I had a happy hour today, pottering round "Rose Crafts" in Midsomer Norton. It's a proper old-fashioned fabric shop - what I use to call a "draper" It has a shop window full of artistically draped bolts of cloth.
Inside are two floors crammed with fabrics, dress patterns, buttons, cords, lace, tassels and notions. Notions are all the other bits - snap fasteners, eyelets, bias binding, tapes etc. There's also plenty of stuff if you knit or embroider.
Of course, the shop, also carries lines of self-adhesive twiddly bits to satisfy the current fashion for sticking said bits onto cards and calling them hand-made greetings cards.... If they didn't, they'd be out of business.
The point of this is that I had to travel to Norton for this. There's nothing in Bath, Wells or Frome. "Where have all the drapers gone?" I asked Paul. "Once upon a time every tiny town had a shop carrying this sort of stuff."
In My Day
As a child I was taught needlework. I can't say I enjoyed it much at the time; only later seeing the relevance to real life and discovering the creative joy of turning flat fabric into garments that flattered the body.
But I don't think I ever questioned that it was an important skill. A sewing machine was a normal piece of household equipment, equivalent to an iron, kettle or cooker. When I designed the costumes for "A Midsummer Night's Dream" at Selhurst and knew I wouldn't have time to stitch them all myself, it didn't seem unreasonable to cut the costumes out and send them home for mothers to do the making up. Generally, one could assume that they had the skills.
Mamma made clothes for me and Beatrice when we were small, as well as costumes for us all for many occasions. She also knitted jumpers and suchlike, although I'm not sure that her knitting skills were great; something to do with the tension, I believe.
The advent of cheap clothes is killing the skill of practical dressmaking just as surely as convenience foods are killing basic cookery skills (not to be confused with the sort of stuff you see on TV - I mean of the boiling an egg variety). I can see why it happens, but, come the revolution, where will we all be if we can't stitch on a button?
About forty years ago, when she lived at South Norwood, Beatrice gave me a needle book. This I still use and have just topped it up with fresh supplies, including two new bodkins. Since Beatrice is completely challenged in this department I can only assume that the giving of such gifts ensures my continuing availability to make and repair for her for the foreseeeable future.
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