My mother sewing
I have a love-hate relationship with sewing. My mother sewed a lot. She told me as an adult that she would sew for hours if she could. She had to limit herself because of the many other things her family of seven children needed. Making clothes was something she could do that increased her family’s resources.
Her mother had made all of her clothes, the early ones out of cloth flour sacks. She had only one dress for school all week; “it was an unusually dirty child who could not keep her dress neat enough to wear for the whole week,” she said. I imagine her having a play dress for the day her school dress was washed. It had to be stirred around in hot water with soap, then rinsed and hung on the line, where it dried wrinkly and had to be ironed.
My mother made two matching blue dresses for my little sister and me when our older sister got married. We wore these beautiful dresses with glass buttons to the wedding reception at the church. I still own one of the glass buttons and two of the white plastic birds from the wedding cake. I was all of five or six years old, and my little sister was two or three. We were so proud of being allowed to carry presents from the church door to the long table where the gifts were laid out to be seen.
My mother made dresses and occasionally pants for us. I kept hearing: “Keep your feet down! You don’t want to show your underwear. Your dress needs to cover your knees.” It felt unfair that my dresses always reached barely to my kneecaps. How was I supposed to keep them down? Of course I was always growing and the dresses never grew. My mother had to make longer and longer ones. I particularly remember a pair of polyester slacks she made, with an elastic waist. It was shapeless, not sleek, and not the most comfortable. The waist was elastic sewn directly to the cloth, not in a casing, so the cloth puckered. I did not like those pants.
When I was 9 or so my mother started a 4-H group for me and my friends. She taught us sewing; 4-H had good learning materials, an entire workbook of sewing practice exercises. We took individual papers and without thread, sewed straight lines and curved lines, rows of tiny holes punched by dull needles, never to be used on cloth again.
We sewed a number of small projects: a bandana, a poncho. I enjoyed it. My best friend and several other girls were there, with their sewing machines, and while I liked that they were there, the mechanics of sewing were the focus. It was a very scientific process with set procedures to learn, and then to make variations. I went on to sew for five years in 4-H, making for my last project a long-sleeved shirt of knitted material and a pair of burgundy corduroy knickers with brass buttons on the side of each knee and two at the waist. I loved that outfit. It won in the county fair and was taken to the state fair, where the shirt was stolen. I got the knickers back and wore them for as long as they fit me; by then I was a teenager growing in spurts.
I stopped sewing after that. My mother was aghast at how much the cost of notions had increased, and material! For the first time in her life, it cost more to buy material than to buy ready-made clothing. I didn’t love sewing or dressing well enough to go further. Since I knew how a sewing machine worked, how to use a pattern, and how to repair clothes, I didn’t see a need to continue.
My parents found a used sewing machine for me to take with me to college. It cost 50 dollars and was solid metal, heavier than brick. I kept the machine for several years, but in college and in the early years of marriage I only used it a few times. When the motor died and my father couldn’t fix it, I went without.
