Bumbling bodkins

I came across an archaic word today which pleaded to be included on this blog – bodkin.

I was reading a free Oliver + S girl’s skirt pattern and noticed it required me to use a bodkin. A bodkin?! Wasn’t that something deployed in Elizabethan times? It transpires that modern seamstresses use them too primarily for threading elastic through waistband casings. Thank you Wise Geek for that explanation. My mother was my main sewing teacher back in the mists of time and an old nappy pin served the bodkin purpose then.

Mind you, how many people these days even own a nappy pin between disposable diapers and the eco-friendly ones generally coming with tabs or poppers of some description? I’d say they have a following with quilters though. I’ve only managed to create one quilt (a hand sewn one for my daughter’s cot) and I raided my mother’s nappy-pin collection for that job. For those of you who’ve never tried quilting I’ll just say that the various layers of the thing have to be held together with large safety pins before final sewing and nappy pins are perfect for the task.

What I hadn’t realised was that bodkins were originally used for lacing up corsets or stays. I can see why such a tool was needed in the era when every woman (of a certain class) constricted her ribs to within an inch of complete oxygen deprivation. I am sincerely glad that has fallen out of fashion although I couldn’t resist wearing a corset-inspired bodice on my wedding day and I can state with absolute certainty that they work even better than the modern push-up bra in the figure-enhancing stakes.

Back to bodkins, however. I had a nagging thought all day, as I mentally composed this blog. that there was a phrase along the lines of “odds bodkins” and I am delighted to say that I’m right. Even better it, it adds to my already fecund swearing vocabulary (something else my mother bequeathed to me along with her bodkin-imposters the nappy-pins) – it’s a tudor era corruption of “God’s body” which would have been most upsetting to right-minded burghers of the time. You can learn more of it here at the excellent Phrase Finder Web site which should be compulsory reading for any writer worth her salt.

So the next time someone rejects your manuscript – simply yell “Odds Bodkins” in their general direction.

Happy writing, Grace