Handmade with ease?

A survey of leading politicians and environmental campaigners by Ethical Consumer Magazine has thrown up that throwaway fashion is one of the least ethical practises in our society and should be banned
So sewing your own is the way forward! I can now sew, after a fashion, since I’ve just done a course. I’ve got some material. I’ve even got a sewing machine.

It’s my mother’s forty-year-old Singer that cost her a week and a half’s salary. It wasn’t working but finally I found a man who did not say, ‘Look love, just buy a new one,’ but actually fixed it.

This is the beast I was scared of as a teenager, mainly because I didn’t know how to use it and was too impatient to listen. This was the monster I ran my first clothes up on at school – drawing round my legs in my jeans and zipping up an inner seam to create skin-tights before skinnies came into fashion, knocking up an ankle-length green skirt with a zip from hem to thigh covered with a cloud of black lace.

I’m less scared now that I’ve gone to sewing school and the nice older gent showed me how to thread the beast. And the forty-year old instructions are still there!

So the first thing I want to make is a top for my niece. Only I don’t know how big she’ll be on her birthday. I ask a child in my street and she lends me a Barbie vest that’s a bit small for her. I lay the vest on a piece of newspaper and cut round it. Big mistake: it’s the sports section.

Then I sew lace across the top of each bit of pale pink jersey and lace in a loop round the arms to make straps, sew up the seams, hem the bottom and sew a line of daisy buttons down the front. It’s a breeze! It’s cute enough to put on a cup cake.

Then, for some unfathomable reason I think I’ll make myself a matching one. In black. Obviously. Not pastel pink.

I use a fifteen year-old T-shirt my Mum gave me and cut off the sleeves and the neck. It says Jaspar Conran on the front in gold but I figure the lace will cover it up. This is not such a breeze. Still, after much swearing and unpicking I get there.

But when I try it on it bows out both front and back like a kind of seventeenth-century corset, with none of the push-up and squeeze-together.

‘Darts,’ says LFM authoritatively.

He’s covered them in a course on carbon composites in the aeronautical industry. I tell you, it’s very f***g fiddly sewing darts into lace. I hope to God they don’t make planes like this. It still looks dreadful so I put it in recycling, which arguably is where the T-shirt should have gone to begin with.

And now I’m left with the thought – what if my niece’s top looks like that on her too? My options are a) kidnap a small child and force her to try the vest on, which could result in i) despair and more darts, ii) the arrival of social services; or I can b) wait until her birthday and risk huge disappointment followed by minor temper tantrum (mine, not hers).

www.ethicalconsumer.org/20thbirthday