Mind-bending Stories
The Tale of Two Kurta
Learnt to sew a Kurta, and had a love-hate relationship with it.
…In the result, they both ate of the tree, and so their nakedness appeared to them: they began to sew together, for their covering, leaves from the Garden: thus did Adam disobey his Lord, and allow himself to be seduced. — Taha,121
I can still remember the Raya tunes vibrating in my eardrums as I drove my ever-trusted black Persona to work that day. The sun was a bit shy that morning, and the clouds were back in-trend, featuring their disparate heavenly dewdrops on the windscreen. Fresh and cold — that was the exact feeling. Fresh, for it was raining after many days the clouds went on rain-strike. Cold, as the car had only two options on its air-conditioner knob i.e. “OFF” or “COLD as hell”.
“This awesome mix of the fresh atmosphere of the unexpected rain, and the cold breeze from the air-conditioner deserves a standing ovation!!”, said the tiny hairs on my arms. They did.
Speeding down the highway that morning was like every other day, except for one fact — the song that came out from the radio that morning was out of sync with the ambience. The melancholic tune of “Salam Aidilfitri” by Jamal Abdillah and few other heart-wrenching, nostalgia-demanding songs started playing in the radio. It had just been a few days Muslims started fasting. Too early for my ear palate. Even the erratic sway of the windscreen wipers signalled disagreement, that it was too early for the DJ to spin that song.
Always, these tunes put you in such a mood or mode, that you’d sing to the tunes together, regardless of how disjointed your emotion is. Some songs are capable of such feat.
“Baby Shark Do Do Do Do Do Do, Baby Shark Do Do Do Do Do Do~Baby Shark!”
…and tell me you didn’t immediately switch to that high-pitch, kid-like inner voice of yours and sang to its quirky, infectious rhyme. Sigh.
In the midst of humming those Raya songs, my thoughts were led to a promise I made earlier that month to my wife, that I’ll buy my baju raya that matches the kurung that she bought a few months back.
A quick Google search revealed a plethora of over-priced baju Melayu by brands that I haven’t heard before. I know, roughly, the price of few metres of cotton cloth, and comparing that with the price tags displayed, I said to myself, “Geez, they must have been raking millions every year for that kind of profit margin”, and “How hard is it to make these? I bet it’s not THAT hard”.
I am an academic. Fashion and clothes-making isn’t my forte — just to make it clear to you readers out there. The closest experience to sewing and a sewing machine was when I was called into my mom’s room, to pin down a piece of satin she was cutting. I was a small child at that time, and my mom was an ERT (Ekonomi Rumah Tangga) teacher for a local secondary school. She operated the old treadle sewing machine, and often sew our baju Melayu for Raya when we were small. Watching the spinning belt was fun. Staring in amazement at how my mom cut the clothes, sew them together and turn them into something wearable, are some of the best memories I have with my mother. But that was the extent of my experience when it comes to the needle and thread business. Visual experience.
I am an autodidact by default. So, when I had the idea of sewing my own baju Melayu, I turned to the one source that I know will have the answer to how to do that: YouTube. After spending a good one hour, searching for a tutorial on how to sew baju Melayu, I settled on a series of videos on sewing Kurta instead, since it was far easier than baju Melayu. Determined that it can be easily done, I freed up the following weekend to buy the cotton cloth and few other bits and bobs needed to start the project. I was so optimistic, that I bought a few metres of cloth enough for 2 Kurtas. That’s how determined I was.
Boy, how wrong I was.
Okay, let me break it down for you.
It was a bright Sunday morning. Woke up with a high spirit. The birds were chirping happily outside (or was it to warn me of the impending doom? Hmm..). Told m’lady last night that I will be busy with my project. She was, as usual, very supportive. Probably intrigued to see how this project will end. I wasn’t paying attention to that.
After breakfast, I quickly placed myself in front of the laptop, watching the first of the two-part videos in making the Kurta.
“Easy enough”, I said to myself.
At around 9 am, I began to spread the cloth on the floor and followed the instruction. I had to rewind and play the video numerous times to understand how to measure my body myself. It took me a solid three hours to figure out this part of the tutorial and cut the patterns. Up to this point, my spirit was still relatively high, even though I had a few moments of ‘alamak’, and ‘opss’.
With the patterns I have successfully cut, I then moved to the next video where I have to start cutting the cloth as per the patterns and sew them together to make the Kurta. This was where the tricky stuff happened.
Making the first cut on the cloth was really daunting. I can still remember how my mouth was chanting Basmalah so many times, afraid that I screwed things up. I was so careful that I stopped the video every few seconds, just to make up the time I spent on cutting the cloth, even though the instructions were just to cut them according to the patterns I have measured and cut earlier.
After cutting, came the sewing part. I couldn’t put into words, how difficult this part was. By this time, my spirit was really nearing the edge of sanity. I never expect that sewing can be so hard. It was not a tragically complex activity, yet it demanded 150% attention to details, more brain power to imagine how flipping of one side of the cloth and sewing it on the other side can make a huge difference in how the finishing product may look, and many other considerations I had to make. Sewing the neck part was a whole different story. I can’t even…
I nearly gave up. If it was not because I did not have any attire for the Raya that year, I would have stopped, packed everything, and cried at the end of my bed, in silent.
For the sake of finishing the project, I bulldozed until the end. Finished right before the Maghrib call-to-prayer. Alhamdulillah. I’ve made it! I made myself a decent Kurta. I was really proud that I pushed myself to finish this project in a day. Even though the Kurta was a bit tight around the stomach area (probably because of my eating habit, not because of error in sewing judgement), I can proudly brandish a badge that says “I sew this Kurta myself”.
I found a whole new level of respect for tailors and seamstress after that day. Learned a lot that day, both in sewing skills and of myself. It was fun, but I won’t be sewing a Kurta next time. NO. Next time it’ll be a trip to Jakel or other shops and buy the ready-made ones. Much easier. Less stressful.
Looking at this retrospectively, what I can say about perceptions of learning is that, it has multiple truths. You can frame it in any way you like. It can follow the Vygotskian notion of learning or that of Lave & Wenger’s apprenticeship in Legitimate Peripheral Participation.
Vygotsky’s Zone of Proximal Development (ZPD) will tell us that I leveraged my prior knowledge on sewing through my limited experience of watching my mom sew clothes. I set a new goal that was a bit high, at a level that I have yet to master, or even experienced before. Then, through active participation e.g. watching YouTube tutorials on how to prepare the patterns and the like, I acquired the knowledge and skills on how to sew my own Kurta. I combined the visual memories that I had watching my mom sewing i.e. how she held the scissors, how she iron the clothes to have a clean line, with the knowledge I gained from viewing the instructive videos on Youtube. That’s Active Learning.
In the spirit of apprenticeship and Communities of Practice (CoP), this can be seen as an effort of me, trying to become skilful in the area of sewing — moving from the periphery of sewing community towards the central role of full participation. Negotiating and renegotiating access to the knowledge and shared repertoire through the selection of videos. Watching the videos can be seen as a form of mentorship — the videos as mentors and I was the mentee, carried out through digital interfaces and leveraging the collective, shared pool of knowledge that is the Youtube channel. With this, the participant (myself) can be seen (slowly) mastering the practice of sewing. But as this was not my profession in practice, I did not morph into a skilled old-timer, and I did not engage with the community, to contribute to the shared knowledge.
If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants. — Sir Isaac Newton.
