Illegal Gathering
Or,Yoke of Oppression
I swear I’ll publish my account of Pennsic XLII. But it’s not an easy thing to write. I’ll need to devote to it my full attention, which I can’t do until I get out of another particular quagmire.
It feels like it started an eternity ago. That’s because it started before I went to Pennsic. The Before Time.
At the beginning of the Summer, I’d been to Gulf Wars XXII, and I think I’d been to Border Raids. I’m pretty sure I’d also been to Coronation and Kings & Queens. I was still coming off the high. I’m always coming off the high. But I was going to Pennsic soon. I was at Joan’s pool at one of a slew of parties she has every Summer. I don’t go to church unless there’s free food but I do know Pastor David, the Episcopal rector of St. David’s where my parents go on Sunday. He was there and asked what I’d been doing lately. I told him about the sewing of vestments, and that I was going into business sewing...well, whatever people want, particularly vestments, so if he ever needed anything…
He gave me a sunny smile and said “you know, I need a surplice!”
He gave me a sunny smile and said “you know, I need a surplice!”
Holy shit! A real commission for a real priest! I even knew what a fucking surplice was!
It’s also called a choir cotta which is wrong because choir don’t wear them [citation needed], but it’s basically a choir gown. It’s something that was on the list of things I needed myself as Cardinals wear them too. Well, theirs is called a Rochet. Surplices are much shorter now but David wanted one of the awesome why-else-would-you-wear-one Old English long surplices.
I took him up on it. Of course I took him up on it. I excitedly told Joan about this. She fixed me with a look.
“You’re not ready, kid.”
Joan has been sewing sixty years. But I have the kind of Buddhist outlook that makes me question my teachers, so of course I took on the project anyway.
September rolled around and it wasn’t done.
Don’t laugh. There’s no reason any reasonable idiot wouldn’t think the project was feasible. The whole structure is in essence four big triangles plus a collar and two gussets. It’s a deceptively simple little bastard. Look up at the neck there. Those wrinkles are an extremely deliberate thing called “gathers,” and they’re a motherfucker if you’ve never done them.
The project was disagreeable from the start. First I had to go back and forth with a man I didn’t see regularly with fabrics and measurements. That was just irritating. The real trouble started early. A simple task. Get a pattern.
Mom bought me the book Vestments And How To Make Them as a gift. The book is originally from 1912. My favorite chapter is the one about how to make cassocks. It’s not even one page long. It’s a picture and an entry saying that making cassocks is too hard and it should be left to a professional tailor. This is why my head is so big.
This book has a surplice pattern, which I set about drafting. This was a difficult but very interesting experience. When I was a kid the only kind of math I could stomach was geometry, and it turned out to aid my drafting, and before long I had something passable. I presented it to Joan with some questions on how to get the curves down. She answered with a question; why bother drafting it?
Buy a pattern, she said.
It’ll be easier, she said.
Oh yeah?
Go out into Montenegro and bag a unicorn. Catch a chupacabra in a bear trap, get HD footage of bigfoot and catch my ex performing any act not motivated by self-interest, and I still defy you to find a sewing pattern for an Old English surplice. Or any kind of liturgical surplice or choir cotta.
McCall’s 2105. McCall’s 2105. It burns a McCall’s 2105 shaped hole in my subconscious so only McCall’s 2105-shaped thoughts can come in. I have McCall’s 2105 dreams. McCall’s 2105 is a vintage sewing pattern for a surplice, long or short, pointy or round sleeves. It’s out of print and you can’t have it. Everyone on the entire internet is sold out of it. I would perform seks acts to get this pattern. If you have it send me your name and a picture of what debasement you wish me to perform for you.
The search availed but one option and it wasn’t promising. It was an outdated website, churchlinnensdotcom or something, run by a woman who appears to be insanely old. The site was like a catalog. You couldn’t use paypal or any of that heresy, you actually had to send a check to some place and presumably an envelope with the pattern would magically come back.
It almost fucking didn’t. By the time we came around to this step Pennsic was about ten days away. I was hoping to finish the surplice before I departed. The pattern finally arrived terribly late and was the wrong one. Mom had rather uncharitable speculations about the proprietor’s state of mind as she sent it back along with a polite E-mail requesting the correct goddamn one, ROUND yoke, NOT square. So it wasn’t getting done before I left.
So basically for two weeks, Pennsic, Pennsic, Pennsic, then I get home.
I returned to find the proper pattern in my possession. The package contained a rather disturbingly familiar pattern and several pages of literature, into the sea of which are cast the instructions. The whole thing is preceded with a horrendously bubbly history lesson as well as some things I don’t want to hear about books. Particularly that this pattern came out of one. And that the name of that book is Vestments And How To Make Them circa 1912.
If anything I should defy my teachers more. That was where my suffering came to a middle.
Way back at the beginning of this process, in spite of my enthusiastic favor of linen/rayon fabric for David’s surplice (it feels like clouds and love), David had decided on cotton/poly because it doesn’t wrinkle. Unable to counter “wrinkles are period!!” like Domenico taught me to, now that I was back it was time to go buy it. JoAnn Fabric opened up a location 5 minutes from my house, but that was a month away at the time, so we had to go to one about 45 minutes away. So when they don’t have what you want it’s very frustrating. And they didn’t have it. Empty-handed again we were forced to order it online. We did get 10 yards though, at $3 a yard, which is really inexpensive, leaving me to screw up freely.
When that finally did come I was instructed to consult Joan. This happens a lot. I don’t want to run to her for everything, but while the family’s LLC is the umbrella I stand under, I have to respect their wish not to have to buy more material if it blows up on the launchpad. So when I arrive at an impasse, or even a potential impasse, or even something I haven’t done before on a commission, I’m usually issued a general halt and sent scurrying to consult The Oracle. She does indeed know all, but this visit saw her in a fitful mood. She didn’t like that pattern. It wasn’t marked or annotated, it had to be lengthened the instructions were ridiculous. When one more hunt for McCall’s 210-fucking-5 fell flat as Sigourney Weaver’s ass, she finally relented and we analyzed the materials. Then we ran into more problems. Chief of these were that I have fabric 44 inches wide for this. This would work for a normal sized surplice but the pattern I have is for the short boring version. The thing is essentially bell-shaped, so if you make it longer it gets wider, right away crossing 44 inches. You can’t have a surplice with a seam down the middle of it, FFS, so we made the thing longer, not wider.
And then of course, the gathers. Fiddly bastards, they are, deliberate wrinkles made by doing something normally considered destructive, a counterintuitive process by a counterintuitive technique. I’ll shield you from the particulars but I had to do it over again four times.
Finally the yoke was finished and the thing was wearable. The sleeves weren’t done but you could put it on. Once again a meeting of the experts was called.
The thing wasn’t wide enough. Joan and mom actually pronounced it dead. It didn’t look right. For it to do so we’d have to order wider fabric and start over. I gave up because I was told to. I wasn’t sure how I felt about that.
Pastor David was very sweet about it, but I did have to admit to him a project beat me.
When I made my first thing, I expected it to suck, but I still wear it. When I did standup for the first time, I expected to bomb, but I didn’t. That came later. It hurt much more that way.
Meanwhile let me tell you about my buddy Arn.
Arn is a recent acquisition, joining a little after me. He’s bigger and younger and started his career with a boffer LARP and showed up with us when that wasn’t hardcore enough. He commissions me for this and that pretty often, and he asked if I could make a simple T-tunic for $40.
That’s another thing that’s supposed to be simple.
Go to Youtube, go to Google, look up “how to make a T-tunic.” There’s a slew of examples and it’s very easy. My Celt friends make these. They do this without measuring, trimming seam allowances, pressing, or any of that fancy stuff, and it drives me out of my late-period mind. It’s two pieces of boxy fabric sandwiched together. You cut the neckhole around a saucer. Arn wanted long sleeves and a long hem. Easy.
So I go to make this thing, and when you do this you fold the paper in half for symmetry and draw away based on your subject’s measurements. Folded in half, the neckhole didn’t look big enough traced around a saucer. So I used a dinner plate.
Oops.
I make this thing out of black linen and it comes out with a neckhole so big you’d think the guy wanted to show off his cleavage. Dude’s not that big. All this time I’m also working on that damn surplice, so I ended up staring at this abomination of a $40 throwaway commission that was supposed to be a slam dunk that I’ve managed to hash. It was humiliating.
So then they pronounce the other one dead.
I’m sitting there. Watching Arn’s tunic. I want to make it go away. I’ll do anything to make it go away. And determined to get something out of my failure with the surplice, I grab the thing up and determine to fix it.
Around the giant neckhole, I put a yoke, which makes it look better. The yoke is slightly off, so I put gathers around the yoke, which makes it look even better. Before long this isn’t a $40 tunic anymore. Finally I hang the Diocese collection keys around the ties I added, and now you have something someone might buy for about $100 or more.
He was very happy with it. Still is. I got $40 and the promise of finally launching something and having it stay up.
This is why a lot of people give up sewing. You can work on something for months, get to the end and find it cannot be saved, that your efforts and materials have been totally wasted. I don’t know why I still do it. Maybe it’s from the thrill of getting it right. Or seeing that garment you made on the person later. Or hearing the compliments they get on its construction which they are then forced to attribute to you.
I kind of lost my train of thought. But basically, I hate gathers.