Of Brooms and Boredom

I think that boredom is a best friend.  As the weather shuts down from summer to winter here, carrying us through that best time in Maine- autumn- I am anticipating the coming glut of dark hours and inclement weather with some amount of affection and curiosity.  What will they hold, how will I fill them?  This is a question that causes general festering and soul-rot in Dave, who needs the Bahamas, warmth, and sunlight- but the closer I get, the more those hours burn in my mind with the light of potential.  Because I am getting slightly, lightly bored.  Which is a very good place to be.

Obviously, there will be feeding of the pellet stove, shoveling out to the chickens, shoveling out to the drive, and attempting to make 2014's money cover the first quarter or so of 2015.  But such things can only eat up so many hours.

My upbringing made me very good at distracting myself- a semi-only child, I was cleverly raised.  If I ever complained of boredom, my mother gave me two options: I could clean my room, or do homework.  This will make a child very good at finding his or her own preoccupations.

 Consequently, my bedroom was a scourge of laundry, books, toys, costumes, art/craft projects, and laissez-faire science experiments in the bottom of mugs, glasses, and dishes.  The key to allowing this sort of behavior/hygiene is to be able to shut the door to the child's room.  Intriguingly, once I became an adult I proved to be fond of rather tidy surroundings and now quite like to clean.  It helps that we now live in a world packed with excellent audio files, and I can listen to books and clean at the same time.  When I was young, reading and cleaning were mutually exclusive activities, and given my choice (thank you, mom), I chose exclusively to read.   If audio books, NPR, and podcasts did not exist, I would probably still live like a hoarder.

Were I faced with my childhood bedroom as an adult, my head would nearly explode and I wouldn't be able to accomplish anything until it was clean.  Oh, human development- you never know what you are going to get.  That being said, I do suggest that people parent old school, stop hovering over /minutely scheduling their kids, and kick them outside, don't allow much screen time, and let them stew in their own boredom.  How else are they going to get bored enough to create their own entertainment?

Bored is the very best state to be in, because when you are bored, your mind begins to itch and you shift about looking for something to do.  As an adult, boredom is worth its weight in gold, because in one's working life, you are rarely allowed the time to be bored.  But if you are lucky enough to stumble on a seam of it- oh the pointless things you can accomplish!

I confess: I have of late spent my boredom not on noble chores like cleaning out the fridge, or pursuits that might make me seem accomplished or remotely career-oriented, like writing, but rather on an old obsession- costuming.  My friend, Lauren, enabled me, by dangling events and occasions to be dressed up and actually have someplace to go.  So the room that a month ago looked barren, a forlorn sewing machine on an otherwise empty table, now looks like an actual sewing room.  The trick, it turns out, is to spend time in the room, sewing.    

When last my boredom chased me to my writing desk, I was contemplating my 30-odd years of consumerism... and hoarding.  Vowing to be not quite so bad, rather than going mad with on-line searches and purchases, I bent my mind to making up a costume with more or less what I had on hand.  Or had made my parents store in their homes for decades.

The glory of steampunk (the theme for the upcoming occasion) is that it really need have very little contact with reality.  Which is why I can get away with a sternwoman costume that's cotton.  And clean.  And involves... um, skirts.  The only thing remotely realistic are the accessories- gage, banders, sunglasses.  The fact of a hat and gloves.

A theater geek/major, I had petticoats, crinoline, and a red rehearsal skirt with a train that could be bustled.  You may not realize this, but as a female, you can't study Ibsen and Chekov seriously without a long, trailing skirt.  True story.  The punch of Nora slamming the door on domesticity in The Dollhouse is lost if the actress playing Nora accidentally shuts her skirt in the door.  On the mandatory packing list for students at the National Theater Institute- "long rehearsal skirt with train."  Because that's how we rolled (our hips) at boot camp for actors.  I went equipped with two- oh the riches!!!!- the red one purchased on line from a period reconstructionist, and one my mother made for me from black fabric found at Marden's.  Both came in very handy during my final years at school, any time I need to sweep period-style across a stage.

So that was the bottom half of the costume, which entailed me shifting a few storage totes' worth of my clothes, and an old dressing screen from my parent's basement to my house.   It meant quality time with my mother, sorting through old things, and playing "oh, remember!"- a favorite past time of ours.  Last spring, quality time with mom involved having her come to the theater and vacuum the audience aisles while I talked with the props master and stage manager before a show.

As for the top half, I took a summer shirt I had bought at H&M a couple of years ago, and started futzing with it, layering it over another shirt that I loved, but didn't actually suit/fit me, and that I never wore.  I ended up changing the sleeves and hem of the first shirt, then cannibalizing the other for its fabulous bits and pieces.  This left me with a sleeveless fitted bodice, with a newly yoked hem, awkward neckline, and some dreamy brown silk ribbon and brass buttons.  Know what doesn't work?  A sleeveless Victorian day dress.

Off to the Mainer's answer to every needful thing: Marden's Surplus and Salvage.

Six dollars later, I had a couple of yards of blatantly "servicable" brown cotton with a ticking stripe.  I think it says something about my aesthetics that my heart goes gooey over such fabric and thinks "perfect!"  What can I say- I love drab stripes.  Some hours of work later, the bodice had sleeves.  And days later, a collar.  Then- why not? I had a cream chiffon scarf- a built-in fichu.

This is the thing about projects- if you actually like the work, the more time you have before you hit the deadline, the more detailed your work becomes.  So once the bodice had come together, I still wanted more project.  I began looking at my crinoline, an old Goodwill find, a nylon bridal jobby that had seen better days, though it still did what it needed to do to provide poof.  And I thought... I could clean the fridge, and write... or I could refurbish that petticoat.

Somehow I found myself back at Marden's.

And here's the thing about Marden's- it always has the fabric you need, at the price a Mainer (read: cheapskate) will actually pay and be pleased about.  I am fairly certain there is a small god who conscientiously devotes him/herself specifically to this one concern of the universe.  I believe I owe that god a small shrine for how it helped me through multiple stage productions...

Today's mental exercise: design a shrine to a small god of your own choosing.  Perhaps to the god of asshats?  If you are a constant reader and got that allusion, you are welcome- again.  Also, you do not suffer from trivial memory loss, but should still go and check to make sure you turned off the oven.  Or figure out where you put your small child (if they are clever- and all children are- they will have found something to do, while you wandered off to catch up on cyber reading).

I digress, if digression is possible when you are not steering for a fixed point.

Petticoats!  And brooms!  You see, at Marden's on one of their great mounted rolls of cloth, there was a plain white cotton- soft and substantial, a million miles wide, it was clearly meant for sheeting.  Which in my mind, was exactly the type of stuff I wanted to re-make the petticoat with.  I walked out of the store with about 15 acres of it, and am pretty sure that the sales lady, having felt it up while serving me, quickly bought the rest of the roll.  Part of me thought- "you could make another white sheet set!"  It is the part of me that would walk out if it could, because I almost never listen to it.

Measure, pencil in, shear, iron, pin, stitch, gather, hem- construct.  At heart, sewing is building- but you are building soft things.  There's a reason in the theater world we call it costume construction.  In the down time, the windy weather, I have been methodically rebuilding the petticoat, the way you rebuild a broom- I am replacing the whole of the skirt, but keeping the crinoline.

It's still the same petticoat.   Years on, someone might think the crinoline is a bit tired and not keeping shape, then replace that.  Still the same petticoat, right?  Recycling is a process with soul, I think.  Worrisome that we as a society don't do enough of it.  When's the last time someone mended a broom?  Or anything, really?

Even in the course of a project you get bored.  So while working on the costume, I also managed to finally stitch one of three "curtain" panels (i.e. raw Marden's fabric on  ring clips) for the living room, and make a cover for a frankly hideous hot pink footstool I'd bought for a song at TJ Maxx and always semi-regretted aesthetically.  Two curtain panels still wait for me to care enough to iron, pin, and hem them.  Cloistered, becurtained living room privacy be damned- there's a reason I have left that rhododendron out front wildly overgrown.

This morning dawned dark and dreary, rain pattering on the roof- a perfect project Sunday for those inclined.  I went into the sewing room, to start on next steps, but didn't turn on Midsomer Murders, my companion chatter, because I was ready for quiet- I even remembered to turn off the iron before I came to my writing desk.  Every kind of work requires a special style of boredom.  Welcome, friend.