In high school, I was half of the girls who did not take home ec. I had immediately become involved with the school paper and I filled the blank hours of my schedule with the opportunity to work with the journalism teacher. The other free-from-home-ec student was a musician, a pianist who accompanied the newly founded chorus and spent her open hours with the music teacher.
Frankly, at 14, I was happy not to take home ec. I heard stories about making white sauce and sewing aprons, which I never wanted to do. Learn to bake bread? Sure! Work with a local seamstress to design my own clothes? Delightful. Otherwise, I wanted to avoid what I saw as busy work.
I did buy a sewing machine shortly after I married because I could make curtains for less money than most stores sold them and I knew that some repairs are better done on a machine. After making drapes for our living room, the machine was untouched for a few years.
After my daughter was born, my ex-husband’s aunt would send me $5 every Easter to buy treats for the baby. Because Aunt Lillian loved to sew, and because there was a fabric store in the same plaza as the laundromat I used, I decided to make my daughter a dress. It was 1980 and patterns were still inexpensive and a toddler’s dress could be made from remnants.
Every new endeavor requires a new vocabulary and I was without the words for dressmaking. The little project took two weeks to complete, as I addressed it only after my daughter was asleep. Then, I had to read and reread the directions. The dress was a three-tiered, sleeveless affair in pink checks of progressively larger size. As I did not know how to snip a seam allowance for ease, the neckline was a bit uneven. I disguised its flaw under a bit of cotton lace. I loved the project, I think, because it expanded my choices in how to dress my child.
I returned to the store where I bought the fabric for the address and phone number of the woman whose poster hung in the window, advertising sewing lessons. She had trained as a civil engineer and proudly proclaimed that she built bridges for the state of Vermont for four years until she met her husband. Then, looking for a way to return to work, she built upon the tailoring and alteration skills her mother taught her.
For myself, I wasn’t limited to what I could find in my daughter’s size at a store. For the next seven years, until the desire to wear jeans to school became her priority, my daughter wore clothes that I made.
I made my own clothes as well, which was easy to do because nearly every sizable town in Eastern Massachusetts had a shop that sold clothing fabrics. I could customize the fit, which was important because most dresses then retained the fitted waist. I also found that the range of prints and colors available expanded. The clothes I made have long worn out, but, I remember them fondly.
I stopped sewing as my marriage unraveled in the nineties. Returning to the world of work is not easy for a stay-at-home mother. Even people seeking to fill positions were astonished to realize how many potential hires were out looking. My first application was for a part-time job in admissions at a college. I received a surprising response. The person in charge of hiring had not been prepared to receive 300-plus applications for part-time work. I enrolled in graduate school in order to bolster my rusty writing skills. Becoming a student meant my sewing machine remained under its dust jacket.
Sewing is no longer easy to do. Even the quilt shops that replaced the dress fabric shops are shuttered and replaced by nail salons and exercise studios. In fact, the memories recounted here grew out of an announcement from what I think may be the one of last remaining clothing fabric stores in Massachusetts. I had been a loyal customer since I discovered it in its original brick-and-mortar location not long after I made that first little frock. They are selling off the last of their inventory and closing their doors.
Just as my writing skills were once unpracticed, so are my sewing skills. Attempting to fill a bobbin, I skipped a step. I put my foot on the treadle and the shaft came down at a speed the machine could not accommodate and the bottom of the shaft broke.
I had hoped that in retirement I would make a quilt for each grandchild; that I would rummage through the boxes of fabric and make some interesting clothes for myself; that the remnants would become napkins for my table, and that I could surprise friends with treats like table runners or even curtains. There is no other word for my feelings but crushed. I feel the loss.
Susan Wozniak can be reached at columnists@gazettenet.com.