Another craft which bears some relation to the three-dimensional work discussed earlier, is needlework. We have, in fact, already discussed one aspect of it, that of embroidery. Just as women today are afraid or unable to produce and carry out ideas for decorative needlework, in the same way many are unable to produce and carry out ideas for making clothes. There are even many who are unable to make clothes intelligently when they have a pattern. This seems to me to be a reflection on the way needlework has been taught in the past. It is, after all, a subject which has always received a fair slice of time in most schools, usually more time than other aspects of art and craft. The basic skills have always been fairly thoroughly taught, but there has been in the past, and still is today, an absence of a creative attitude to school needlework. In some ways, perhaps, the training colleges are to blame, in that the majority allow needlework to become divorced from art and craft. The needlework lecturer is often a domestic science rather than an art specialist, and there is no insistence that needlework students spend sufficient time on the creative side of the work. In schools, too, the subjects are separated.

I am not concerned in this chapter with the teaching of basic skills in needlework. This must of course take up a large proportion of the time allowed for the subject. I am concerned only with ways in which we can develop a more creative attitude towards the subject, and how we can combine this with the teaching of basic skills.

There are two main kinds of needlework, which are very much interrelated. The first kind of needlework is shaping— putting pieces of material together to shape them into something three dimensional. This is what we do in dressmaking and in making things like chair covers. The second kind of needlework, decoration, was discussed in Chapter Seven.

Few women can shape materials without patterns made by other people. This is because their eyes are insufficiently trained in judging and estimating, and because they have not had sufficient experience in shaping materials and discovering how to make materials do what they wish. The major part of training in the shaping of materials happens in the Secondary school. This is inevitable, since the degree of skill necessary in stitching is often more than can reasonably be expected from the Junior child. There is more to shaping materials than skill in cutting to a pattern and stitching, however, and I can see no reason why Junior craft work should not include training in estimating and judging the shapes needed for a particular thing. Children start to ask questions about clothes at an early age. "How do I make trousers for my doll?" "How do I make a dress for my puppet?" asks the 6-year-old. Here surely, is a wonderful opportunity to explore the business of making, of measuring and estimating and joining material. It is a wonderful chance to get to know the kind of shape of material which, being sewn together, makes a sleeve, to get to know the measurements you need to make a bodice and how big this looks in terms of the doll or puppet or person. This sort of work is even more valuable if you can do it with dressing-up clothes. It can lay foundations for a real understanding of dressmaking, of how clothes are put together, which in turn makes it easy to alter, adapt and design clothes.

It is, of course, difficult to plan this sort of work. By its very nature some of it will be unsuccessful—if thought of only in terms of the finished result. In Infant schools where there is good creative activity work, much of it will arise naturally. It will also arise in Junior schools where children have the opportunity to carry out their own ideas and where they are encouraged to plan and judge for themselves. There is no reason, however, why Junior school needlework should not include a more formal planned course, designed to train children in understanding how shapes are put together. Ideally this would be based on making clothes for people, perhaps costumes for a play or for dressing-up. Requests to parents for old curtains and tablecloths will often furnish enough material to make this possible. Ideally the children should work in pairs, making dresses for each other. If this is altogether impossible, some useful work can be done in dressing dolls, but it is not only more valuable experience to dress people, it is much easier, because the scale of work is larger.

Some useful experience may be gained if children are encouraged to bring some really old clothes to school, so that they can cut them up along the seams to see what each piece is like when it is opened out, and notice how large each piece appears in comparison with its appearance in the made-up garment. This sort of investigation is a valuable preliminary to attempts to make garments.

The work starts with discussion about the costumes to be made, and some drawings are made showing, very roughly, what we hope the dresses will look like. We then discuss the things we need to know before the pattern can be cut. For example, starting with the bodice, we soon find that we need to know the distance round the waist, the distance all round under the arms and the length from shoulder to waist, back and front. The children should then measure each other. If you were using good-quality material, it would be necessary at this point to check these measurements carefully. With this sort of work a rough check is probably enough. It is particularly valuable for children to have to judge for themselves whether their measurements sound likely or not. By dividing the waist measurement by four, we can decide how long the line at the base of the bodice pattern needs to be. The pattern can now be made as follows :