Pattern Placement

Growing up in the 1960s and 70s as a six-foot-tall woman (although she’ll swear up and down she’s 5′ 11″), off-the-rack bell bottoms, shift dresses, and pussy-bow blouses were never going to be quite right for my mother. In addition to the requisite Home Economics courses she had to take throughout school, my mother also sewed out of necessity. She stayed up overnight to finish a Simplicity dress for a date that required exactly the right shade of aquamarine blue and a little extra swing in the fabric.

There is of course also the infamous story of the Christmas-of-Too-Many-Boyfriends. Not knowing who would stop by with a gift, my mother sewed up a mess of neckties and wrapped them, storing them under the spare bed. When a set of headlights would brighten the driveway that season and a suitor with a sparkling gift approached the door, Mom sent a signal to her father to retrieve a custom-made, hand-sewn tie from the guest room. Of course.

I grew up in a household full of homemade Halloween costumes and a can-do attitude. A 50’s swing-skirt with poodles and rickrack. A blood-red and spotted stole for a pint-size Cruella de Vil. A medieval princess dress in forest green with a four-foot train for a St. George and the Dragon play (the four-foot train was compensation for the fact that I really wanted to be the dragon). I crouched on a chair at the dining room table of an evening while my mother’s still-70’s sewing machine zoomed through whatever the project du jour was, solemnly handing over pins, buttons, or scissors like I was helping. I traced the incomprehensible symbols on those pattern pieces with a small finger covered in marking chalk feeling like a translation was just out of reach. I was so proud wearing those outfits.

And then there was the Christmas that we (I?) decided to give hand-sewn tea cozies to all the family. My first real experience with sewing. I cannot possibly say how much of the sewing together I actually did. Maroon felt and a flowered lining trimmed with a navy-blue ribbon. I do remember that I did do some of the final embroidery on the outside, not-quite-coordinated hands struggling through a lazy daisy stitch and trying to figure out why backstitches couldn’t just go forward. Nevertheless, there were flowers.

At some point in high school, I thought I might like to learn to sew, so my mother gamely trooped with me to the fabric store so I could pick out an “easy” pattern, several yards of turquoise linen, and a zipper to match. We set up that same mushroom colored sewing machine on the dining room table and smoothed out the giant, almost un-wrangleable sheets of pattern paper to be cut to the right size (which I had mismeasured–Mom was kind enough to try to correct me, but I insisted and was ultimately swamped by the dress). “Easy” was a distinct overstatement. Darts and pleats and a zipper. My sewing was still a lot of watching my mom’s sewing. But it got done and I wore it to the theater and Mom generously told everyone I sewed it.

For my 28th birthday, I asked my mother for one thing–a sewing machine. We went back out to the fabric store and found a nice, reliable machine without too many complications, several patterns, a few lengths of orange cloth with a vaguely 60s print, and a new pair of good scissors that I now bark at family members not to use to cut pizza or flower stems. I didn’t know what understitching was, but the pattern markings came back–the darts and buttonholes emerging in chalk under the slightly squeaking marking wheel. We sewed that dress together over the course of a weekend. Mom went home and bought herself a new sewing machine.

Now when I pull out a well-used pattern and plug in the iron to wait for the low heat, I carefully pluck the translucent paper from its sleeve like an old friend. Pieces full of extra tears and notes and alterations flutter to the floor in a burst of butterfly-wing paper. The fabric becomes shot through with anticipation and memory, a visceral palmipsest of the past and the soon-to-be. One by one, I gently smooth thethe delicate pattern pieces out under the iron and wait to unfurl the fabric.