It was quite a lot of fun, actually, hunting about for interesting fabrics as mementos, rather than feeling vaguely like I ought to buy tacky dust-collecting souvenirs like a tiny model Roman holding a sign that says "I bathed in the Bath baths!" or whatever. This way, everything was cheaper and less breakable (and also lighter and more compact) and I got to make my own tacky dust-collector, which was actually quite fun. Plus, it meant that if I had a couple of days to kill in an unfamiliar town, I could get an idea of the lay of the land by trying to hunt down fabric shops in them. This is actually surprisingly effective, like a scavenger hunt; you get a pretty good idea of a town doing this sort of thing.
Anyway, now, there are something like 100 different fabrics, which is to say about 500 flags all told, all hand-sewn and hemmed into neat little triangles, in sets, now, of 4, plus one representative of each unique set sewn onto the preliminary string I've finished this evening. I'm not actually certain exactly how many different fabrics there are, because although I pretty much remember something about each one, and can gleefully tell you which ones used to be old rag-bag dresses or "3 for 10p" remnants, they somehow defy counting, like Galleon's Lap in Winnie the Pooh. I always seem to end up quite certain that I've counted correctly, but varying around 100-odd with a margin of error anywhere from 0 to 12. So I mean, it's somewhere between about 90 and about 110, I guess.
The only problem with all this is that I'm sort of like one of those people who want to show you all their holiday slides or family album photos, agog with how endearing and delightful they are, completely blind to the fact that you often had to be there to really "get" the pictures, and that 5 would be quite sufficent, thank you. I mean, I'm bad enough about actual photos that way, so this urge I have to explain objectively-less-interesting flags to people is likely to end poorly, and fairly inexcusably, since I know, deep down (and quite a lot of the way up to the surface, come to that) that no-one but me could possibly be remotely interested in how thrilling it was to come across the fabric of which my old favourite dress was made in a shop named "My Hung Fabrics". I even know that that shop name isn't actually amusing to those of us who aren't, at some level, a 10 year old still giggling to themselves are going "hehe, you said hung". In fact, since it's run by a lovely chinese family, it may in fact be deeply inappropriate to think of it as a funny name. (Is that even right? Sometimes I worry that I might be accidentally being a racist jerk without meaning to or noticing.)
Still, there you are. Much like the gigantic ball of finger-knitting (it's like french knitting, kind of, only there's only one stitch, which makes it possibly even less useful than french knitting, which Lord knows is already useless enough)(the french seem to have dropped the ball here, actually. 'French' as a prefix usually presages greatness, or at least pretty-good-ness, like in cooking, or kissing or knickers. I guess every nation has their off days. Some have Terra Nullius and hats with corks on them, even though the corks are themselves just as annoying as the flies they're supposed to ward off, and others have the Reign of Terror and French Knitting. I guess all you can do, as usual, is feel sorry for the Germans, who aptly always seem to have this sort of historical schadenfreude competition taped up from the word go) much, as I was saying, like the gigantic (about 25 cm in diameter?) ball of finger knitting I made in year 4, this is one of those acheivements (which I may very probably spend the rest of my life making), of which I am immensely proud, and which absolutely no-one else will ever be impressed by, except perhaps that particular sort of impressed which is expressed through saying things like "yes but what for?" or "I can see it's taken a long time, now what are you going to do with it? Also why did you choose to do it in the least efficient way possible?".
I'm sure that there must be some kind of deep and meaningful Life Lesson to me in there, about 'doing things I like doing for my own satisfaction', not for the dubious attraction of showing other people and impressing them or whatever, and obviously I get that, and am better at seeing it than when I was in year 4 (when I mainly tended to figure that if I explained patiently enough how awesome it was, people would suddenly see, and presumably hail me as the next Disney Princess or something), but frankly I do not feel bad that I have yet to totally master this. I suspect that getting a true and real grip on that sort of thing is the sort of thing which people usually take their whole lives to get the hang of, and sometimes even then they occasionally don't get it. Probably this is what Maslow means by self-actualisation?
Anyway, long story short, I sewed something a bit useless, but am still foolishly proud of it, and that's ok. As long as I don't forget myself and insist on explaining all of them to anyone but my Dad, who had the misfortune to be next to me when I cut the last thread, before I'd taken this whole blog post to nut out that probably he didn't really want to listen but was doing so out of the sort of habit which you can only get by literally decades of being a good and patient parent, and also by perhaps surreptitiously tuning out the voice and imagining what sort of secret passage you'd like in your house or whatever, all the while making interested noises.
I figure that tbis makes me just like Jane Austen writing Emma and saying in the correspondence excerpt which some completely inept marketer had decided to put in the blurb of the copy I read in highchool "I am going to write a heroine whom no-one but myself will much like". Except, you know, with less literary genius and more constant fiddling with bias binding (I was going to say more hours of useless hand-sewing, but that would probably not actually be true, what with the whole 19th century thing and what have you) but with the upsides that highschool girls will never have to try and skim through my bunting and eventually just watch a BBC miniseries after they realise that the Gweneth Paltrow version is bollocks, and also that it gave me something to write today's post about.
I have to say I'm maybe a little ashamed of how much I've written about the damn bunting, given that the evolving main thesis of the post is "stop telling people about your damn bunting", but hey, you don't have to read, so it's what you might call a victimless crime, really.
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