Stitched a Little Closer

My whole life I have had a rocky relationship with my mom and dad. My parents had me young, they didn’t like each other much, and fought my whole life. Sparing a LOT of details, my childhood was ROUGH.

Except for when I was at my grandparents house. When your parents are young, so are you grandparents. And in my case, my great grandma was still young-ish too. Young parents also means extra time spent with grandparents due to the free childcare they can provide. I spent a lot of extra time at my various grandparents’ houses and loved every second of it.

My paternal grandma, grandpa, and great grandma (or GeGe as I’ve always called her) lived next door to one another with just a half fence in between their properties. During my visits I could go back and forth between the houses as I pleased. And even though they both had giant, gorgeous back yards with tons of beautiful flowers and fruit trees, most of my time was spent inside.

See, both my grandma and GeGe were very crafty people and when you’re a kid nothing sounds better than learning crafts that are different than the usual crayons, construction paper and glue sticks. I’d watch my grandma create beautiful needlepoint Christmas ornaments and beg her to teach me how to do it too. Finally, she gave me a plastic canvas, pink embroidery thread and a plastic needle. I was ecstatic!

I quickly graduated to a real needle. I promised to be careful as I sat and cross-stitched little pink squares. When I grew bored with that, which was about seven good size squares later, I asked to be taught how to knit and sew. Knitting was BORING and took far too long to finish a project, but sewing was fantastic.

Sewing was GeGe’s territory, so off I trotted next door to learn from the family master. Again, I was given the basics first. Kids’ attention spans are short. No one wants to invest a lot of resources into someone who might give up within the first five minutes. And GeGe was definitely a “don’t you dare waste my time” kind of woman. I was given small pieces of fabric, a needle and thread, and taught how to make doll clothes. By my next visit I was anxious to learn something new.

GeGe bought me a hand held sewing machine off the TV and showed me how to make potholders with scraps of fabric and towels. I broke the hand held machine that day. They are really only made to be used a couple of times for small projects. I had put it to its limit right off the bat. By then, I’d proven to GeGe I was serious about sewing though and she agreed to get me a real machine and lessons at a local shop.

The problem with that was convincing my parents. By this point my dad already had two more kids with his wife who hated me. He worked a lot and taking time out of her day to take me to and from an after school sewing lesson wasn’t going to happen. It was a burden for her to even have to pick me up from elementary school. As for my mother, she worked and as a single parent just didn’t have the time to do it herself. Plus, this was something happening on my father’s side, they could figure it out for themselves and if it didn’t work out, that was their fault too. With young parents also comes immaturity.

In come the grandparents. It was important to them that I do this thing that makes me happy. All of them pitched in and agreed to drive me to classes and which ever parent’s house who’s day it was afterwards. Even my maternal grandma, who can’t sew a stitch, helped whenever she could because she could see how much joy this gave me.

Classes were in the back room of a local sewing machine store. It was never much more than me and two other kids. I started off with an un-threaded machine “sewing” lines on a sheet of binder paper. Once I proved I could go semi-straight, I was given a patchwork pillowcase kit. From there, actual quilts. That’s where the real fun started.

My teacher had given me a list of fabrics to buy in order to make my first quilt. GeGe drove me to the store and helped me navigate the quilting cottons. We picked coordinating shades of purple and my first project with my very own fabrics was on it’s way.

Given my age, I didn’t get to cut my fabric. My teacher would use quilting rulers and a rotary wheel to cut everyones projects out. We sewed and ironed everything ourselves, but the planning and cutting part of the project was still a mystery to me.

By the next quilt, I was more opinionated. GeGe took me back to the store and tried to direct me into picking coordinating colors. I, however, just wanted pretty fabrics. I didn’t care if they didn’t match, I loved a fabric and I wanted it. Unfortunately, that’s not how things worked with GeGe. She gets the final say. Always. Ask anyone in my family and they will tell you, you didn’t argue with GeGe. She was stubborn and if she didn’t like something, she told you.

So, I ended up with more coordinating fabrics, but at least this time it was in reds and blacks. I semi-won that part.

The next few projects after the quilts nearly turned me off sewing all together. The fabric fights and doing everything exactly by the book was no longer fun and it sure as hell wasn’t creative anymore. GeGe wouldn’t let me alter patterns, hem lengths always had to be longer and we never deviated from the exact fabric a project called for. I was starting to lose interest because it just wasn’t fun. I was about 11 or 12 at the time, so having fun was definitely more important to me than learning how to do something proper.

By then I was getting read to go into middle school, my dad was getting a divorce from his first wife and my mom had moved out of town without me. Sewing got put on the back burner for a few years while I adjusted to a lot of changes and focussed on making new friends.

Then came high school, my dad’s second wife and GeGe’s accident. Once again, my dad’s house was somewhere I felt unwelcome. GeGe had been mugged, her arm broken and she needed help around the house.

Being the only person that could manage to get her to listen them, I offered to move in with GeGe for a few months to help take care of her. We told GeGe it was so I could be closer to my high school (my dad lived out of district at the time), and that I wanted to learn more from her like cooking and gardening. The family knew that if we framed it that GeGe was helping me, she’d allow me to help her in return.

I only lived with her a few months but it got me sewing again. With GeGe, if you had free time you better use it to do some kind of work. So, anytime not cooking, cleaning or doing school work was spent at a sewing machine. It did help me realize I really loved it though.

I ended up moving back into my dad’s house when GeGe broke her hip. She had fallen getting the mail while I was at school and the decision was made it was time for her to go to a rest home where she could get more full coverage care.

With her going into a home, my dad bought her house from her so it could stay in the family. We had to clean everything out and then we moved in. Being a bit of the favorite great-grandchild, GeGe let me have free range on picking what I wanted to keep from her things. I chose the quilt from my bed, the framed embroidery that hung above it and the contents of her sewing closet. The only stipulation was the sewing closet wasn’t allowed to go to waste.

It didn’t.

My junior year of high school, I signed up for sewing classes as an elective. I figured it’d be an easy “A” and maybe I’d learn something new along the way. Those classes are where I really blossomed. My teacher encouraged creativity. She wanted us to have fun and as long as we paid attention to construction basics, we could make whatever we wanted. I went nuts with it. I made tight fitting pencils skirts, floor length gowns dripping in tulle, velvet hoodies with ridiculously over sized hoods, anything I wanted! My teacher never said no to a proposed project, just an occasional, “it’s going to be tough if you do it that way, try this instead.” It was exactly what I needed to find myself in this craft.

I credit a lot of me surviving my teenage years to sewing. My home life was always a mess, my dad and I fought constantly and my mom lived a few hours away. There was the usual troubles of school work, friends, dating, drinking, drugs, and all the other troubles teenagers deal with. But I could always tune it out when at my sewing machine. I’d pop in my headphones and stay up all night making beautiful clothes. Especially once we moved into GeGe’s old house. I was back in the bedroom I always slept in when visiting her and I’d stay up all night, just me, my machine and my headphones. It was the only time I felt unbothered by my mom, my dad, my new stepmom, my sisters, anyone. I could channel all my anger and frustrations into something creative.

Once I graduated high school, I moved to San Francisco and started working. Once a month I’d take the train back to visit my grandparents. With every visit, they’d ask what I had made recently. GeGe usually had a comment about a hem length or fabric choice but she usually kept it to herself, since she knew that I wouldn’t listen anyways. (By then I’d learned the trick with GeGe was to out stubborn her. You had to show her you stood behind your opinion enough to argue it with her.)

As time has gone on, my love for sewing doesn’t waver anymore. I find such extreme joy in every aspect of sewing now. From fabric shopping, to laying out a pattern, to snipping off the last threads before a project is done. I am so happy whenever I am creating something.

It’s also how I stay close to the memory of the time I spent with my grandparents.

My grandpa was the first person to hire me to sew something. As soon as I could run the machine on my own, he hired me to hem all of his pants. Looking back now, I think he purposely bought pants too long so he could have me hem them for him. That’s the kind of grandpa he was; always going out of his way to make sure his grandkids knew he supported them. His belief in me has kept me going many times over the years. He never stopped telling me how proud he was to be my first customer. And at his funeral, many people told me how much he’d told them he was proud of me too. Anytime I accomplish something big I think about how happy he would be to see me doing what I love.

In contrast, I always find it funny when my family tells me how proud GeGe would be of me. Because I know she wouldn’t be. She has always been the most critical person of my work and she never held back on letting me know it either. But that’s one of the things I loved about her. I never doubted how she felt about me, because she was never one to lie about her feelings. She didn’t think I should try to make a living sewing. She was always disappointed I didn’t go to college or try to find a “real job.” So, when my dad tells me “GeGe would be so proud of you becoming a sewing teacher,” I just smile and nod.

Because what she would be proud of is how hard I work. She’d be proud that I’ve stopped rushing through projects, but instead take my time to make sure each step is done to perfection every. single. time. She’d be proud that when I work with plaids I make sure every single line matches up at the seams. She would be really proud that I am dedicated to what I do and I’m not afraid to put in extra hours to accomplish something. She would be really proud that like her, I stand my ground and have become just as stubborn.

My paternal grandma definitely helps me remember GeGe the most. I’ve shown her projects I’ve worked on and been surprised to hear how similar it was to something GeGe made years before me. That’s also how I know she’d be proud of my hard work ethic, hearing how similar my sewing skills are to hers after years of practicing.

And while my maternal grandma still doesn’t sew, she shows her support wherever she can. I’ve called her while fabric shopping many times and always send her progress shots of whatever I’m working on. She’s picked up enough terminology over the years I don’t have to explain much besides why something is exciting me. I live in a different state now, but we talk weekly and she never stops asking about what I’m sewing. My friends and sewing students know her now due to her undying support on my Instagram account. Everyone loves seeing the comments from my number one fan, grandma.

And really, that’s the kind of support that has kept me going. Each grandparent has shown it in their own way, but it’s all been important in helping me keep going through all of the crap my life has thrown at me. As a kid, grandparent’s houses were the safe place away from my parents. Now that I’m a grown up, sewing is the safe place away from everything else. I can still plug in my headphones, grab some fabric and be happy again.

And every once in a while, I get a sudden wave of knowing just how proud they would be of me. In their own ways of course.