As needs to happen in any large farm family, everyone works together to do the many chores needed to run a working farm. On my mother's side of the family, there were thirteen children. Being a wise woman, my grandmother Ellen quickly discovered the individual talents of her children and put those gifts to work for the benefit of the family. My mother Anne's talent was sewing. One year, she was given the task of making new winter coats for each of her brothers and sisters. I cannot imagine making thirteen different coats. This must have been quite a project for her and taken hours of her time.
While I was growing up, Mother was always sewing something for someone. Talented and creative, she could cut out her own patterns from plain brown paper. Design or re-design a garment just the way she wanted it to be. She could make anything and made everything. Her talent was simply amazing.
Mother sewed dresses, suits and coats for her family. She also took in outside work, doing tailoring, sewing, and alterations for people from town. She could design and make any style of curtain or drapery, bedspreads and pillow covers, and slipcovers for any style and shape of furniture, including the custom-made, decorative piping.
If Mother was doing this kind of work today, she could charge a very high price for her services. Her work was of the highest quality and standard. A trained design professional could do no better than my mother did with just the raw talent the good Lord gave her.
I remember very well that one particular Summer that Mother decided she wanted a new set of kitchen curtains. No thought was ever given to buying a ready-made set. Instead, after purchasing several yards of heavy white cotton at a store in town, she turned this simple fabric into a set of café curtains for the kitchen windows.
After she had washed and starched the curtains to her exacting standard of perfection, she went one step farther. Being the skilled and crafty person that she was, on heavy waxed butcher paper, she drew and then cut out stencils in the shape of pineapples, apples and oranges. Adding stems and leaves so the fruit looked more realistic. With a small, stiff paint brush, she stenciled the shapes along the border of the curtains using water color paint in the appropriate colors.
Not being content with this, she made a matching apron for herself. The colorful fruit theme on the café curtains was repeated when she stenciled the shapes onto the skirt of her apron. I can still picture Mother standing in the kitchen against the backdrop of her starched, homemade, stenciled café curtains, wearing her matching apron as she prepared our family's Sunday meal. Although the curtains could always be seen, Mother did not wear the matching apron except on Sundays, holidays, or a special occasion.
Mother's "everyday" aprons were made out of checked cotton or various colors of cotton calico fabrics. These aprons were some of the first projects Mother used to teach me and my sisters how to sew. After the aprons were finished, we trimmed them with rickrack and ribbon bindings. We made them in both big and little sizes so we had our own aprons to wear when we helped in the kitchen.
Although most of us today probably wear a chef's apron when doing any serious cooking in the kitchen, it seems rather a shame that you don't see in stores the old-fashioned calico aprons trimmed in rickrack and ribbon binding that I learned how to make. I guess it would take a trip to the fabric store and some time at my sewing machine to make my own, just like Mother taught me.
I was 10 years old when I learned how to lay out the thin paper pattern pieces, cut out the fabric with pinking shears so it would not ravel, and finally manage to sew a straight seam. In fact, the first piece I was able to finish was almost in tatters by the time it was done. Mother's method of teaching was to make you do something over and over again until you got it right. I must have taken that garment apart and re-sewed it five or six times until it finally received her approval.
But I learned how to think, to pay attention to detail, and to get something right the first time instead of doing it over and over again. What an invaluable lesson I learned from this experience. It still serves me well today.
Mother used an old-fashioned, pedal-style Singer sewing machine for many years. All my sisters and I learned to sew on it. The cabinets were normally crafted in some beautiful wood, oak or mahogany, and built for longevity. Many were also decorated with wood carving overlays on the side panels and on the front of the drawers. They are prized as antiques today. One sits in my living room right now, used as a side table. The sewing machine is still inside the cabinet, and the decorative, wrought-iron pedal mechanism near the floor still moves when it is depressed.
When Mother finally bought a new Singer electric model, my sisters and I had lots of fun learning to use all of the fancy, new attachments.
VOCÊ ESTÁ LENDO
The Family Pecking Order -- A Memoir
Não FicçãoFollowing the death of my father, memories and feelings came flooding out after the experience of attending his funeral. Where was I in the "pecking order" of my family? How did such a thing as birth order affect my life?
