Michelle Earle, 21. From a small town in Michigan. Fashion design student in New York since 1996, senior year now. Weekends and summers at a fabric store in the Garment District. Sewing on my grandmother's machine.

If you go to my school and you've figured out who I am: hi. Please don't print this and pin it to the critique wall.

Older entries: spring 1999  |  1998  |  1996-97, freshman year

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Sunday, September 26, 1999

Today I cut Look 1 in the real fabric. Charcoal wool for the outside, built in strips from the center out like a Log Cabin block, and the old feed-sack cottons from Mr. Peiffer's basement for the lining strips, light on one side, dark on the other. And a red square at the center back, inside, where only the person wearing it will know. The fire in the hearth.

Then I sewed the first seam. On Grandma's Featherweight, which hasn't missed a stitch since 1956, at the table Pete hauled up the stairs, with a quarter-inch seam allowance, the quilter's seam, not the dressmaker's five-eighths. Grandma says a quilt has to last fifty years and a dress only has to make it through the dance. I want this one to last.

Then I called her. I told her it was the first seam. She asked me if I pressed it. I said not yet. She said, "Well, go press it, and then you can call me back." So I did. And then I called her back and she said, "Good. Now do the next one."

Three years ago this month I got here with two suitcases and this machine and cried for most of October. I wrote on this page that nobody said hi on the sidewalk and that a professor said my sketches were what a nice girl wears to church. I read those old entries last night. I wanted to go back and tell that girl something, and I couldn't decide what. Maybe just: press as you go. Leave yourself some room at the edges. That's what holds.

Five looks to go.

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Thursday, September 23, 1999

Pete said no to Boston.

He says it wasn't because of me. He says when he told his chef about the offer, the chef went quiet and then made him sous chef here, starting next month, with a raise, so he doesn't have to move to a city where he doesn't know where to buy fish. I believe him, mostly. I'm also allowed to be glad.

And then tonight he came over with a drafting table. A real one, oak, huge, with a top that tilts, that somebody put out on the curb in Chelsea. He carried it eleven blocks to the subway with a busboy from work and then on the N train and up our stairs. Our Greek landlady watched the whole thing from her doorway with her arms crossed. Now my cutting table is the size of a twin bed, and there's room on it for a whole jacket laid flat. Diana says we're going to have to eat dinner on the floor until May. I said we already do.

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Sunday, September 19, 1999

It's the spring shows this month, Fashion Week, and the whole city is full of very tall girls with portfolios walking fast. A girl in my year knows somebody who knows a small designer who needed dressers, so on Thursday, while what was left of the hurricane poured rain on the whole city, I spent twelve hours backstage at a show in a loft in Chelsea. The models came in soaked, holding plastic bags over their hair.

A dresser is the person who gets the model out of one outfit and into the next between walks. You get one model and a rack with her looks on it in order, with a picture of each look taped on, and when she comes off the runway you have maybe ninety seconds. Shoes, zipper, earrings, jacket, go. Nobody is polite. Nobody has time.

Ten minutes before the show, the strap on my model's second dress came off in my hand. Just came off. Everybody near us froze. I always carry a threaded needle stuck in the hem of my shirt, a Grandma habit, so I sewed it back on her while she stood there, eight stitches, double thread, in about forty seconds. She said, "You're my favorite person." Then she went out and walked like I wasn't even there, which is how it's supposed to be.

Afterward the designer came by the rack with a glass of champagne for everybody and stopped at me and said, "You're the one with the needle." I am. I'm the one with the needle.

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Monday, September 13, 1999

First thesis meeting. My advisor is Professor Ingham. Of course she is. The same Professor Ingham from my very first critique in October 1996, who told me I didn't know who I was yet. She's still tiny and her hair is still white and she still wears all black and every silver ring she owns.

I pinned up the six sketches and the quilt snapshots. She looked for a long time. She said Look 1 was "inevitable," which I think is good. She said Look 4 was "honest." Then she got to Look 5, the Drunkard's Path, and said, "This one is a lie. You drew it because you thought you needed something modern. You don't. Take it down."

I didn't take it down. I said the curves are the only place in the collection that moves, and without them the whole thing stands still. She looked at me with her eyebrows up for about five seconds, which felt like a week.

Then she said, "Good. Argue with me. Now make it not a lie." And wrote something in her notebook.

Three years ago I'd have cried in the stairwell. Today I went and got a coffee.

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Sunday, September 5, 1999

Labor Day weekend and I've been on the floor of the living room since Friday with a roll of brown paper, drawing the lineup. That's all six looks drawn side by side, the way they'll walk out at the end, so you can see if they belong together. They should look like a family, not like six strangers at a bus stop.

The first lineup looked like six strangers at a bus stop. The second looked like a family that doesn't speak. I'm on the fourth. It's taped to the wall over the radiator now and I keep walking past it and squinting.

Grandma asked me on the phone tonight, "Which one is mine?" I said, Grandma, they're all yours. She said, "I know that. Which one is mine, mine?" I said number six. The crib quilt. The one we made together. She didn't say anything for a while, and then she said, "Don't make it too fancy." That's the hardest note I've ever been given.

Classes start Wednesday. Senior year. How.

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Monday, August 23, 1999

Pete got offered a sous chef job in Boston. A new restaurant, a chef he worked under for a summer once, more money than he's ever made, his own station and two cooks under him. They want an answer in a month.

He told me at the diner on Ninth at two in the morning, over eggs he wasn't eating. He watched my face the whole time like he was waiting for something to boil over.

I said he should take it. I meant it. I also didn't mean it. Both. You can mean two things at once, it turns out, like a fabric with a different color on each side. I have a thesis to make. I'm not going to Boston. He knows that. He didn't ask me to.

We walked to the subway and didn't decide anything. Mr. Peiffer, when I told him at work today, said, "Boston has fabric stores too, you know." I said, "Not like yours." He said, "Nothing is like mine," and went in the back.

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Wednesday, August 11, 1999

Mr. Peiffer took me down to the basement today.

I've worked at the store almost three years and I'd never been in the basement. It's one long room under the whole building with a ceiling so low he has to duck, and it's full of bolts that never sold, some of them older than me. Older than my mother. He'd heard me telling a customer about Grandma's feed sack quilts, and he said "Come," and turned on the bare bulbs one at a time.

At the very back, under a sheet, were bolts of printed cotton from the 1940s. Little flowers, little checks, tiny dots, faded a little at the folds. Mill ends his father bought after the war and never sold because the fashion changed. They look exactly like the feed sacks. Exactly. I couldn't say anything. I just put my hand flat on them.

He's letting me have them at what his father paid. In 1947 dollars. I tried to argue and he waved his hand and said, "I want to see them on the runway before I die. Make it worth the dust."

That's Look 4's coat, and every lining in the collection. I rode the N train home with three bolts in my lap like a baby.

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Sunday, July 25, 1999

The quilts came.

Grandma decided, without asking anybody, that I should have them in New York for the thesis "instead of looking at pictures like a tourist." Mom packed them in two big boxes and shipped them, which cost a fortune, and they came Friday while I was at work. Diana signed for them and put them on my bed and called me at the store to say "Your quilts are here" in a voice like they were people.

Last night I unfolded them on the living room floor, one at a time, because there isn't room for two at once. The cedar smell came out of every fold. The Double Wedding Ring, from her wedding in 1940, the arcs a little crooked at one corner where she says she was "in a hurry to get married." Her mother's Flower Garden, which has one hexagon in the whole thing, near the middle, that's a different yellow from all the others, on purpose. Grandma says her mother always put in one mistake on purpose so God wouldn't think she was showing off.

Pete came by after his shift and found me sitting in the middle of the Log Cabin. He sat down next to me and looked at it for a long time and said, "This is like a really good kitchen. Everything where it should be, and you can tell somebody worked in it for years." That's the best thing anybody's said about these quilts who isn't related to them.

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Friday, July 9, 1999

Report from behind the cutting counter, summer of 1999.

What women want right now: anything silver. Silver lamé, silver sequins, silver organza, silver anything, for New Year's Eve. Every single one of them is making a dress to wear on December 31, 1999, and every single one of them thinks she's the only one. I have cut about ninety yards of silver lamé since June, and it sheds glitter, so I go home on the N train looking like a disco ball. Pete says I sparkle when I take off my shoes.

What else: pashmina shawls, which we don't sell but people ask for anyway. Fabric for capri pants. Stretch everything. One woman wanted fabric "like the millennium" and I said what does the millennium look like, and she said "You know. Silver. But tasteful." I sold her a gray silk shantung. She was thrilled.

I'm not making anything silver. My whole thesis is 1940 cotton and wool and a quarter-inch seam. Everybody is running toward the year 2000 and I'm walking backward into my grandmother's cedar chest. I think that's okay. I think somebody has to.

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Older entries: spring 1999  |  1998  |  1996-97, freshman year

Quilt pages I keep going back to while I work: Mary Bird's Quilts, sixty-six years of quilting and her mother's quilts before hers, and Quilt Blocks in HTML, patchwork made out of table cells, which I wish I'd thought of.

Want to know when I write something new? E-mail me with pin me in the subject and I'll put you on my list. (Twenty-three people so far. My mom is on it twice.)

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last updated Sunday, September 26, 1999