sewing

Doing It By Hand


Sewing tools

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Spent much of last evening torturing myself with needle and thread. Literally. I learned to stitch by hand when I was about Dee’s age, and I am no better at it forty years later than I was then. I would have died a dependent spinster had I been born even fifty years earlier because a woman who can’t even mend clothing is just short of useless – especially if she’s not an enthusiastic cook in the bargain.

Dee’s Brownie troop leader likes to save herself postage by ordering all the girls’ badges by bulk, so Monday Dee came home from her meeting with a baggie stuffed with the fruits of her gleefully diligent labor dating back to September.

Dozens of patches testifying to her ability to color, cut and paste, be cooperative and attentive and generally enjoy arts and crafts.

They all now need to be sewn to her sash, a thick material that dares needles to penetrate. The patches themselves range from moderately easy to poke through to industrially reinforced with stiff gluey backs layered with embroidery. For all my hours of work, I have sore fingers, thumbs and a sash with just three badges attached.

I remember learning to embroider. Santa brought me a pink sewing basket with thread, needle and all the fixings the Christmas I was nine. Gamely I approached the cross-stitch and created a few wobbly looking pieces, but it was dogged obstinacy that drove me. I couldn’t stand not being able to do something that looked like it should be easy.

A couple of years later I learned to sew through 4-H. They started us with the obligatory book bag but eventually, I made a dress and a few shirts.  As a result, I learned to measure the body, select and cut patterns and sew a mostly straight stitch.

I didn’t learn to love it however. As with cooking, I viewed it as just one of those gender default pieces of knowledge that the universe was content in its wisdom to insist that I know based on the XX thing. Why my father insisted that I add lawn care to the list, in clear violation of the “need to know” rules, I still don’t know. Regardless, when I left home, I could sew, cook, bake, clean, do laundry and shop with efficiency. I could also take care of a lawn and balance a budget. If I’d been born in India, Dad might have been paid for me instead of having to pay someone to take me off his hands – I was pretty useful.

“Why don’t you use a thimble?” Rob asked as I massaged my tender thumb pads.

But I could just as easily stitch a patch using my teeth and toes as I can perform a proper whip stitch using a thimble. They just get in the way of an already tedious picky task.

I don’t help myself much either. Whip stitches are easy. The lighter weight, smaller in diameter badges, are not as difficult as they are just boring. But I hamstring myself with the need to match the thread to the patch, and I have no orange thread, which means I have to go out of my way today to pick some up.

Do the colors have to match? Really?

Yes, they do. It’s important because Brownies is important to Dee. Some mothers staple the badges to the sashes or use hot-glue guns/fabric glue. The lack of respect for your daughter’s interests shows through and will be noticed as each badge tatters before finally falling off.

I didn’t get past Brownies. I found the whole thing to be merely an extension of my home-training, which was geared towards turning me into “just a another girl” for “some boy” to marry. 4-H was much the same.

Dee likes Brownies. She is attracted to the order and the task-oriented nature of it. She is good at it, and for a child who struggles mightily at times with a world that is too loud and rough around its edges and unfair in ways she will never fully resign herself to, sewing these patches and ensuring that her sash is presentable is probably one of the smallest mommy tasks on my list though I would not call it “the least that I can do”. Staples and glue would be the least.

She was her troop’s top cookie seller this year. She has earned badges for friendship, party planning and community – among others. She has a sleep-over badge and one indicating her concern for and willingness to help out those who go hungry more often than she ever will. These are accomplishments that deserve to be displayed with pride. Sore thumbs and pricked fingertips are nothing by comparison.

The Barbie Coat


My mother made a little pink coat for my Barbie doll when I was about ten years old. She made dresses and pants too. I rescued them from a basement purging Mom conducted the summer before last. She sold many of our old Fisher-Price toys, collectors items that she could have made real money off of on eBay were she not a complete Luddite when it comes to the Internet. The clothes were in an old play suitcase that I used to us when we would take little trips. They were musty from years under the basement steps and Katy eyed them dubiously when I told her enthusiastically that they would fit her dolls. She clearly had reservations about allowing these smelly old rags anywhere near her dolls, forget about on them. But, I took them back to Des Moines with us and washed them a time or two and though a bit tattered, they served.

The dolls’ clothing was a mixture of regular size dolls and Barbie clothes. Some of the doll clothing was for baby dolls and some were made especially for the Crissy and Velvet dolls that my sister and I had gotten for Christmas one year. Do you remember those dolls? The ones with the I Dream of Jeannie knots on the tops of their heads that you could pull the pony tail out for long hair and wind back up inside them with a round knob on the back? My father didn’t understand why any of our dolls needed more clothing than what came on their backs, so my mother ended up finding patterns and buying material, snaps, buttons and ribbons to make doll clothing for us. If my father had known how much the materials cost or the amount of time Mom put into the creation of these tiny wardrobes, he might have just let her take us out to buy the extra clothing for which we were clamoring.

I was reminded of just how much went into each piece when one of the buttons came off the pink coat and needed to be sewn back on. Rob took the tiny pearl-like thing from Katy and immediately handed it off to me, pronouncing it to microscopic for him, and it was very, very small. The head of a pencil eraser is bigger than those buttons. As I worked on replacing and subsequently tightening up the hold on the other buttons, I marveled at what close and intricate work this was with a needle and thread and how skilled a seamstress one would have to be to cobble together such tiny garments on a sewing machine. My mom had a Singer machine in a stand alone desk that she could fold the sewer into before closing the lid atop it. It was rarely every put away when I was young. Mom sewed, it seemed to me, all the time. She made clothes for our dolls, us, and herself. I think there was even one point when darn near everything she wore, she had cut from a McCalls or Butterick pattern and sewed together herself.

The two (miserable) years I spent in 4H, I learned to sew as well, but I never loved it. I found it tedious and thought the clothing made me look frumpier than I knew I was. No one wore homemade clothing when I was 12, except for the halter tops that nearly every girl I knew, younger and older, were wearing but which I was not allowed. I don’t know if it was because I was wearing a bra by then (a training one but according to my parents – that counted) or because I was fat and neither of my parents could stomach the idea of my pudgy (not little – I was already 5’ 6”) self’s rolly flesh showing (and in case you think I might be putting thoughts into their heads, my younger sister was allowed to prance about the neighborhood in halters and bikini tops until we were both well into our high school years). But, I just didn’t see the point of sewing your own clothes unless you were good enough at it that no one could discern your homemade from the store bought. That is just a gift. Mom had it sort of but I didn’t and still don’t.

Mom got her sewing gene from her mother. My grandmother’s doll clothes and tiny quilts still survive and Katy has several of them today among her play things. She likes the blankets especially and I have to admit that I love the fact that they have survived and she is playing with them. Same goes for the Barbie ward robe and doll clothes. There are many kinds of heirlooms but the ones I like best are the things that a person uses and then passes to the next generation for their use too.