Today’s New York Times has an article about women who are busting their butts selling their homemade stuff on Etsy, but I want to draw your attention to Monday’s column by Michelle Satalla’s, “Altered by a Sewing Machine.” It’s about her psychic battle with her brand new, fancy-schmancy sewing machine. When she removes the machine from its box, she is flooded with all these ideas and ambitions. But she learns that in order to turn the fantasies into reality, she has to train herself into being more of a patient “process” woman.

Like Slatalla, when I first brought my machine home (a basic Singer Inspiration), I was heady with ambition. Suddenly, every textile product—from napkins to gowns—became a candidate for my art direction and handicraft. She writes:“First I would make dish towels and place mats and pillowcases with ric rac, then graduate to table clothes and draperies and blouses with nipped-in waists. I would like very much to someday have a velvet dress with a fitted bodice and long, tight sleeves (who wouldn’t?).”

In my case, it was more of a mastery of '40s-style tailored dresses with illusion lace or net and contrasting lining, but you get the idea. And for some reason I really wanted to embroider geometric radishes on white cotton napkins.

But, then, like Slatalla, the reality of learning how to sew and the frustrations of screwing up set in, which for many women leads to the following realization: “All I wanted ... was to make a simple set of dish towels. Actually, all I wanted was to have made them.”

Meaning, of course, that it would be lovely to own all of this stuff and to play art director, but do you really want to sit in front of the machine and sew this stuff? I think many women realize this and then feel bad about it. As Slatalla explained, it’s as if in learning how to sew and in fabricating all these items, you can change yourself from being an impatient woman “into a better” woman. I feel that this type of self-flagellation is more native to the psychology of sewing than any other home craft. Is it because we hope to wear the results, so our ideals merge with our ideas about self-actualization, which is literally manifested in our dress?

Sales of sewing machines have been skyrocketing. And in some social circles, Joann’s, the fabric and craft supply store, is as common an errand stop as Duane Reade. But I wonder how many New Sewing Women actually stick with sewing. How many machines are collecting dust or plonked on desks in spare bedrooms or crowding hallways?

Beginner’s sewing isn’t hard—and if you like the craftskool look, which I don’t, you may be pleased and encouraged to keep at it. It’s simple to master the A-line wrap skirt, for example, which teaches basic fitting, cutting, stitching, and hemming techniques. This is the first garment most sewing manuals and schools will introduce to a neophyte (after you’ve graduated from single-fold fabric wallet with a button closure). I took a class at the Make Workshop on New York's Lower East Side two years ago, and this was our syllabus.

I loved the class, but I haven’t worn the skirt. In fact, the skirt still needs a waistband because I was so anal and slow in class. So it's currently rolled up in a bag from B&J Fabrics (the fancier Mood, for all you Project Runway fans). Fortunately, I predicted that my relationship with my Singer Inspiration might be ... uninspiring.

I selected black and white gingham for the A-line wrap skirt fabric—a suitable choice for slicing up into festive picnic napkins. And come next Memorial Day, if I haven’t finished the darn waistband, and if I somehow come to accept the craftskool look draped across my short curvy frame, that sucker is coming undone.

Tags: DIY, Etsy, sewing, sewing machines

Given the sad failure of a No. 12 to emerge, Tiger-watchers have turned, inevitably, to meta-analysis. Tina Brown says that we talk about Tiger because it’s a story we understand at a time when stories we don’t understand (the economy, the climate) are ascendant. Blogger Matt Feeney attributes public interest to the fact that Tiger once “seemed to illustrate the essential soundness and stability of our most important and worried-about institution,” but turned out to be “living in the bad old days we’re constantly telling ourselves we’d left behind.” First Things’ James Poulos, always entertaining on these matters, says “we are chagrined and dismayed to see Tiger represent evidence that putting most of our effort into a life of demonstrated professional expertise will leave us with the sort of meaning deficit that nags in the kind of way that causes us to do reckless, irresponsible, indulgent, and, yes, even depraved things.”

The latter two of these explanations take it as given that we are “disappointed” in Tiger rather than just entertained by him, and so the Tiger story is different in kind than the celebutante tabloid fodder on which we normally subsist. I think this is arguable at best. It’s not clear to me that the enduring interest in Tiger even needs explanation. For a while there, every time we looked away, a new woman emerged with an even better set of semi-sordid details. The story propelled itself forward. The gift kept on giving.

Since the above should make it clear that any cultural analysis of Tiger tends toward projection of one’s personal anxieties, I’ll refrain from using the universal “we.” I feel let down not by Woods, but by the paparazzi on whom we all depend to keep us abreast of these things. The man was with 11 women over how many years and not so much as a snapshot surfaces? Where were you, X17? Where were your swarming, flashing hordes, your ravenous stalkerazzi instincts? Does any photographer show up anywhere without a knowing tip-off from the entourage? My faith is broken.

Tags: paparazzi, tiger woods

Oh, what a difference a TV show can make! A couple of years ago, trend pieces discussing the men in their 20s and 30s who like to cut  nice, fashionable figures dismissed these men as emasculated "metrosexuals." But the popularity and influence of the aesthetic of Mad Men intervened and now the very same "metrosexuals" are being used to shame older men who are still wed to their worn out T-shirts and Birkenstocks. I may be biased, being partnered with a man who enjoys looking sharp in a jacket and a tie, but I can't help but applaud this new trend of applauding men for wanting to look good. If it took Jon Hamm in Brylcreem to get us here, so be it.

Not that I sneer at the revolution in casual dress of the '60s, exactly. For one thing, it introduced a great deal more variety into what one can wear, and nowadays it's more just than hipsters who mix casual and not-casual clothing. (A tie with jeans, a band T-shirt with a skirt, etc.) I'm against oppression in all its forms, and the mandatory dressing up of the '50s was objectively awful and had to be thrown off. But what's less discussed is how casual became a uniform and a mandate in the years since. Having recently moved to New York, I can say that it's actually a relief to be able to wear heels and a skirt if I want to; Austin isn't as hippie as it used to be, but it still is hippie enough that if you try to dress up to go out, people look at you funny and ask if someone died. This attitude is more common across the country than you'd think, which is why the dreaded Crocs managed to be a trend instead of being treated as clearly too ridiculous to be donned by anyone with dignity.

Even in places like Austin, though, recent years have seen a loosening up of the casual-at-all-costs mandate in clothing for both men and women, but as the article notes, men especially have been the beneficiaries. Mad Men probably has a lot to do with it, but the trend really predates the show. I credit a combination of hipsterdom and feminism—hipsters for putting a premium on self-expression through clothes and feminism for making it less shameful and emasculating for men to want to express their inner dandy.

In the years since the casual revolution of the '60s, men dressing up has always had a whiff of shame to it, as if a man who wants to look good is acting just a tad too ladylike for comfort, possibly because he's doing what ladies do and considering what he looks like to the opposite sex. (Thus the term "metro.") So of course the men taking leadership on the return of the tie and jacket are the men who care least about proving their manhood at all costs and find it fun to please the ladies. It's when I go to suburban environments full of anxious masculinity expressed through guns and gas guzzlers that I still see men pushing the casual-at-all-costs look, where it's not unusual to see women with full faces of make-up, hair done, and dresses on the arms of men wearing baggy shorts, baseball caps, and Crocs. But perhaps these women will get relief in a few years as the trend of men dressing a bit more nicely trickles down, as did organic food and hybrid cars before it.

Tags: mad men, men's fashion