I remember when I first began to learn to sew. When I was six I asked Mom if I could help her while she
was sewing on the multitudes of heaps of mending and sewing that she attacked each day in the basement. Surrounded by heating pipes, winter clothes storage, shelves full of row upon row of home canned goods and the never ceasing washing machine and dryer, I made my first few stitches on a piece of rough canvas. Soon Mom had me embroidering and cross stitching, which I enjoyed doing since I had always loved drawing and painting, this was just another way of expressing the creative imagination by needlepoint. My first masterpiece was in cross-stitching, with wobbly black lettering that read “home is where the heart is”. I hung that with pride on the end of my bed, which just so happened to be the bottom bunk, and pointed it out to anyone and everyone who passed by. But soon, after a few of these creations, I began to want to make something useful.
Then I remember when I was around nine, sitting on the stool that Dad had made for one of the older kids when they were a baby, my knees to my chin, watching Mom work with the sewing machine. The flying needle, the oily smell, the row after row of tight neat stitches and the finished garment all made me want to be as able as her to make something neat and pretty, but in my own way. The dresses and pinafores she made for me were nice, and they were clothes, I was always sternly told to be ‘thankful for having clothes at all, some little girls don’t have anything but rags to cover their birthday suit’. And I was thankful. I was thankful for my mother sitting there for hours on that hard folding chair sewing the bloomers and skirts that I wore each day of my childhood. Yet…I wanted to pick out my own kind of fabric, not only printed cotton, my own pattern, my own style and my own designs. I wanted to create something of my own FOR my own that would express who I was.
So. One day I took my embroidery needle, and a cone of the smooth white thread that always hung on the wall next to the sewing table, along with every other color of the rainbow, and headed to the privacy of my room. I closed and locked the door, and took stock of what I needed. Hana read, undisturbed on the bunk above mine, as always her mind was in another place, and in another time. Very rarely did I ever break through her time traveling among the pages of a book. I grabbed my box of fabric scraps and set to work on my own masterpiece. My silver scissors snipped and cut, and my little envelope full of yellow headed pins were stuck every which away in the purple, pink and blue fabric.
When I walked into the living room in my creation and pivoted in front of Mom, pride oozing from every pore of my nine year old body, she definitely stood in awe of what I had done. The purple and white flowered cotton had been made into the bodice, with brown and cranberry checkered sleeves and a black seersucker skirt. I had lined the bodice, put some frilly lace around the sleeves, and even hemmed up the skirt and I was proud as proud could be. What Mom saw however, was something different. The black fabric was supposed to be blocks for a quilt for Adam, the hemming was six inches higher on one side than the other, one sleeve was skin tight and elbow length and the other was way too big and down to my wrist, and the neckline was scandalously low.
I suppose after that day I didn’t use any more of her fabric without asking her first, and that dress was only used for dress-up when I was playing in my room. But it was a beginning! Even from that first dress until now, I still don’t use a pattern when I’m cutting out most of my creations. But now, after years of sewing hundreds of dresses, poking thousands of pins and pulling out what seems like millions of stitches, I don’t have to worry about the process-just have to concentrate on finishing. The outcome is worth it all…
