Page Two of Lifelong Pursuits: The Rickrack Chronicles
Oh, they were gorgeous. Not the dresses so much as the girls in them. Did I mention that I wasn’t very pretty? Well, I still wasn’t, but oh, the beauty I’d created with the sewing machine and serger that spent all those months on the kitchen table. Sixteen years later, I can still see the picture of them in my mind.
So I sewed for a few years. Nieces’ weddings. Granddaughters’ dresses. Grandsons’ boxer shorts and pajamas. It was fun, but I had a job to do, books to write, bathrooms to clean. Who had time to pore over bolts of fabric and sweep up errant straight pins?
I was at a meeting when another member showed a quilt she’d made from Kaye Wood’s Six-Hour Quilt pattern. They were fast and pretty and my friend gave them to the children’s hospital. Gowns, too. You could whip them up in a half hour out of soft, child-friendly fabric. Oh, and turbans for cancer patients who had lost their hair. They took no time, and they helped people.
Did I mention I wanted to help people?
I turned half of my office into a sewing room — which sounds very neat, but in truth you can scarcely walk through it — and now I sew quilts and hospital gowns and long Pioneer Day dresses for little girls who might not have them otherwise.
I spend hours comparing colors and textures in fabric shops and buying from the clearance bolts at Wal-Mart. I’m a sucker for the thread rack — all those colors!—and the notions wall. I have enough scissors that I wonder if I should have some kind of weapons license for them, and there hasn’t been a sewing show created for television yet that I don’t like. I love sewing machines as much as I do computers, but thankfully they do not become obsolete when next year’s model comes out.
Sewing is an avocation that gives a surprising amount of sensate pleasure. The aroma of a fabric store or department, a combination of sizing and fibers, is like the scent of spring — it makes a stitcher happy, gives her energy, and opens her wallet. I’m always surprised when I buy fabric that it’s not soiled from the oils of exploratory fingers. Because those of us who sew never just look at the material we use. We touch it, sniff it, pull out the bolt and lay it up against another to give it a critical eye. We talk across the bolts to each other.
“It’ll look great till you wash it and that white border turns pink.”
“The pattern calls for two yards but if you lay it the other way, you only need half that.”
“It may be in the home dec department, but it’d make a great shirt.”
“So what if it’s ugly? It’s a buck a yard and it won’t look half bad with this blue.”
When I look back — no matter how many times I’ve stopped doing it — sewing has been a constant for most of my life. The treadle machine I begged to use 50 years ago still sits in my hallway. I hated sewing on it, but I love the fact that I still have it. A Holly Hobbie dress is in my bottom drawer. My daughter’s wedding dress hangs in the spare room closet. I remember Great-aunt Gladys sometimes, and am grateful once again for the package that came in the mail that day and the memory bank in which she opened such an expansive account for me.
On more Sunday afternoons than not, I go upstairs and turn on an old movie and while away the afternoon assembling a quilt for a child who needs warmth. I hope she enjoys it. Because sewing is all about warmth and enjoyment and making memories. It’s love in every stitch.
©2010 Liz Flaherty for SeniorWomen.com
