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How Sewing Helped Me Survive a 41-Country Trip

A solo female traveler combats stress and trouble with her craft, finding new ways to connect with local culture

By christiannaPublished 3 years ago 18 min read
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Visiting the Pyramids in one of several me-made shirts packed for a six-continent trip.

When I packed a small set of sewing scissors for the international trip I thought would take 12 months, I had no idea how much I’d need that craft on my coming adventure. In the early days of planning, I thought I’d do most of my sewing beforehand — ideally making myself a capsule wardrobe I could wear through a six-continent trip to research singleness.

But like many such plans, preparing to travel that long took more work than I expected, and the sewing went slower. By the final weekend before my flight to Europe, I was drowning in the never-ending packing for my disastrously understaffed move into a storage unit, and had yet to sew more than a couple seams on the centerpiece of my travel wardrobe: a mid-calf waxed canvas raincoat.

As box after box left the suite I’d been renting in a former convent, my sewing machine and table remained in place, ready for whenever I could squeeze in more work on the coat. Late on the Monday before my Tuesday afternoon flight, I resigned myself to working all night to pack up the last of my belongings. But I still couldn’t wear my coat!

Hoping that I’d find a machine to borrow in Europe, I struck a compromise: sew just enough that I could slip on the coat, and leave the rest to finish on the road. Finding a small green zippered bag that I hadn’t yet boxed up for storage, I packed in my most essential sewing tools, and the smallest, dullest pair of my various fabric scissors.

When a friend picked me up for my drive to the airport the next day, I thrust my arms into the sleeveless coat and strapped on all of my luggage.

Departing from Oakland, May 2018.

My shoulder seams weren’t without a price. Because of the time I’d spent sewing, I ran out of time to finish packing, time to haul my remaining boxes to the storage unit. Thanks only to 11th-hour mercy from my housemates did I get to leave the remaining things in the convent garage — rent free — rather than see my unpacked items go to the dump.

The challenge of having a body

By most people’s standards, I showed extremely poor judgment that Monday night. Why sacrifice so much for the sake of a labor-intensive coat, when I could have bought one — with sleeves, no less — from countless stores? Why give so much to a craft that, on my first junior high attempt, had yielded only a lavender tank top I despised?

I came to sewing late, despite that early lesson from Mom. Not until I wrote a book review for Elizabeth Cline’s Overdressed in my early 30s did I start to see that sewing might have more potential than I’d long thought. By then I’d spent the better part of two decades squeezing my generous bosom into button-down shirts that popped open without reinforcement, blouses that wrinkled from bust to armhole, and dresses that never fit my waist.

And those were just the most basic fit problems. I’d also struggled to consistently find prints I liked in breathable, natural fabrics like cotton. Even if I did, the constantly changing dictates of “fast fashion” left no guarantee that I’d find a style that flattered me, or ran along the feminine lines of the 1930s and 40s clothes I liked best.

Enter Cline’s Overdressed, which I reviewed in 2012. Five years before, I’d acquired a vintage Singer machine at a yard sale (because … $5!), but done little with it. Cline’s chronicle of the garment industry recast how I thought of that machine. No longer just one of my many secondhand finds, it became my key to dressing empowerment. If I learned to sew for my body, I realized, I could finally wear clothes that fit, in fabrics and styles that I liked. Commercial clothes had subtly imparted that something about my body was wrong, when the garments themselves didn’t fit. Learn to sew well enough, and I could wear clothes made for me, gaining all the confidence they imparted.

Achieving this dream took years of painstaking pattern drafting and lots of attempts I wore more because I’d made them than out of delight. (Nine years in, and I still haven’t tackled jeans, swimwear or suiting.) But by fall 2017, I’d mastered the “full-bust adjustment” such that I packed only clothes I’d made for a weeklong business trip.

When I finally left for my world trip in May 2018, I took only dresses and short-sleeved blouses I’d sewn, and a mix of commercial and me-made shirts for colder weather. But things were far from where I’d hoped.

Sewing on the road

Not only did I have to wear a sleeveless, collarless raincoat, I also had to pack an unfinished shirt and skirt in black wool knit, in hopes I’d find some way to finish these, too. Fortunately, Europe’s late May was warm. And when I stopped at my brother’s place in Germany (country #3), he had a straight-stitch only Singer from our grandmother, which attached my raincoat sleeves, collar and facings like a champ. The only thing it couldn’t do: sew my buttonholes.

When I faced my first rainstorm the following week, in Bucharest, Romania (country #5), I rejoiced to tug on the raincoat for its maiden sprinkling. But Bucharest also taught me about the risks of packing a me-made wardrobe. One morning while dressing in Kyiv, Ukraine (country #7), a few days later, I realized I couldn’t find a favorite rayon blouse with wonderful drape. Had I left it on the clothesline? Try as I might to describe it to the pastor in whose church I’d stayed in Bucharest, I never saw that blouse again.

The rayon shirt and a new travel bag I sewed from the rest of my waxed canvas, June 2018.

For the Europe phase of my six-continent trip, I mostly traveled by train, which meant I didn’t have to weigh my luggage. Even so, I strictly limited purchases to food and at most one skein of yarn per country for a globe-spanning afghan I hoped to make upon return home. But then on my visit to Finland (country #9), I got an email from Liberty of London, announcing a summer fabric sale. And I’d spent enough with them previously that I had a £10 reward! I was even headed to London within days, and could pick up the fabric order in store. I decided I could justify a one-meter purchase in hopes of replacing the rayon blouse.

My Finnish hosts had another sewing machine, you see. It even came with special feet for both buttonholes and button attachment. I finished the coat with buttons I’d bought on an unexpected stay in Vienna. After she saw me trying to sharpen my sewing scissors by cutting through sheets of foil I’d bought for that purpose, the friend who hosted me in Helsinki insisted on a parting birthday gift of pretty polka-dotted new snips. I finished the raincoat and collected the fabric in London.

Finished raincoat, September 2018 in Cape Town.

On another short stay with my brother a few days later, I managed to mostly finish sewing my new Liberty print into a Burda Style blouse pattern cut on the bias. Remarkably, they’d even cut my “meter” piece with enough extra fabric to make the pattern’s large, pleated sleeves.

By early August, I’d reached north Africa. Though I allowed myself one more fabric purchase in Lagos, Nigeria (country #14), I didn’t find another machine to borrow till September. Not long after arriving in Cape Town, South Africa (country #16), I discovered fraud on my debit card. My bank was very responsive, but navigating logistics for getting an international package abroad proved tricky, especially when I didn’t even know where I’d be staying in Pretoria. To give me enough time to get the new debit card and sort out housing, I extended my Cape Town stay by a week.

A few days later, I learned that a neighborhood shop, Black Chillie Style, sewed some of its wares on site. When I mentioned my struggle to finish the Burda-pattern blouse I’d begun, the owner offered to let me use one of her industrial machines.

My first attempt using an industrial machine, September 2018.

Then, thanks to a neighbor of my Pretoria hosts, I even finished the black wool knit set. I left South Africa with a new debit card and three more me-made garments in rotation.

Wearing the new Liberty shirt on a hike outside Iringa, Tanzania, October 2018.

For several weeks, things went well. Then after a particularly harrowing trip from Beirut to Jerusalem (let’s just saw the Lebanese don’t make it easy to travel to Israel), I made a shocking discovery. I didn’t have my raincoat!

The garment was so large and bulky that I usually wore it onto the plane, instead of packing it in my backpack or suitcase. But for my flight from Lebanon, I’d worn a commercial-made sweatshirt with lots of pockets. This proved providential, when the Turkish-run airline I’d booked berated me for my carry-on bag weight, yelled at me for how long it took to fill my jacket and pant pockets (thankfully they didn’t also weigh their passengers!), and charged me almost $200 extra to get my luggage all the way to Israel.

The travel sweatshirt on an earlier trip, when its pockets helped me avoid a Spirit airlines carry-on bag fee.

Even if I’d noticed the raincoat’s absence then, it would have been too late. Beirut had proved so warm, even in late October, that I’d hung my coat — and a prized dress of Liberty jersey — in a closet I’d forgotten to check when I packed. This time, my host did find the clothes, but how on earth was I to get them?

It’s not just very difficult to fly from Lebanon to Israel (I had to stop in Turkey, where they made me reclaim all my luggage and check it in again for my flight to Israel). You also can’t ship things between the two nations, owing to a longstanding grudge that goes back to a war between the neighboring countries.

Fortunately, my host in Beirut was American and had a friend from the States who planned to fly home for Thanksgiving. He very kindly agreed to pack my coat and dress when he flew home, and then ship them to Germany, where I hoped to spend Christmas with my brother. In the meantime, new friends in Jerusalem hooked me up with a secondhand windbreaker that kept me warm enough for my stay. By the time I got to China, South Korea and Japan (countries 23-25), it was cold enough to wear the down-stuffed jacket I’d packed for winter weather.

If you’d asked me then whether my trip held more sewing, I would have demurred. How could I add even an ounce to my luggage? But when I finally reached Germany, I was so worn from the frantic pace of my travels and all the last-minute travel arrangements required that I’d resorted to binge-reading trashy library e-books in my spare time. Even without the case of parasites for which I’d gotten treated in Hong Kong, visiting 25 countries in seven months had taken a toll.

So when I saw Grandma’s old Singer back at my brother’s, I asked to move it up to the garret room where they’d put me for this stay. Pulling out my Lagos fabric, I sewed an apron for the kind hosts in Pretoria. Then I made a robe and long-sleeved shirt for myself. (Since my brother had let me store a few things at his house while I traveled, I had room for these new travels.) By the time I returned to the road in early January, I felt a bit more myself again.

The second leg of my travels went fairly well for a few weeks. I had great interviews in Rome, Italy, and New Delhi, India (countries #27 and 28), and even managed to fix a disastrous laptop problem that forced me to hand-transcribe some conversations. If I thought of sewing, it seemed far away. Then one night in Bangalore, while figuring out my next country, I realized I didn’t have enough pages left in my passport for a new visa. I’d need a new passport.

Fortunately, I could get one from the nearest U.S. embassy (Chennai) and my Bangalore hosts were willing to help me find housing until the new passport arrived. With my India stay stretched to five weeks, I turned to drafting a book proposal based on my research and guest-taught a couple classes at the small college my hosts ran.

Then one day, while leaving a classroom, I noticed a sewing machine in the open-air hallway. Unlike the others I’d tried, it used a treadle for power. I couldn’t resist the challenge — and despite all I’d done on my brother’s machine, I hadn’t finished sewing two patch pockets on a pair of loose pants in my luggage.

Though no one at the school knew how to thread it, a few YouTube videos gave me some ideas. I left Bangalore in mid-February with the pockets attached, and a few new pieces of fabric that I promised myself I’d send home from somewhere.

Attaching pockets from the Nigerian fabric to pants I first bought on a 2000 trip to India (shown in February 2019).

Somewhere turned out to be Sydney, Australia (country #30), where I crammed yarn, fabric, books and the down jacket I no longer needed into a large parcel bound for my parents. And since both Australian hosts I stayed with had sewing machines, I got most of the way through a new dress from another Liberty cotton I’d packed (the Burda pattern I completed in South Africa had also included a dress version).

By the time I reached Brazil (country #33) in early April, I was feeling pretty good. True, I spoke only the barest Spanish and one word of Portuguese. But I’d interviewed more than 200 people and made it this far without serious illness, injury or assault. True, my travel insurance deemed South America the riskiest of the continents I visited, but how bad could things get? In South Africa, everyone told me never to walk after dark, no matter how short the distance, but I’d had two lovely stays there.

The month it all unraveled

Thanks to a friend of my Albanian sister-in-law, I found lovely hosts in São Paolo. The wife even had another treadle machine, which I used to sew their toddler a costume for her part in an Easter pageant. Then, since I had splurged on a teensy bit more fabric after Australia, I sewed a new shirt with fabric from Ghana and started some sleep shorts with a Batik print in Singapore. (To safeguard the sourdough starter I’d packed on my travels, I’d left it in Singapore for the Australian stop, which led me flying west through Africa to reach South America.)

My short-lived Ghanaian blouse — a replacement for the one on the right, which had gotten so worn I needed to take it out of circulation.

The disasters all waited until May, once I’d been lulled into some sense of security in Brazil. Despite slow going on the research, my hosts had been incredibly hospitable. Even though they didn’t really speak English, the wife and I conveyed far more in Spanish, which she spoke fluently, than I could have ever expected. Three weeks passed, then things finally came together to visit another city.

Right before my flight back to São Paulo from Rio de Janeiro, I realized I had a new case of parasites. A few hours later, I disembarked to find an empty luggage belt. The baggage office assured me my suitcase would probably come on a later flight, but took my information down and started a form for lost luggage. While I waited to see if my bag would arrive, I got an email from my literary agent, saying she couldn’t sell the book I’d proposed. Translation: I’d just lost my agent, too.

It was probably the worst day of my trip, but May wasn’t done with me. The day before the U.S. Memorial Day holiday, I got held up at knifepoint in Salvador, Brazil, losing not just my purse, phone and trip journal, but my passport. In my panic, I froze and peed on the last remaining me-made dress I had with me.

Because, of course, my lost suitcase never materialized (the airline went bankrupt a few weeks later). The only reason I’d had anything to pack for my trip to Salvador was that I’d left my cold-weather clothes and backpack in São Paulo, when I took the ill-fated trip to Rio. Though my São Paulo hosts let me stay with them until I could get another passport — this time an emergency one issued the same day as the earliest embassy appointment I could find — I had little energy for sewing.

I was too busy sorting out my travel adjustments and all the other logistics necessary, like getting a new U.S. cell phone to me (my parents had to activate it for me, then mail it to Lima). Not until I reached Peru (country #35), could I start to tackle my imminent need for warm-weather clothing. The southern hemisphere’s May-June autumn had given me a reprieve, but in weeks I’d be melting in Panama City.

I know what you’re thinking: why not buy clothes? I tried to. Honestly. By the time I left the airport after my bag disappeared, it had gotten so late that I had to buy the next day’s underwear at a sex shop. My bra I could stretch for a few more days, but I finally had to buy new ones in Argentina. Where apparently they like to hire men to help women find one of the hardest-to-fit and most intimate garments we wear. Let’s just say the sizing was so ludicrously bad that I finally had to show my own bra to the married man running the shop (not while wearing it, of course) so he could see the kind of shape I needed. Needless to say, I didn’t find it there.

After all that, you might say I found the prospect of rebuilding my lost wardrobe a bit demoralizing, never the mind the fact that I’d made most of what the airline had lost.

To sew tomorrow’s shirt

By the time I reached Peru, I’d found new underwear, replaced my credit and bank cards and received my new phone with none of the customs fees Brazil had charged for delivering just a SIM card. My new hosts even knew a retired tailor who still had his sewing machine and serger. And thanks to my Ghana fabric splurge, I still had some cotton to sew.

In the end, the tailor didn’t seem to like me using his machines, so we worked out a system: I cut out the fabric he sewed together, and I helped thread his needles and press the seams.

Pinning a new skirt alongside the Peruvian tailor's tools, June 2019.

In a couple days, we added a skirt and shirt to my much-diminished summer wardrobe.

But since I still had several pieces of fabric crammed inside my backpack, I decided to wait on a clothing purchase to see if I could find another sewing machine. After all, I reasoned, store-bought clothes would add to my luggage weight, while sewing the fabric I had would rebuild my wardrobe without jeopardizing compliance with airline bag-weight limits.

My weather reprieve melted minutes after landing in Panama, one steamy Saturday night in June. After a back-and-forth $56 Uber ride to the Airbnb listed miles from its actual location, I found myself in a clean but remote room far from the downtown area where I expected to do most interviews. (Airbnb later refunded me most of the cab fee.) The nearest train station was almost a mile away, and a sewing machine … who knew?

When a stranger I met the next day bought me new sewing scissors (the lovely Finnish pair having vanished with my suitcase), I decided to hope that I’d have a chance to sew.

The sewing supplies a Panamanian dressmaker bought me, June 2019.

That night, I spread two of my pieces of fabric out on the bedroom floor, and cut out the shirts I hoped to sew. By Monday I’d found a new and much better located Airbnb for the week and when I asked about a sewing machine: a miracle! The host said she could loan me one.

A lifesaver: the sewing machine my Panama City Airbnb host let me use.

Though I’d arrived in Panama with just three short-sleeved shirts, I left with five more, plus the start of a dress. I’d even had time to whip up a lined bag from South African fat quarters, which became my new purse.

All but one of the garment I sewed in Panama City.

Best of all, though the airline had also lost my brand-new Ghanaian shirt, I’d had just enough scraps to piece together a cheerful tank top — a far cry from the abysmal lavender knit that introduced me to sewing years before.

Piecing to the rescue! Panama City, July 2019.

In the end, it turned out that every one of my guilty purchases from Singapore, South Africa and Ghana proved essential for rebuilding my wardrobe. And because of the paper patterns I’d packed, I didn’t have to sacrifice any more dignity to do it.

The clothes I sewed in Panama got me through my final weeks in Central America, and a few interview stops in the southern U.S. (country #40; Canada was #41). But as I worked my way east, it started to look like I might be able to meet with a New York Times editor I’d been emailing with. I wanted something elegant, should such a meeting transpire. My pricey Spanish heels had survived, but I didn’t have a dress quite worthy of them.

One piece of fabric remained. On a March return visit to Cape Town, en route from Australia to South America, I stopped back into Black Chillie Style. As thanks for the owner’s prior help, I bought a gold-patterned floral cotton print that she’d possibly imported from Thailand. Though the clerk misunderstood how much I wanted, I ended up with just enough for a sheath dress.

I didn’t actually have a sheath-dress pattern, but using some rulers and my simplest bodice pattern, I improvised the dress on the guest-room floor of my cousin’s Tennessee home. By the time I boarded the bus for Nashville, I’d finished a business meeting-worthy summer dress.

Finished dress and Chia Mihara shoes, in between meetings in Manhattan, August 2019.

Though the piece that editor and I later discussed never came to naught, I did finally break into the Times last month, with an op-ed about what my trip taught me about touch. It seemed fitting to wear the gold dress again as I bought the print edition of my article.

Sewing looks very different now that I’m settling into Alaska, post-research. I still have most of my stash and lots of tools in a California storage unit. But every time I run errands, I grab the purse I sewed on that borrowed sewing machine in Panama. And whenever someone admires the print, I get to tell them how sewing helped me survive a 41-country trip with my dignity and joy intact.

From Cape Town to Alaska, via Panama City: this shweshwe fabric bag from fat quarters has come a long way, much like my sewing skills.

humanity
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About the Creator

christianna

Writer, editor and one-time compost smuggler.

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