Though I am sure it is but a shadow of its former glory,
there is still a garment district in NYC and, unsurprisingly, it’s one of my
favorite places to visit. There are a bunch of specialty shops, like the ones
that only sell beads or trade exclusively in trimmings; there are
wholesale-only storefronts that deter every-woman entrance with big “No Retail
Sales” signs, though no one can stop you from gawking into the windows from the
sidewalk—the spirit of Bob Mackie is alive and well on 38th Street,
fear not. There are the stores that have staked out their little corner of the industry,
including—and I kid you not—Spandex House, Spandex World, and Stretch House.
There are the hidden stores, the ones that don’t have outside signage or they
do but it’s subtle, like a dentist’s, and they’re just hanging around up there,
two, three, six stories above the street, hundreds of thousands of square feet
of absolutely everything you might
need to make absolutely anything, all
crammed into a few square blocks just south of Times Square.
I like the window shopping but if I’m in the ‘hood I’m usually
there for Mood, which is a famous (um, in certain circles) fabric store and if
you don’t already know what Mood is then you won’t care so I’ll spare you
further details. (It’s AMAZING.) However, I was recently in pursuit of a very
specific fabric, so once I had exhausted Mood’s inventory, I started popping
into every retail-friendly fabric store along 37th. And I do mean
“retail-sales-friendly,” as opposed to “customer-friendly”—I went into one
store I will not name and an older gentleman—suit pants, suspenders, dress
shirt, moustache—approached. He gave me that upward chin-nod that indicated I
could speak if I so desired and I did.
“Do you have any brocade,” I asked politely.
“No!” he barked. “We don’t carry brocade!” This is, btw, a little weird, but I don’t know enough
about the arcane nooks and crannies of the garment district to know who staked
out what turf way back when so, okay, no brocade. Never Brocade!
Because this guy looks like he has probably worked in this
store for 300 years and because the garment district is kind of called that
because all the stores are squished in there together, I asked if he happened
to know which stores in the area might carry brocade. This was a mistake.
“How the hell would I know that,” he shouted at me, “What do
I look like, a goddamn yellow pages?”
Anyway, so that place didn’t work out and I went on to the
next. I was looking for brocade because a dear friend of mine is getting
married (yay!) and she found the perfect
dress…except it needed a little alteration. I volunteered to see if I could
hunt up either the same fabric or something close enough to be snuck into an
inconspicuous area of the dress and lo and behold G&R Fabrics for the win!
G&R doesn’t appear to have a website or social media
presence, which I kind of love in this modern era. It’s a no-frills joint,
prioritizing jamming as much fabric as possible (which is a LOT) into a long,
tall, narrow space. As far as I can tell, all the employees are men, and
because they dress in casual street clothes it’s almost impossible to identify
them unless you can spot the giant steel fabric scissors in their back pockets.
I walked in to find a lady unfurling 8 yards of a gorgeous scalloped lacy fabric
in a deep emerald green, the material gathering in a pile in her feet on the questionably
clean carpet, as a man who worked there (?) delivered a detailed explanation of
the pricing he was able to offer her and how that came to be—it’s not just $65
a yard, it’s $65 a yard because it really should be $85 a yard and [insert here
extremely complex recounting of all of the things that have or haven’t happened
that enable him to give her this extremely generous discount].
I edged around the lady and her little mountain of fabric,
wondering what in the hell she was going to make that required spending over
five hundred dollars on fabric alone, and made my way to some rolls of brocade
I spied propped up along the shelving that lines the walls—fabric on top of
fabric on top of fabric it was dizzying. A nice gentleman appeared to offer
assistance and I showed him the picture I’d taken of the OG fabric. “Oooh,” he
sucked his teeth, “I just saw that the other day.”
I started to get hopeful but he shook his head and told me
the guy who had the OG fabric was wholesale-only and I’d have to be ordering at
least fifteen yards for him to consider bending the rules. But, my new best
friend went on, he had something similar. He lasered us over to another area of
the store and sure enough, there was a fabric that was sooooo close to the OG
that I really don’t think anyone who wasn’t a weirdo about stuff like this
would notice the difference. Needless to
say, I was ecstatic, and finding it was only $15 a yard was just the icing on
the cake.
So my friend got the fabric and a tailor made the
alterations and there was enough of the yard left over that it seemed
irresponsible not to try to find a way to use it, so….we brainstormed a bit,
and then, inspiration struck: why not use it to make the groom’s tie?
I’m no stranger to biting off WAY more than I can chew so I
said hell yes, and I met my friend and her fiancé at a bar where we attended a
talk about CRISPR (the biology and
the technology) and she handed over the remnant. Then I went home and got SUPER
into tie-making tutorials on the internet. I decided to really tackle this
properly I needed more fabric, so I made my way back to
G&R where the same guy not only greeted me but remembered me—“Back for more of the same?”—and hey presto I had a
stockpile. I asked the guy if they carried silk and he said no (Never Silk!); I said I
thought maybe satin might work and when he learned I was making a wear-it-only
once tie for a wedding he positively scoffed at the idea that I would line it
with silk. “Satin’s FINE,” he scoffed, pulling down a bolt of white that matched
my brocade perfectly, and I was bundled out the door with everything I needed
in under 5 minutes.
Walking home, I called my friend Z. who is a much better
seamstress that I, and described the project. She wisely suggested I go to a
thrift store and buy some ties I could take apart to understand the
construction and/or use as a pattern. “You can get like 10 for a dollar,” she
cried, and so I bustled over to the closest thrift store Google maps could
find and sought out the ugliest tie, assuming it would be the
cheapest, and instead it was marked at $65.
I eventually found two ties I could use as models, each for
a more-reasonable-but-still-NYC-prices $5 each. I went home and fell into a
blizzard of snipping and ironing and pinning and cutting and crawling around on
my hands and knees and knowing how to make things is just so NEAT! I dug out
some lightweight wool batting I’d used for a quilting project—moments like this
a terrible reinforcement of every crafter’s habit of always squirreling away
scraps, I’m sure I’ll need this someday, we
think, and then goddamn it one day we do and I have fabric scraps that are over twenty years old it is almost
mathematically impossible that each one of those scraps will finally get its
day in the sun—and used that as the interfacing (I had no idea that ties
require interfacing!). It turns out there are a couple of different methods of
construction you can use to sew a tie, so I chose the one that didn’t require
hand-sewing an invisible seam the entire length of the thing because f*ck that
do you know how hard that is? This alternate method requires sewing a
looooooong tube and then turning it inside out, which is a bit of a tricksy
proposition, but fortunately my sewing friend Z. just happened to be in town so I cornered her in a bar and watched
her slowly work a safety pin the length of the tube until the whole thing came
inside out and WOW we (almost) had a tie!
I say almost because this story is long enough already but
it turns out what I really had was a tube that was full of twisted interfacing
and eventually I had to rip open the seam and remove the interfacing and resew
the seam and turn the thing inside out again (did it myself the second time!)
and then iron it for like two hours until I grudgingly accepted that satin + brocade
might be hard to crease. I’m sending it off for the groom to try on, as before
I fling myself over the parapets in search of the SHARPEST of edges, I need to
know what other wonkiness is going on that I’ll need to address.
And yes, I say “need to,” because this is the REALLY fun
part: my poor innocent friend, the one with a wedding to plan, had no idea what
kind of monster she unleased when she mentioned what a shame it would be to waste
a few scraps of fabric. Honey, you should have BURNT that shit, because now I’m
loaded for bear and I’m coming for you with tons of ideas for lavender sachets
and keepsake holiday ornaments and all manner of other things you might not
have even known existed and I’m talking fiber fill and embroidery and maybe
some decorative top stitching and this isn’t about your wedding any more, my darlin’,
now this is about PROJECTS and it belongs to me and to Z. and to every crafty
friend who has ever gotten the chance to contribute to the ties that bind us
all together.
And that’s the thing you should know: we’re out there all around you, us
crafty ones: maybe you know some of us or maybe we’re hidden in plain sight, our
mouths full of pins or nails or brushes, our eyes maniacal with purpose or glazed
in dreamy vision, our brains brimming with ideas and inspiration. We all make
different kinds of things but we almost always share a deep and unshakable
conviction that a thing made with our own hands, while sometimes imperfect, is
still the best version of that thing
because it comes imbued with all the very best qualities we have to offer:
optimism, faith, courage, passion, determination, resourcefulness, and a big ol’network
of weirdos that’s right here all around you, ready to work together to imagine
all of the things that might, just might,
be possible.
P.S. I broke a safety pin and doesn’t its little head look
just like Darth Vader's helmet?!
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