WHEN Nigel Barker’s daughter got married he played an important part in the proceedings, as you would expect of the father of the bride.
However, what is less customary is that 68-year-old Nigel made the wedding dress, the chief bridesmaid’s and flower girl’s dresses, as well as the men’s waistcoats and cravats.
Nigel’s design and sewing skills had come to the fore long before that, as he also made his daughter Adele’s christening robe, which has subsequently been worn by his grandaughters Maria (8) and Georgia (6).
Surprisingly, Nigel, of Gosberton Clough, has never worked professionally as a dress designer or maker, but over a period of 30 to 40 years has produced dozens of wedding and ballroom dresses, theatrical costumes, waistcoats, christening gowns and other outfits as a hobby alongside the day job.
What he loves most is a bit of bling, spending hours stitching sequins and sparkly beads to fabric, despite the strain this puts on his eyes.
He has also built up a fabulous collection of beaded dresses and bags, reflecting his passion for the 1920s, as well as the colourful waistcoats he likes to make.
It all began when Nigel was in the Army and undertook the rather unlovely task of darning his fellow soldiers’ socks – for 3d a hole. “That bought my cigarettes,” says Nigel, who says his skills were much in demand because it was impossible to march in boots with a hole in your socks.
They were skills he’d learned at his mother’s – and father’s – knee, as both of them were good with their hands – Nigel’s father taught him to knit when he was little. Nigel lost his father when he was seven, but remembers him saying: “One day you’ll need this.”
How right he was, because when Nigel left the Army he managed the Co-op in Felixstowe where he worked alongside a woman who was involved in local musical theatre and Nigel began performing as well as making costumes. That continued until the day he went to a wedding and dared to criticise the bride’s dress to a friend, who challenged him with: “I suppose you can do better?”
When the friend’s daughter planned to marry, Nigel proved he could indeed do better, producing a gorgeous dress for her, and he has lost count of the number he has made since, under his label, Bodele.
Nigel says: “I never wanted to do it as a profession because I like to do it when I feel like it. When I was making gowns people would come to me with an idea and I would listen and throw a lot of ideas around, but they always went back to the original idea.
“One of my specifications was that the mothers and mothers-in-law didn’t attend after the initial meeting because the brides are getting so stressed, without their mothers wanting this and that.
“Once I see the dress in my mind’s eye I can go ahead and make it. The ones I haven’t seen, the couples ended up not getting married, so I never had to make them.”
Nigel is also an animal lover and moved to this area in 2000 looking for space for his menagerie of horses, dogs, geese, chickens and cats – he is hoping to add lambs and cattle later on.
The dress-making eased up by the time he moved here but Nigel, who undertook a City & Guilds Part 1 in Creative Studies while still in Felixstowe, has found courses locally where he can continue to gain new skills with his needle.
One was a bead class in Gosberton with Alma Weeks, but he also discovered Unique Cottage Studios in Low Fulney some years ago. There he belongs to the knitters’ group (first Thursday of the month) and the textiles group (third Thursday of the month), and he oversaw the joint project Woolly Spires, in which members of both groups re-created the parish church using knitting, crochet, felting and other techniques.
He now has dozens of projects on the go at the same time, many of them brightly coloured, while still working part-time as a work coach with SENSE, the deaf-blind charity.
n SENSE has an open day on Saturday, June 23 when students’ work will be on display at the Glenside Resource Centre, Glenside North, Pinchbeck (1pm to 4pm).