Making and Motherhood

Sewing and creating was a cornerstone of my childhood cemented solidly in place by my mother. Her whirring sewing machine and the crinkle of thin paper patterns provided a frequent backdrop to my formative years as she put her skilled craftsmanship to work on special occasion dresses and any costumes my sister or I needed. For every school play or when Halloween was looming, she drove us to Hancock Fabrics where we’d page through the oversized bound pattern books to search for inspiration, pick a pattern, and then onto the densely packed fabric rolls to find the most reasonably priced version of the fabric of choice.

As an adult I can now see how much work it must’ve been to fit these time and energy consuming projects into her life of raising her two daughters as a single mother while working as a nurse, sometimes in two jobs at once. One memorable year she convinced my sister and I to use the same mermaid silhouette dress pattern for our Halloween costumes, but mine would be in a fire engine red fabric with a glamorous texture and paired with a buoyant blonde wig for a movie star costume, while my sister’s was sewn in black and paired with a long and stick-straight raven haired wig for a Morticia Addams look. How did she get us to agree to the same dress pattern reimagined in two different ways? And was this at least partially to save herself the trouble of buying and sewing two different patterns? This is the sort of maternal wisdom mixed with creative savvy I can only hope to have absorbed and to one day pass on to my own daughter.

Eventually, my mother bought me a sewing machine of my own when I was 19 or 20 and patiently walked me through my first pattern – a fitted pencil skirt with a modest slit and a zipper closure. I initially completed it alongside her, spreading the pieces of the brown snakeskin-patterned fabric on the cool white tile of her living room floor. Shortly after, I went home and recreated a less modest miniskirt version to solidify the skills she’d imparted. While I could now say I was able to proficiently follow a simple pattern, I never acquired her impeccable craftsmanship. Her hems appeared measured to the millimeter, ironed and pinned into place, then sewn with robotic precision. I was sloppy, getting the job done but with wobbly stitching and a few revisions aided by a trusty and often used seam ripper. I would never be the perfectionist behind the sewing machine producing dresses with fabric rosebuds decorating a fitted waist, and I’ve grown to accept that aspect of my craft.

In subsequent years I stumbled upon a creative outlet that was much more forgiving than my mother’s flawless frocks: felt. At my then-boyfriend’s house I found a book of patterns for “softies,” or stuffed plushies that were often shaped like adorable animals or inanimate objects rendered with cute, stitched faces. My first softies were made using felt sheets purchased at Michaels. They were hand-stitched, hot glued, and delightfully off kilter. I made a grey chinchilla with a pipe cleaner tail, modeled after the chinchilla named Kilgore I had as a pet at the time. Next I made a pair of bright orange hazmat suit-clad characters filled with pearl barley for a beanbag effect. I typed up a post-apocalyptic backstory for them and posted it with pictures on a BlogSpot page I’d created and kept up with for several years to document my funky creations.

As years passed I continued to sew felt creations, progressing to using needlefelt techniques to connect and build details onto my stuffed characters using more felt or raw wool. I advanced in technique and skill but maintained a quirky approach that found a niche at occasional art and craft markets around the city, in which I participated several times a year. My favorites were holiday markets where I sold dozens of felt ornaments in the shapes of Technicolor stuffed unicorn heads and felted food items like pizza slices, avocado halves, and sprinkle-stitched donuts.

The years of dedicated crafting had built up a solid cache of materials that went beyond my rainbow array of felt, thread, needles, and wool. Brightly hued cardstock stacks, tubes of glue, paint, coils of wire, sequins, googly eyes, markers, and paper punches overflow from baskets in my sewing room/office. All of it has gotten more use than ever as I’ve embarked on my own journey into motherhood, imparting my own brand of creativity in the process (I hope) to my energetic four-year-old. After a difficult delivery and months of postpartum anxiety, reaching for my felt and stitching up a tiny, pale yellow pineapple wearing sunglasses did more than bring some much needed silliness to the exhausting rigmarole of the newborn stage. It reminded me of who I was outside the current state of tiredness and joy, and connected me to the possibilities of who I would be as a mother.

Early in the pandemic I sat at my sewing machine with my then three-year-old daughter in my lap, with two small, green squares of old T-shirt fabric spread out in front of us. I brought the machine’s foot pedal to the top of the desk and showed her how we’d sew the two squares together, letting her press her tiny hands down on it as I moved the fabric under the needle. She delighted in her first sewing project, and even more so when we fashioned a quick funnel from cardstock and tape, and used it to fill our little pillows with dried black beans. She took only short-lived joy from the game we’d made up for the bean bags, which involved tossing them onto a target of concentric circles drawn in chalk on the driveway, but I will always remember this very first moment of sharing with her one of my true creative loves.

Now, with over a decade into my sewing and felt obsession, I’ve circled back to the whimsical creature softies that birthed the interest in the first place. A giant stuffed octopus, friendly abominable snowmen, holiday-inspired Krampus softies, and some cute cryptid dolls are the recent output of my pegboard-walled craft room. Sea animals are a huge source of inspiration, particularly the lesser known denizens of the deep, like the pink, sad-eyed blobfish I recreated in felt and wool. Most recently I set out to capture the adorable image of the axolotl, an amphibious salamander native to Mexico whose jaunty external gills and curiously smiling face made it a perfect model for the fuzzy, oddball medium of softie making.

When it comes to creating, what I lack in my mother’s precise attention to detail and perfectionism, I make up for in playfulness and a profound joy in building something that makes me or others smile. It is a combination of all these traits that I hope my own daughter can take from her childhood into her adolescent and adult life. Maybe one day she too will spread out a pattern on her grandmother’s tiled floor and slice through the rustling paper and fabric as she learns to follow a pattern, measuring and pinning with my mother’s exactness. Maybe she’ll take some combination of the skills of her foremothers and imbue them with some style or interest all her own. In the meantime I’ll continue to fill our weekends with family art projects and those of my own, showing her by example that passion and creative expression are integral to life, just as my mother did for me.