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Monday, November 17, 1997

Draping class. You don't start with a pattern, you start with a dress form and a long piece of muslin and pins, and you push the fabric around on the body until it does what you want, and then you mark it and take it off and that's your pattern. It's like sculpture except the sculpture can wrinkle.

Today I draped a cowl neckline on the bias, which is the diagonal of the fabric, where it stretches and falls, and it fell exactly right on the first try, in those soft folds, and I stood there with pins in my mouth and didn't want to touch it. The teacher walked by, stopped, looked at it for a long time, and kept walking without saying anything. Diana says that's the best review that teacher gives.

Grandma would say, don't get a big head, it's muslin.

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Sunday, September 7, 1997

Sophomore year! I'm not in the dorm anymore. Christina and I and a girl from my draping section named Diana Rathbone found an apartment in Astoria, in Queens, on the second floor of a house that belongs to a Greek lady who lives downstairs and waters her tomatoes at six a.m. in a housecoat. Three girls, two bedrooms, one bathroom, and a living room with my sewing machine in it. I take the N train into the city. It goes up in the air on the tracks and you can see the whole skyline coming in. I always look.

It's been a strange summer for anybody who loves clothes. In July, Gianni Versace was shot outside his house in Miami Beach. I was home in Michigan and I saw it on the news in Grandma's kitchen and I said "Oh no" so loud she dropped a spoon. She didn't know who he was. I tried to explain. All that color and gold and nerve. Then a week ago Sunday, Princess Diana died in Paris. Her funeral was yesterday and Christina and Diana (my roommate Diana, I mean) and I got up early and watched it on the little TV with the coat hanger antenna. Nobody said anything for two hours. I kept thinking about her wedding dress, the giant one in 1981 with the long train, which I've seen in pictures a hundred times, and then about how simple her clothes got later, at the end, like she finally got to pick.

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Friday, August 22, 1997

Home in Michigan for the summer, back to New York on Sunday. I worked at the ice cream place on the highway again and spent every evening at Grandma's house.

This summer Grandma taught me to quilt. Not just sew, which she taught me when I was seven, but piece and quilt, the whole thing. We made a Nine Patch crib quilt for my cousin's baby out of scraps from her rag bag. She showed me that quilters use a quarter-inch seam, not five-eighths like dress patterns. I asked why. She said, "Because a quilt has to last fifty years, and a dress only has to make it through the dance." I wrote that on the inside of my sketchbook cover.

She also showed me her quilts in the cedar chest. Some her mother made, some she made in the thirties out of feed sacks, the cotton bags flour and chicken feed came in, which had flowers printed on them so farm women could make dresses out of them. She remembers picking out the sacks at the feed store by the pattern. I sat on the floor of her bedroom with them all around me for an hour.

Next summer I'm staying in New York. I have to. Everyone says if you go home every summer you're not serious. Grandma says go, go, I'll be here.

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Wednesday, April 23, 1997

Something good happened!!

In construction class we had to make a lined skirt with a zipper and a waistband. Half the class has never sewn before, which I didn't know was possible at a fashion school. A girl next to me sewed her zipper in upside down twice. I've been putting in zippers since I was ten because Grandma made me practice on old pillowcases.

Today the teacher held up my skirt in front of everybody and turned it inside out and showed them the inside. The inside! Because that's where you can tell. Clean seams, pressed open, the hem done by hand. She said, "This is what I mean when I say finish." Nobody's ever held up anything of mine for a good reason before. I called Grandma from the pay phone in the lobby and she said "Well, of course," like she knew it the whole time, and then she asked if I pressed the seams open as I went, and I said yes, and she said "Good girl."

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Sunday, February 16, 1997

Money report. I have $41 until Friday. The subway is $1.50 a token and I buy them two at a time. I eat ramen noodles (three packs for a dollar at the Korean grocery) with a fried egg on top, which Christina says is gourmet. I bring my lunch to the fabric store. I walk whenever it's under twenty blocks.

Everybody at school wears black. Black slip dresses with T-shirts underneath, black pants, black platform shoes, black turtlenecks, black everything, like we're all going to a very fashionable funeral. I came here with a suitcase full of sweaters my mom bought at the mall, in colors, a red one and a blue one and a green one with snowflakes, and the first week a guy in my drawing class asked if I was in a Christmas pageant. So now I have two black turtlenecks and one pair of black pants and I wash them in the sink.

But I'm wearing the snowflake sweater right now. It's warm and nobody can see me.

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Thursday, November 28, 1996

Happy Thanksgiving! I'm not home. A plane ticket to Michigan for one weekend costs more than I make in a month at the store, so Mom and Dad and I decided I'll wait for Christmas. I cried about it last week, a lot. Today was okay though.

Christina and I got up at six and went to see the Macy's parade. We stood on Central Park West for three hours in the cold behind a family from New Jersey with a ladder. The balloons are SO much bigger in real life. Then we took the subway to Christina's aunt's apartment in Queens and her aunt made turkey and also tamales because they're from San Antonio, and everybody talked in Spanish and English at once, and her aunt kept putting more food on my plate and calling me flaquita, which means skinny, which I'm not.

I called home from the aunt's phone with my calling card. Everybody at Grandma's table got on one at a time. Grandma got on last and asked me what I was thankful for. I said "You," and she said "Oh, stop," and then she didn't say anything for a minute.

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Thursday, October 31, 1996

Today was my first real critique and I cried. Not in the room, thank God. In the stairwell between the fourth and fifth floors, which I've since found out is where everybody cries. There was a girl crying on the landing above me.

We had to pin up ten designs for a small collection, and the teacher, Professor Ingham, walks down the wall and talks about each person's in front of the class. She's tiny and she has white hair cut very short and she wears all black and huge silver rings. She stood in front of mine for a long time. Then she said, "These are very nice. These are what a nice girl wears to church." And everybody laughed, not mean, just because it was true. Then she said, "I don't know who you are yet. Neither do you. Find out." And she moved on to the next person.

I called Grandma from the hall phone in the dorm. I didn't even say hello, I just started crying. She waited till I was done. Then she said, "Is she right?" I said I didn't know. She said, "Then go find out if she's right." That's the same thing the professor said! They've never met!

Christina dragged me down to the Halloween parade in the Village tonight to cheer me up. There was a man dressed as the Empire State Building who was taller than a bus. I'm going to bed.

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Tuesday, October 15, 1996

I got a job!!! At a fabric store in the Garment District, twenty hours a week, $5.50 an hour.

The Garment District is a bunch of streets in the West 30s full of fabric stores and button stores and trim stores and zipper stores, and men pushing racks of clothes down the middle of the street. The street signs on Seventh Avenue say "Fashion Ave" under the real name. I walked under one and got goosebumps.

The store belongs to Mr. Peiffer. His father opened it after the war and he's run it for thirty years. It's long and skinny, bolts up to the ceiling on both sides, and it smells like wool and dust and coffee. He hired me because when he asked me what something was, I said "That's a wool crepe," and when he held up another one, I said "That's a silk charmeuse, and that one's polyester pretending." He laughed for a long time and said, "When can you start."

I'm learning so much just from cutting yardage. Bouclé, which is loopy. Organza, which is stiff and see-through. Duchesse satin, which is so heavy it stands up by itself. I love it here.

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Saturday, September 21, 1996

Two weeks in New York. Things I've learned:

1. Drawing class is at 8 a.m. and the model doesn't care that you're tired.
2. You buy subway tokens at a booth. They're $1.50. You do not stand at the top of the subway stairs looking at the map.
3. Nobody says hi on the sidewalk. I said hi to about forty people the first day.
4. It's never dark here. Never. There's always a light outside our window and a siren somewhere.
5. I'm homesick. Like, really homesick. I didn't know it would be in my stomach.

I call home on the hall phone with a calling card on Sunday nights. Mom cries, then I cry, then my brother Aaron gets on and makes fun of both of us. Grandma asks if I've used the machine yet. Not yet. I will.

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Sunday, September 8, 1996

Hello world!! This is my first journal entry on my first home page. I'm writing it on the computer in the school lab with about five minutes left before they kick us out.

My name is Michelle Earle. I'm 18. I'm from a small town in Michigan where there is one blinking light and one fabric store, and I am now a freshman fashion design student in New York City!!! Mom and Dad drove me here in the van, thirteen hours, and they left this morning and I watched the van go up the street until I couldn't see it.

I brought two suitcases and my grandma's sewing machine. It's a Singer Featherweight from the 1950s, little and black with gold designs on it, in its own case. Grandma gave it to me at my graduation party in June. She taught me to sew on it when I was seven. She said, "It's yours now. Make something they've never seen."

My roommate is Christina and she's from San Antonio, Texas, and she has more shoes than I have clothes. She seems nice.

OK they're turning the lights off. More soon!!!

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