Desert Rats

Today

My Canadian nephew is enjoying his travels through Western USA in his trusty "Airstream" camper.

"We are often puzzled with ourselves. Why do we love the desert so? " he posted on his latest update.

I suppose the first thing you have to do is define desert. The dictionary defines it as a "waterless, desolate area of land with little or no vegetation, typically one covered with sand."

I also researched the average rainfall in the Mojave desert, the driest in North America, and it's typically less that 330mm PA, as opposed to London's 580 mm. By contrast, the Nazca Desert in Peru has an average rainfall of 4mm PA.

In My Day

I have visited two deserts in my travels. One was the region of Mendoza in Argentina. This huddles under the rainshadow of the Andes and it looks like a very fertile place. I found that, over the past 7 centuries or so, people have slowly been planting this desert so that it now supports a very active wine industry and can grow a range of crops and support a reasonable population. It struck me as a very lovely place. 

It does all this on 234mm of rainfall PA.

The other desert was a very different matter. This was the Nazca desert in Peru. The West coast of Peru has virtually no rainfall and the Nazca desert is the second driest in the world, with 4mm of rain PA

We drove along the Pan American highway for what seemed to be endless miles, through an endless dirty ochre landscape. Along the roadside were little woven reed roofless huts in which people attempted to live.

The only water is underground, from the melting snows on the Andes. The Nazca people actually learnt how to bring this water under the desert to where they needed it, and then to store it.

Again, I found myself full of awe for the people who managed, not just to survive in this horrible place, but to have a complex society and to have drawn the wonderful "lines" in the gravel which survive to this day.

But I do have to say that I found this place inexpressibly dreary; it was monochrome, there's almost weather as such, no winds or storms. No grandeur.  The only time there is water is in the unpredictable "El Nino" years when tsunamis swamp the coastal desert.

So loving or loathing the desert all really goes back to what kind of desert you're in and, maybe, how tamed and accessible it is. 

Made to Measure

Today

Much of my sewing activity focuses on clothes for children or for family members. Recently, though, I've been wanting to make some clothes for myself.

It's much harder, in that you have to do the measuring and fitting on yourself, which is awkward at the best of times and sometimes impossible.

In My Day

When I was at college, at Worthing and Eastbourne, we were all involved in making clothes. We'd all received the same training about how and where to measure, how to fit and adjust. 

So when anyone wanted to make something, there was always someone on hand to take the vital measurements. When you are also going to make the pattern from scratch there are a lot of them, and it's impossible to measure your own back of neck to waist length or back shoulder width. And even things like waist to ankle or inside leg are likely to be unreliable when you are squinting at a tape measure dangling down your leg.

Once you'd got to the trying on stage, there was another expert who could make the adjustments while you stood as straight and still as you could, nipping and tucking seams at the side and back. They could easily make sure that the shoulder seams were sitting straight and that the trousers didn't bulge around your bottom.

One solution to the problem is the adjustable dress form. The idea is that you can enlarge or shrink it to replicate your own shape. Mamma and Daddy bought me one, made out of cardboard. This had two disadvantages. Firstly, when you made an adjustment to, say, the bust, there were always angles where the pieces of paper overlapped, so it wasn't exactly realistic. Secondly, it was unwilling to accept pins, so it was hard to pin fabric in place. I don't think I used it much, preferring to rely on my colleagues. I think I managed to train Mamma how to take measurements and adjust.

The lady pictured is very like Mavis who lives in my sewing room and she's certainly useful for checking shoulder seams and the like. But I don't think that her figure will ever be quite like mine and I just have to hope that the trousers I'm making will be the business.

Maybe I'll have to teach Paul the art of measuring and fitting.