It's hat making time again. You can always tell when I've been doing it, because there will be little rips and tears in my skin. Millinery needles are pretty serious. They are about 1/3 longer and 2x thicker than regular needles. So when I'm pushing them through three layers of buckram and my finger turns out to be just a little too close....
It hurts.
But I love it. Hats have complicated angles and things that you don't get in regular sewing. Not to say that regular sewing is easy, because it certainly is not. (Stupid period correct costumes....button fly my arse.) But I like the problems in hats better than I like problems in garment construction. Picking my poison, I guess.
I love millinery.
There are a few things that scare me though, about this particular business. Techies are notoriously hard on their bodies. The joke in theatre is that you work until you're 45, and then you teach, because you've ruined everything but your mind.
I met a milliner named Kathy about a year ago. Kathy was teaching a workshop at my university, and she was demonstrating how to hold buckram while you cut it. (It's a bitter mistress. But that's what you get when you soak fabric in glue for like....weeks.) She picked up her Ginghers and went to cut into the fabric. And then she grabbed her hand in pain, and said that her arthritis was too bad now. That someone else would have to CUT FABRIC for her. She literally could not support the weight of the scissors. Kathy was 38.
I just hope it won't happen to me.
Wow. That is sad. Maybe you could get some people to do all the cutting for you and just boss them around. Better to ruin someone else first, right?
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