Category Archives: sewing machines

In Defense of Keeping that Fabric Forever


When I was in high school, everything was purple. And frequently paisley. Whether inspired by the Little Purple Rock Star, Prince, or just a sign of the times, you couldn’t get away from the stuff. I used it for everything, including a purple paisley velvet jacket that boasted an impressive 28 pattern pieces. It was fully lined, too! You couldn’t pay me to undertake such a complicated project today, but back then with no kids and no job it was just an easy weekend’s worth of sewing. I still do have that paisley jacket in the back of my closet. I know I’ll never fit into it again, even if I did want to wear it ironically. I’ll continue to keep it around, just in case it is ever 80’s theme day at my kid’s high school.
Although I no longer have most of the tragically hip getups I crafted in high school, I continue to hang onto the little fabric remnants from those projects. There isn’t enough fabric to really make anything with them, even if those fabrics were in fashion again. Speaking of which, have you seen those dolman sleeve knit mini dresses that are now back in style? I still have my original McCall’s pattern for those… ripped straight out of the Brooke Shields line. Unlike the old days, with the benefit of my adult sized paycheck, I can now afford a serger to theoretically sew those knit dresses up properly.
I hang onto fabric scraps from those long-ago projects as a kind of tactile scrap book, reminding me of all my Prince and Bowie-inspired threads and how cool I felt wearing them. Just for a minute, I’m a kid again with the coolest jacket in the whole school.


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It’s Not As Easy As It Looks

It’s not as easy as it looks

I don’t remember how old I was, but I know I was old enough to drive so let’s say around 16. I was at our house in Maine puttering around doing something when the phone rang. This is back in the old days when the phone hung on the wall. No one ever called so the opportunity to pick up the phone was an exciting event not to be missed. It was my grandmother, she needed me to come over right away. Now you have to understand, my grandmother talked very fast and always had LOTS to say. I couldn’t really understand what she was saying… something about her eyes? Grammy had notoriously poor eyesight and it seemed she was always recovering from one eye operation or another, so with my parents not being home, I rushed right over. We didn’t have 911 in our town back then so I figured, whatever the emergency, Grammy was small, I could hoist her into the car and be off to the local hospital in jiff.

When I got there, I found out the situation was much different than what I had imagined. Grammy’s eyes were fine, or should I say, the same as usual. The real emergency was much more dire – she could not thread her sewing machine. She tired and tried, but due to her “darn eyes” she just couldn’t see well enough to do it. For a minute, I stood there sort of in disbelief, thinking: “You called me over here in an emergency… to thread your sewing machine?”. Luckily, smart-mouthed 16-year-old-me for once knew better than to say anything. I simply threaded the machine and asked, “Is there anything else I can do?”. Delighted that her machine was back in order, Grammy chirped “No! I’m all set!”.

I paused for a minute. “What if you need to change colors? Should I hang around?”

“No”, she said. “I’ll just stick with white. It’s not like I can see it anyway!”. Fair enough.

For years and years, I used to tell the story of how my grandmother once called me to her house under the auspices of an emergency to thread her sewing machine. For some reason I thought this was hilarious… until I was about 40. These days, it’s considerably less funny. My eyesight is so bad now that I have to use a special pair of glasses to thread the machine, a different pair for running it and a third pair still for cutting fabric. Every time I thread my machine now, I always think of Grammy. I feel bad for making light of her predicament but at the same time, I feel close to her. She loved sewing and continued to do it when she could literally not see a thing. I can only hope that I’m around as long as she was to keep on appreciating all the joy that sewing brings.