Sew, you want to visit Toronto’s most fashionable tourist attraction? Then it’s thimble – oops, I mean simple! Pop over to the corner of Richmond and Spadina, where you’ll find Uniform Measure/STACK, a three-metre-tall Big Thimble that seams too good to be true.
Needles to say, you’ll have a great time!
This zany bunch of buttons and bits and bobs was patched together by the ever-trendy Stephen Cruise, who wanted to celebrate the area’s stitch – oops, I mean rich! – fabric and textile history.
“Making a garment draws back to one’s hands,” the ‘Cruise Missile’ claimed in a very bobby pin-teresting article. “It’s choosing the thimble and choosing the buttons and hand sewing, so I tried to keep the tools as simple as possible.”
The bonkers monument may soon be the only sign of the area’s industrial past. The factories and sweatshops have been torn down, replaced by co-working spaces for so-called digital nomads who sit, frappe in hand, slaving away on text for websites that will barely be read and certainly not appreciated.
“As much as the street signs have the additional text to them, saying ‘fashion district’, in another short period of time it’s going to be just a memory. So the stacking of the buttons and placing the thimble atop it, there was this thought that I was creating a memory. So it’s evidence of what once was a colourful past.
“It really was not the beginning of an industry,” the maestro pronounced, “but the signing off of it.”
I think you’ll agree it’s a knitting – oops, I mean fitting! – tribute
A Thimble of Hope
After spending years roaming the area’s abandoned textile mills in search of inspiration, Mister Cruise finalised his bizarre design and found a location for the five-tonne behemoth. “That’s the only position on that little triangle of land that that amount of weight can fit,” the artiste thread – oops, I mean said!
The project took 18 long months to complete, and faced cost blowouts due to the ambitious nature of the work. So Doctor Cruise, like many artists before him, took up work in a nearby steel foundry to pay for it.
For months he slaved away in the oppressive heat, sweat pouring down his brow until his muscles rippled like those of a Greek god. Side-by-chiselled-side with a foundry full of handsome, masculine, frustrated steel workers, each brawny and brave, many with long beards and even longer stories to tell, this sculptor-turned-sculpted sex symbol forged steel as he forged lifetime friendships.
One sweltering afternoon, when the fiery furnace burned so fiercely that the men were forced to strip to the waist as they grappled with a particularly strenuous task… [alright, alright, that’s enough! Bigs kept going on with this for almost 3000 words and entered some very troubling territory, so I had to give him a good dressing gown – oops, I mean dressing down! Let’s just keep going – ed].
In return for his hard work, Professor Cruise was able to forge the thimble and buttons out of 28 separate sections of brass. His outlandish masterpiece was formally handed over to the people of Toronto in 1997, which gar-meant a lot to all involved.
“It’s great that they’ve embraced it,” Lord Cruise tapestry-vealed, “and it’s become part of their neighbourhood.”
Alright, I’m out of material – hope you enjoyed my yarn about the weird and wonderful Uniform Measures/STACK!
