In the
Summer of 1988, my wife Kathe and I met a touring Deadhead, one of
the thousands of people who travelled around the country (sometimes
around the world) to attend concerts by the Grateful Dead (or as some
people felt, one of the nomadic tribe who had the Grateful Dead as
their house band). She was a friendly middle-aged lady whose greatest
joy was going around the country in her van with her son, who was in
poor health and needed a lot of care.
Like many
Deadheads, she made money by tie-dyeing T-shirts, thermals and
hoodies to sell to her fellows and to locals at each city she stopped
in. We looked over the woman's wares, counted our pennies and
finally bought a long-sleeved thermal shirt for me. It was far more
colorful and eye-catching than anything else I owned, and in
particular was more colorful than anything else I had to wear in the
cold months of the year. I wore it on almost any occasion, and
naturally it began to wear out quickly. A thermal shirt isn't very
sturdily made, after all. It was never intended for outer wear.
At first,
I just patched it with whatever soft, stretchy fabric was on hand,
sewing patches to the inside of the shirt around the holes and then
stitching around the edges to slow down the fraying. I used only the
simplest kind of stitch, a crude “baseball” stitch. Even so, I
noticed that if I used a brightly-colored patch on the inside,it
looked pretty good. My wife compared the result to “cutwork”, a
word I'd never even heard before. I began sewing down the edges with
more complicated stitches that wouldn't ravel so easily.
As the
years passed, there was less and less of the original garment left.
In places, there were patches which were wearing through and needed
new patches added inside of them, making it thicker and heavier, less
of a thermal shirt and more of a heavy sweater. The fabric stretched
gradually, so that a waist-length shirt became an inseam-length
sweater and eventually a tunic that hung to mid-thigh.
The
original spiral pattern became harder to make out, yet oddly, old
Deadheads could always recognize it – it seemed to have some
Grateful Dead vibe that lingered with it even as the actual Deadhead
shirt vanished thread by thread (at this point, only a few sturdy
pieces of seam remain), so that old Deadheads recognize it. Other
people also stopped us on the street to comment on it, and I began to
think of the sweater as The Sweater, a local celebrity. I set up a
web site devoted to posting photos of it in various stages of
development, and stories about incidents involving it and comments I
got about it. I wound up creating several, actually: thesweater.blogspot.com, johnmburt1960.livejournal.com/photo/album/482/, and a Tumblr. For various reasons, I can't use any of those (I can't use the Tumblr, for instance, because Verizon bought Tumblr and gutted it, and I'm damned if I'll give Verizon any traffic at the taxidermied corpse of Tumblr-That-Was), so I wound up creating yet another blog for The Sweater, johnssweater.blogspot.com.
The web
sites were in part created out of self-defense: Kathe and I wound up
stopping to chat about The Sweater so often, I felt the need to print
up cards directing people to the site, so that an errand downtown
wouldn't take all day.
For some
reason, Fred Meyer seems to be the place where these encounters take
place most often, including one which I remember with especial
fondness: a woman and child approached us, and the woman said that
her daughter had been talking about beginning an art project of some
kind but felt intimidated by the act of getting started, since she'd
never done anything like that. She pointed out The Sweater to her
mother as the sort of thing she'd like to make, and her mother said,
“Why don't you ask him how he made it?” I told her I had known
nothing about sewing when I began the project, and had learned many
techniques along the way. I encouraged her to dive in and begin doing
what she wanted, learning as she went. I gave her a Sweater card and
wished her well.
On very
rare occasions, someone will have something unkind to say about The
Sweater. One person went so far as to post a vile screed on
Craigslist's “Rants and Raves” which I wish now I had copied and
saved to my web site, it was so absurdly over the top. Not only did
he call The Sweater, if I recall correctly, “Technicolor vomit”, but he referred
to Kathe as looking like “a scarecrow with AIDS” and me as “a
big fat guy”, both of which characterizations I resent greatly:
Kathe is quite shapely, even at eighty years of age; and while I am
indeed a big man or if you insist a fat man, I don't think any
reasonable person would call me a “big fat man”.
In the
course of maintaining The Sweater, I sometimes have to trim away
sections of it so that it doesn't become completely shapeless. These
scraps come in handy patching worn places, and for side projects like
patching and eventually Sweaterizing a worn-out cap or a pair of gloves, but
even so pieces accumulate. This inspired a new project: I had a pair
of thermal pants for cold weather, and I patched them in places with
pieces of The Sweater and stitched all over them with yarn to try to
turn them into The Pants, but it didn't work out. The yarn made the
pants too baggy, and while a baggy sweater is tolerable, baggy
thermal pants really aren't. I put the pants into my ragbag as a
source of material for some future project.
A few
years ago, we found a place online that was selling tie-dyed
thermals, and bought a new one. I cut the back out of The Sweater and
sewed it to the front of the new sweater, and then cut the front of
the new sweater out from behind the big patch I'd added. I used that,
and some scraps, to give The Sweater a new back so I could continue
to wear it. I cut the legs off the failed decorated pants and turned
them into sleeves for the new Sweater, and stitched across its back
to make it better match the front. I presented it to Kathe so that we
could go out together wearing “matching” editions of The Sweater.
The one-of-a-kind garment was no longer so lonely.
More
recently still, a “part-time” child came into our family, and I
bought a 3T-size yellow sweater
and used
Sweater scraps to turn it into a cute little Sweater that reached to
his ankles when he was a toddler, fit him snugly when he was four,
and has since been enlarged with careful tailoring so that it still
fits him comfortably now that he is a husky twelve-year-old as large
as many adults.
And so,
my thirty-year-old celebrity Sweater continues to remain the
centerpiece of my wardrobe, and a small but visible element of life
in Corvallis – and continues, slowly, to reproduce itself . . . .
