ... do not laugh, I did sew the patch on SECURELY. Only I had been so tired that I had also sewn thorougs both layers of the trouser leg, so closing it. I had pick out the stitches and start it all over. Twenty years has gone by, but, as you see, it still bothers me)

... and I still darn jeans, as for me clothes are still expensive.

See, now you can understand why I would have preferred to have been born an American.

[nancylebov.livejournal.com]

This reminds me of some snark at the demand for locally grown, slowly cooked food-- if people are eating that way all the time, it takes a huge amount of labor.

[nipernaadiagain.livejournal.com]

What I find interesting is that when people are well fed, full of energy and with lots of free time, some of them DO choose to spend this time to do things in more time consuming old fashioned way.

Or just play at doing it - as when Americans do the cloth diapering, seems the diapers are (often? Always? sometimes?) sent out to be washed.

When I did it as I had no other choice, I had to boil the diapers and iron them from both sides (I believe that it WAS useful, even if diaper rash can have different reasons and ironing does nothing against most of them).

And it is not useful to tell me about locally grown food - I do not miss the annual lack of vitamins during winter. I guess it IS possible to do for very resourseful farmers even here, but it can be one of choices, not the only one.

[daharyn.livejournal.com]

The vast majority of people I know who use cloth diapers wash them out themselves. Those who don't are the sort who send all their laundry out to be washed, which is a very common practice where I live--and is not only often more cost-efficient, but is generally helping out a small local business (as opposed to a faceless corporation). That's not "playing" at doing anything.

The assumption that disposability is a virtue in this country is awfully tired. Things are pretty much always way more complicated (and regional) than you think.

[nipernaadiagain.livejournal.com]

I am sorry if my jealousy for affluence of your country made me sound aggressive.

Because I rally do find it interesting that some ways of doing things become popular again after the initial relief of not having to do them. Also, as Mrissa has pointed out - it lookes that I assumed that cloth diapering means the same way I used, and apparently it does not.

I will used Google to find out more, as it seems I have been more ignorant than I thought previously.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

To further support daharyn's comment about not "playing" at doing anything, a great many of the people who use cloth diapers have very few children and are not organized very well with other people with children. Using the diaper service means that they are not scrambling to try to acquire and then sell the diapers for babies of changing sizes as the baby grows. I happen to have friends who are having babies two months apart and could pass diapers down from one baby to another, but that's not actually very common in my family and group of friends--people meet up with other people who have babies exactly the same age for care groups, but that's not very useful when you're trying not to waste diapers that aren't disposable. You need a great many, you need them very promptly, you need them in this or that size, and then suddenly you don't need them at all ever again. This seems like exactly the sort of thing you'd want to rent rather than buy if you had the choice. It's not like a hammer or a broom or a sweater where you'll need one all the time forever.

[nipernaadiagain.livejournal.com]

Oh, now I need to look up more about the new way of diapering - because I used only one size of diapers when my children were babies.

I do remember how many diapers I needed, though, so there was no need to imply that I have somehow forgotten. I do not think that my babyes were somehow different in their diaper needs.

[octopedingenue]

Most of the cloth diapers used for me and my sister were kept and passed down as cleaning rags: soft, absorbent, and easily bleached clean.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

I have been thinking about what a shame it is that we don't have baby clothes services along with diaper services. For adult clothes, renting them can be a bad bet, because even though there are a few things like sundresses or heavy sweaters that I know I'm only going to wear for three months out of the year, next year will come around again, and unless something drastic has happened, I'll be able to wear the same one. (It helps that I can think this way because my size has not changed much since I was 12 years old, so the Norwegian ski sweater my grandparents bought me that year still fits just fine and is the quality of piece one can expect to hold up two decades with no problems.)

But for babies, you know that they will wear the clothes for a very short time and then never again. When most people had lots of children, it made sense that you would keep your baby clothes and have all your babies wear them. Now I know a lot of people who have one or two children and then cast about trying to find a good home for the clothes or a good place to sell the clothes. (It's early enough that I had to rephrase that carefully because it sounded like I knew lots of people trying to sell their babies as soon as they outgrew the first set of clothes. Um. No.) And I wish that we weren't so culturally attached to Making Fashion Statements and to labor being Good For The Soul so that we could just fill out a form with the diaper order for x number of onesies and baby sweatshirts and the like with diapers, and they would bring clean, seasonally appropriate stuff in the baby's size. And when the kid threw up on it, you'd throw it in the bag alongside the diapers, and they'd bring clean stuff every week. It'd cut down on the endless new parent laundry and on having to buy and sell baby clothes.

I mean, sure, it wouldn't express the parents' inner self the way a onesie they picked out would, but neither does the one that Auntie Florence sent that makes the baby look like a mottled codfish, and parents who are desperate enough for laundry time use that.

Possibly I am just thinking of this here because two of my friends are pregnant, I would like to be pregnant and can't be right now for medical reasons, and I am on deck to coo a lot and swear on my soul that the specific selected onesie/crib sheet/etc. is the very best one ever. Because of the specific personalities of the pregnant people involved. And I am...less good at that type of role, and better at saying, "Yes yes, let's get the laundry out of the way so we can test whether the baby has more or less theory of mind than the dog at this stage. Ooh! Less! That's fascinating!" I have been lucky so far in having friends who find fascinating about their babies what I find fascinating, but I fear my luck has just run out.

[papersky.livejournal.com]

I flat out don't sew. But I grew up with people who... didn't buy that book when it was new because they already knew how to do that stuff and would have regarded the book as a useless frivolity. All my clothes were either handed down or home made, when I was a kid, and out of old fashioned materials, and they got mended and darned and patched and my grandmother worked full time (she was a teacher) and came home and cooked and after dinner got out the mending. *The* mending, because there was a basket of things-needing-mending that always constantly had things in. It was a grind, and mostly a thankless one. I can see her now sitting by the fire saying "Jo, how did you tear this like this? Have you been climbing trees in this dress?"

When my clothes need mending, I say "Ending is better than mending!" and... cut them up for dusters. I can't quite bear to actually toss them out. My aunt still darns socks.

(What a wonderful modern age we live in!)

[hobbitbabe.livejournal.com]

I can darn socks. I used to have my family trained to return to me any handmade socks that were getting frayed, so I could darn them. But after a while, I concluded that I was so much better at knitting than darning and that it was so much more fun, that for ordinary socks I told them I'd knit them another pair when these wore out.

Now, however, I'm working on a pair of kilt hose with cables that are going to take 300 g (1000 m) of yarn, and I'm thinking that for these, it would be worth darning.

[veejane.livejournal.com]

My mother took an historical sewing class and as part of her coursework made a set of 18th C. stays: which is a corset where the bones are tiny slivers of wood, hammered down into their sewn channels with great swearing and splinter-getting by Ye Olde Ancestors.

She missed part of one class, and so didn't hear the word that she did not have to sew the whole thing by hand, but once started, she continued that way, and did end up finishing the garment. (I have no idea how it was washed/cared for, except surely the wood-slivers must break now and then, and need to be drawn out with pliers and replaced.)

[p-zeitgeist.livejournal.com]

Thank you for the review -- this sounds like a book that needs to go on my giant list of reference books to acquire some day.

Sewing and the degree to which what was once (and not so long ago) common household knowledge has been lost fascinates me, in part, I think, because I came to sewing as an adult with no background knowledge at all, making for an interesting contrast with cooking, which I've done all my life. Lots of people in our generations and younger in the U.S. can neither cook nor sew, and before I began sewing I was baffled at the difficulties that many people had with what I thought of as the basics of cooking for oneself. How can you not know this? I would think, as I explained something simple yet again. Look, you put the egg yolks in one bowl and the whites in another. Now they are separated. Mix the yolks in with that milk and heat -- aaaaahhh, stop, why are you boiling that? Of course it curdled, it has egg yolks and no starch, what did you think would happen if you boiled -- oh. So, um, right. Sorry. Of course you weren't born knowing that. Let's talk about eggs, shall we?

And of course when I started sewing I was in exactly the same position as my friends who couldn't cook. There was an entire universe of background knowledge that I didn't have. Worse, not only did I not know what that background knowledge was, no authorities explained it because it didn't begin to dawn on them that a person over the age of eight wouldn't know it. Or at the very least, wouldn't know what it was she didn't know. Unlike cooking, almost all sewing moved out of the household and into the factory generations ago in this country.

I think it's worth recovering, though, even when we'll probably never need it again. It's still a treasure trove of knowledge about how materials behave and what approaches have worked with them over time, the kind of knowledge that makes for mastery of a craft. I'd like to know what the lost stitches are, and why some are better for a given purpose than others. Who knows? Maybe they could be adapted for new purposes. For that matter, maybe they're better than what we use now, and got lost because no machine could make them with the technology available before their loss. It would be nice if they didn't go the way of Roman mortar, or ancient techniques for gold granulation, or any other excellent and lost technological art.

[deliasherman.livejournal.com]

I can't make clothing, but I can (and do) mend it. I was taught to darn and hem and reinforce and patch, and have a sewing basket for mending. This being The Modern Age in America, I only mend the clothes I can't bear to throw away--a considerable luxury to a good portion of the world, I know. Weaving new cloth with my needle (even though I'm not the neatest darner in the world), sewing up a ripped seam, tightening a buttonhole, are all small victories against entropy, and I find them immensely comforting.