Cotton

Going crazy here. I feel that what i do is useless. Maybe i should get out to breathe some fresh air. Maybe i should just open the window a bit. It's so cold in here and so warm in the lab, but i wouldn't work from there, it's not so pleasant as having your own bed and toilet and kitchen a few meters away. Nope, opening the window does not help, just makes me restless. Well, maybe a few pushups will help, in a few minutes.

First i'd like to tell you what a nice thing happened today. I found two curtains, the thin kind, made of cotton, 100%, nice and soft, but not too soft, somewhat transparent (the weave is quite wide, but not too wide) and really big for what i need. I want to cut them up and make shirts out of them. I know, right? Crazy woman here. People cut up shirts to make all sorts of shit (yes, shit is the word for some of those 'DIY' projects and their results) and i want to cut up a curtain to make a shirt?? I forgot to mention it's a traditional blouse rather than a shirt and it's supposed to have a certain feel to it. It can't be made out of any fabric, especially not synthetic, since i'll be doing a lot of embroidering on it and it needs to breathe when worn, so i don't stink it up and have to wash it too often. Besides, some designs only work on a certain type of fabric and i've been looking for fabrics like crazy in the past month and everything i've found to be decent is sooo expensive that i can't possibly think about buying any of that without knowing exactly how much fabric i'll need. I wouldn't want to waste my money on precious fabrics when i have no idea what i'm doing. So i'll start with upcycled/recycled fabrics. At first i wanted silk (because i'm crazy like that, and have enough silk to cover all my walls in a colorful mosaic), but it's too tight and i would really go crazy trying to do embroidery on it, counting the threads. Yeah, i forgot to mention that you don't just embroider any fabric in any way, there is a system, a structure that must be followed. And in order to have the most mathematically correct and esthetically pleasing design, one must count the threads. And make calculations beforehand, making everything symmetrical and beautiful. In order to do that, you can't use any kind of fabric. It would be great if i had access to hand woven fabric, but that's even more expensive, i can't even begin to imagine how much.

So now you can imagine my happiness at finding this fabric today. I also have a friend who started sewing already (for a few test runs, nothing fancy) and she lacks proper fabric for the same reason that i do. It's difficult to find. So, excited as i was, i wrote her a few messages some hours ago. I would love it if we made 'matching' blouses, in the sense that they have the same fabric (because everything else would be completely different), they would be like sisters. She is a very dear person to me and i'd love it if she finally read that message of mine. Unfortunately for both of us, she hasn't and i've been waiting for a sign for quite a few hours. Waiting for people to see my messages (especially the ones with really good news) makes me anxious like hell. I hate that. So i've been quite productive while waiting for an answer. I finished 'picking' the designs from my two favorite shirts from my region and drew them on my nice notebook that i'm sure i'll love forever, even though it's full of mistakes and i've already torn a few pages out of it. Then i used a bead design software to digitize them, i didn't know what else to use. It looks almost like the graph paper that i'll be using soon to transcribe them again, this time hopefully with no mistakes. The only problem is that it's made for beads, so the 'squares' are actually a bit too tall, they're rectangles. Tough luck, what can i say. What software can i use to create pixel-like designs like the ones used on traditional blouses? The thing is there are many ways to represent a stitch in embroidery and i was lucky for only getting to draw one with only crosses (because the blouses from my region are made in a simple fashion), but how about the more complicated ones from Transylvania. Our intellectual leader, the woman who started the movement and made me (by just being inspiring, nor personally) start my own journey toward a traditional blouse of my own, she has the tools and knows how to use them. I just wish she'd teach some more people how to do what she does, so that there will be more contributors to this growing community. I'm sure i'm not the only young person doing this and i'm not the only one who is computer literate, so getting a quick demo from her should probably make things work faster. Who knows...
For now i'll just be content to have found this beautiful fabric, i'll do a test run with the needle and i'll start designing my shirt. Oh yes, there is a bit of work there, starting from scratch and only a few photos. But you learn by doing :D Plus, there's a whole community of people who can tell me what i did right and wrong, i'm sure they'll be nice to me, even though they're not always nice...