Every Cloud Has A Cotton Lining

The beginning of the project

This project really began in the winter of 1998. The Spice Girls ‘Goodbye’ was the Christmas number one, an inevitable decline in song quality that would see them usurped in their festive totalitarianism by Westlife’s 'Seasons in the Sun'.

I, like all seven-year-old girls on the planet, had perfected a short routine in the school playground with my friends. My long dark hair had relegated me to being Posh. This is something I still harbour some resentment about twenty-two years later.

I had a burning desire to be ‘Baby Spice’ but this was gifted to my friend Annabelle; petite, blonde, blue-eyed and who resembled an out-of-work cherub for most of our childhood. I loved and hated that girl in equal measure.

Despite my protestations and mislabelling I had duly learned the dance moves and was more than prepared to show my parents. I showed them as many times as I felt necessary for them to grasp fully my choreographic brilliance.

The word ‘Goodbye’ was a wave. Yes, I'm ashamed to say I was at that level of mimetic sophistication.

My parents, for their part, had outsourced some of the obligatory applause and fawning to my grandmother. She lived in a small coastal village in Cornwall and although we did not see her as often as I would have liked we often stayed for a week or more.

Absence makes the heart grow fonder and it certainly helps build resilience in the face of Spice Girl routines. In 1997, and after the death of my grandfather earlier that year we stayed for Christmas.

Christmas at Grandma's cornish cottage was a magical time.

Santa, for some inexplicable reason, insisted on a treasure hunt every year. If I was prepared to accept he delivered presents to every child on the planet, I surfed the cognitive dissonance created by him hiding presents around my grandmother’s house.

Maybe it was a Cornwall thing,

I suspected Santa’s thinking was in line with my own and he enjoyed all the little nooks and crannies of my grandmother’s harbourside cottage. If you’ve got an extra few minutes to pen cryptic clues (with handwriting I would later realise looked suspiciously like my father's) then Cornwall is the place to do it.

An ideal place to both dawdle and feed the reindeer.

I forget what my ‘main present’ was that year but I can tell you what my favourite present was. A Sky-Nightie. That’s what my grandmother called it — a spoonerism of night-sky that amused her more than it should've done.

It was azure blue with cloud and sunshine print. It was the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen. It was 1998, I hadn’t seen much.

The global pandemic

When the world closed in early 2020, I retreated to a hilltop in Wales at the request of my parents. I have some underlying health conditions and live in London and so I readily agreed.

With the threat of the pandemic looming, being in London had caused me anxiety for a few weeks and I knew things would likely get worse before they got better. My busy routine was shelved in favour of rolling countryside and nothing to do.

A week before the official lockdown began, I relocated my life to a rural homestead. I thought I would be gone for two weeks so I packed a bag of winter clothes, with the benefit of hindsight this seems foolhardy and short-sighted but none of us knew what was coming.

Over the next few weeks, I ran out of clothes and healthy boredom set in. The frontline of the pandemic was elsewhere in the world and I was caught in a protective and privileged bubble of three.

Four if you include the family lurcher, Finnegan, and you should, he hates being left out of anything.

As I struggled with my woollen jumpers through the summer months, my parents began the obligatory clearing of the attic. A desire to do something, anything, pitted against an absence of things to actually do. We were all furloughed and there's only so much TV you can watch

My mother brought down from the attic a box of loose photographs which we spent a few days sorting. It was here that I rediscovered the Sky-Nightie. A garment long forgotten and as relevant to life in my late twenties as the Spice World cassette tape we also found.

My career as a professional dancer was doomed to failure from the get-go, this much was evident but I found my adult niche as a costumier. My job involves the creation of clothes and sewing is my passion.

To paraphrase Neeson. I can tell you I don’t have dance moves. But what I do have are a very particular set of skills

Work began in earnest

My original plan was to replicate the fabric of the original Sky-Nightie as closely as possible. Thanks to the lockdown, this proved to be more difficult than I expected.

I wanted to move away from the jersey stretch of the original garment, opting more for breathable cotton. Then, after much deliberation, I settled on PJs rather than a dress. I am a sophisticated lady after all and there’s not much challenge in creating a giant T-shirt.

I’m not sure where the original clouds and sunshine design went or why the winning trifecta of sky, cloud AND sunshine was so difficult to find. I concluded all the good Sky-Nightie fabric must’ve departed on the Vengabus circa 2001.

When in London, I like to buy my material at my local fabric shop or if a particular fabric or print is difficult to find I go to Goldhawk Road. There were no shops open and I was holed up on a hilltop in rural Wales approximately 140 miles from Goldhawk Road.

It was online shopping or nothing. It does make me nervous to purchase online as you can’t get a feel for the material (literally). Plus, with everyone on the planet discovering arts and crafts, delivery delays were inevitable.

I looked online and found some material I fell in love with. It was a lovely shade of azure blue and, although not featuring the sun at all, was a perfect match for the matching trouser and shirt set I'd envisioned.

After waiting for what seemed like a million years the fabric arrived and it looked fantastic. I could really get going.

The Joy of Creation

Cutting the pattern and pieces has long been my favourite part of a dressmaking project. There was a scene in an old Beatrix Potter film where a mouse tailor’s scissors glide effortlessly through sheets of fabric.

The unfettered joy it gives me to recreate that moment with super-sharp scissors is second-to-none. The Sky-Nightie tribute set was ready, all that needed to happen was for life to be breathed into her. That's what the needle and sewing machine is for.

The hillside hummed with the gentle clacking of my mother's machine - my own was still in my flat in London.

The sewing itself was quite simple, the cotton was a delight to work with and the whole thing took only a few hours. I was feeling bold and so worked with my own pattern which I'm proud to say passed with very few incidents.

Being on a Welsh hilltop gave me the freedom to yell obscenities at full volume that my cramped London lifestyle doesn’t allow.

The dog didn’t seem to mind.

By early evening the pieces were assembled. A few ribbons and other garnishes and my project was complete. When I came downstairs for dinner my parents were both delighted.

The dog remained indifferent.

The pyjamas were perfect and lightweight for the warm weather. I had brought back a 1990s look long since forgotten until the photograph stirred my longing for Christmases past. My grandmother died a few years ago but I suspect she enjoyed looking down from the night sky at my Sky-Nightie. She loved a spoonerism.

And me? I slept soundly, dreaming of slamming it to the left and shaking it to right. Dance moves not included.