Sewing in the Time of COVID

I’m gonna go ahead and blame my deranged decision to hand sew a swimsuit on COVID. Being cooped up for an entire year while this pandemic plays itself out has thrown me into a loony state of creative madness.

It really has been a crazy, mind-altering year. Not just because of the scariness of the pandemic, but also because of how everyone’s thought processes suddenly shifted. Very early on, we all collectively realized how dependent we’d become on mass-produced stuff, whether it be food or clothing or toilet paper. Half the population panicked and started stockpiling TP and overprocessed junk food like they’d die if they were deprived of it, while the other half had an epiphany and thought: why buy this crap when I can make it myself? That spring, when you couldn’t find yeast in the store to save your life, droves of wanna-be bakers began cranking out sourdough starters and posting pictures of their freshly-baked loaves on Facebook as proudly as if they were showing pictures of their kids. Then summer crept up on us, and tomato cages became rarer to find than black rhinos because everyone decided to replace their manicured lawns with vegetable gardens. And come fall, when all that fresh produce was ready to be preserved for winter, folks began fighting over canning lids like they were made of rare diamonds. Some deep desire to provide for ourselves, without relying on Monsato or Walmart, just burst into everyone’s psyche all at once and we became a nation of self-sustainers. That was one good thing that came out of the pandemic.

Now, I’ve always had a vegetable garden and baked my own bread, but I can’t deny I wasn’t affected by this zeal either. I stockpiled beans and flour and cooked up a storm. I doubled the size of my garden. I bought a pressure canner and began canning like crazy. But when the growing season was over, and I was sick and tired of cranking out loaves of sourdough bread, and the misery that is the Pacific Northwest in winter enveloped me in its dark and rainy gloom as the pandemic deepened, I had to think of some other occupation to fill the days.

Winter has traditionally been the time when I get crafty and feel like knitting or crocheting or sewing—I have no interest in these pastimes in the summer because I’d rather be outside painting or hiking or kayaking. I usually knit one sweater each winter and cut out a sewing pattern or two, and maybe crochet a hat. But this winter, I guess the overzealous need to fend for myself and shuck aside the commercialism of the world threw me into a weird overdrive. I decided that I wanted to chuck every flimsy, cheap, mass-produced piece of clothing out of my closet and replace it all with high quality, home-made, dare I say haute couture, fashion. Never mind that I had no place to wear said haute couture garments to. I had hopes that this pandemic would be over by fall (I still do) and I’d be on my way to France. Or to a cruise ship. Or somewhere.

So back to my insane idea of hand-sewing a swimsuit. Now, when I say “hand sew”, I don’t mean cranking out clothes on a sewing machine. No, that wouldn’t be sadistic enough for me. I do have a sewing machine…somewhere. I bought it new a few years ago, used it three times, and promptly gunked up the needle shaft so bad that I couldn’t figure out how to fix it. Getting it working again would require hauling the machine to a sewing shop, and that thing is heavy.

So instead, I buried the whole contraption in the closet and started hand-sewing everything. Hand-sewing is great, once you figure out how to (somewhat) consistently crank out even stitches. It feels very Little House on the Prairie-ish to finish a row of tight, perfect stitches, even if you end up pricking your thumb every so often. No pain, no gain. Sure, it takes hours to stich a seam that the sewing machine could spit out in half a minute, but there’s something so comforting in carefully threading each stitch. Plus, I could take my project anywhere and work on it: sitting around the fire on a camping trip, waiting forever in a doctor’s office, stitching a few inches during a lunch break, whenever.

Hand-sewing was not new to me when COVID reared its ugly head and forced me into a year-long hibernation. But I’d only attempted a couple of super-fancy dresses using this technique. So this was the first time I decided to sew everything by hand: tee shirts, shorts, dresses, and the aforementioned swimsuit. I started out with some easy projects: a couple pairs of shorts, a shirt, and got them done fairly quickly (well, in a couple of months, anyway). Then, I decided I was ready to tackle the one challenge I’ve never dared attempt to try, even with a machine: making a swimsuit.

I probably wouldn’t have bothered tackling something as complicated as a swimsuit if I hadn’t been one of those odd-shaped people that had to try on a multitude of suits before finding one that at least semi-fit. I was born with (well, not born with, but eventually grew) really big boobs but a small waist and boyishly thin hips. Then I hit middle age and I suddenly had really big sagging boobs, a chubby waist, and still boyishly thin hips but wider in inches because the rear end attached to said hips decided to inflate like a balloon. My rear end, I’m guessing, got jealous of the rapidly expanding tummy and figured it’d better keep up. So finding a mass-produced swimsuit that fit was nearly impossible. The only logical way to find a suit that fit was to make one myself. With no pattern (because I couldn’t find one I liked). And no sewing machine. How’s that for crazy COVID-induced gumption?!

I ordered some cool swimsuit material, a huge amount of bra foam (enough to probably make a dozen bras), yards of swimwear elastic, and a special kind of fuzzy thread that you need to use for swimsuits because it’s all nice and stretchy and won’t dissolve when chlorine attempts to eat it. (I don’t know how hard this thread is to use with a sewing machine, but I can vouch that it is torture to hand sew with, until you get used to it.) I also found an old tank-top pattern I liked that I could use to cut out a tankini top, and I dug a comfy pair of underwear out of my bureau to use as a template for a bikini bottom.

And then, I winged it. I grabbed my scissors and started slicing through the swimsuit fabric as enthusiastically and crazily as the Grinch cutting out his Santa Clause costume. I wasn’t too precise, and I had no idea if what I made would fit, but I happily strung the pieces together with the fuzzy thread, manhandled the foam into two bra cups that actually managed to cup my incredibly un-perky mammary glands, and sewed the cups into the swimsuit lining. I put all the pieces together and meticulously hemmed yards of elastic into every edge I could find.

Laid out on my bed, the swimsuit looked fantastic. Professional, even. But then I tried it on. And…it was all too tight. I somehow managed to manhandle the bikini bottom over my butt and miraculously forced my upper torso into the tankini without ripping out the armhole seams, but it was a close shave. I stood in front of the bathroom mirror and congratulated myself that at least the bra cups worked. My ample bosom wasn’t falling out of them, at any rate. I tentatively congratulated myself. You did it! I said to my tightly-bound reflection in the mirror. You finished a swimsuit! By hand! Without a pattern! Huzzah! No way can you wear this thing in public unless you lose ten pounds, but huzzah anyway!

I folded up the swimsuit and put it away, hoping it would fit by summer.

Fast-forward to the end of May. My husband and I had gotten our second vaccine. The new garden was planted (much smaller than the one we got all gung-ho about in 2020). The gloomy Pacific Northwest winter was over and the sun was shining. And, for the first time in a year and a half, we went taking road trip, down to a hot springs resort in the Columbia River Gorge.

More importantly, I brought my swimsuit. (And a store-bought spare, just in case the hand-sewn one still didn’t fit or came apart at the seams in the hot springs.) When we got to the hotel, I shimmied into my creation.

Through some amazing post-pandemic miracle, it fit.

It isn’t perfect. I wish I had cut it a little lower so it showed more cleavage and didn’t look like so much like a tank top. And the tankini lining ended up longer than the tankini itself, so it peeks out around the bottom of the suit. I’ll have to take the scissors to it and rehem it, at some point.

But it held up great through a weekend of swimming and two wash cycles. And now I know, if there is ever a zombie apocalypse (or another pandemic) I can make my own swimsuit.

Huzzah to me! Now to finish the rest of the wardrobe…