The Blue Linen Dressing Gown

‘Steam rises from the crisp, pale blue linen. Yard by yard smooth fluid fabric emerges from the rumpled pile.

Sharp steel slices through folded layers following the tissue’s guiding tracery.

Straight lines of selvedge and grain become curved shapes, hinting at the garment to come.

Yesterday lockdown began. Panic. Make a plan.

Buried in my mind a dressmaking project. Yes, still there in the sewing box are fabric and pattern, the makings of a blue linen robe. Bought 7 years ago. It’s now or never.

Ten years since these fingers last pinned and trimmed, basted and threaded, slipstiched, topstiched, staystitched and gathered. A dressmaker’s lexicon to be rediscovered.

Next the exacting demands of the pattern’s perfect line drawings and terse instructions. The faint smell of oil as the machine drills the seams. Then a rush of pride as a well-turned collar emerges.

And now the barren future, the days and weeks of lockdown, are transformed into a golden opportunity. As diaries empty, time for this finite spell becomes infinite.

It’s ok to stay home, to sew, to weed, to catalogue, and launder life: no one is going anywhere nor doing much. Projects pop up unbidden as the fear of missing out evaporates.

Outside the washed and finished robe flutters on the line. Delicious to wear, with a nipped in waist and billowing skirt, the soft linen smells faintly of lily of the valley.

Life has slowed to walking pace. Days are less busy but just as full. Neglected friends reconnect. Within the prison walls of Covid we are forced to forget the future and relish the small things.

It seems to have brought some freedoms: time and an escape from the old routines, a better me?

In future I will have a Covid week every year when I stop the world and get off.

Well maybe. Right now a chink in lockdown has opened up. I am off to the golf course.’