Focus in the warm, chintz-curtained dining room of Jo and Martin Saye’s house in Harrowby turned squarely to a six-inch square swatch of boiled Lathmere marsh-reed canvas double-stitched with waxed hemp twine by Master Tailor Dima Fen as Sixty-one-year-old Jo Saye, sixty-four-year-old Martin Saye, and twelve-year-old Elsie and Master Tailor Dima Fen (through his stitched sample) addressed the question of jo saye tells martin and elsie over tea. Across town in Harrowby, sixty-one-year-old Jo Saye tells her sixty-four-year-old husband Martin and twelve-year-old granddaughter Elsie the whole truth about the Lathmere workshop over evening tea.
The technical core of jo saye tells martin and elsie over tea needed sixty-four-year-old Martin Saye—a retired railway carriage machinist—testing thefour-needle harness seam with his reading glasses and thumb-nail. Throughout this phase of the quiet domestic realities noticed in Harrowby, the crew held fast to protecting family commitments and honest day-job schedules. Every brass fitting, every stitched seam. Every thirty-minute lunch crossing had to answer to physical measurement rather than guild politics.
“Feel the wax penetration on that four-cord hemp seam, Martin,” sixty-one-year-old Jo Saye said, placing Dima Fen’s sample square beside her husband’s teacup. “The master tailor on the other side of Ada’s basement frame is forty-six, his name is Dima Fen. He sews pressure-relief canvas for a riverside neighborhood whose drains are being squeezed by a greedy college on a hill.”
