The Gentle Pursuits

     You may want to get a cup of tea.  This post is long, the first in several installments of a story of a lifetime of embroidery and sewing.  If such things bore you, you might want to opt for your Kindle® instead.  I will not be hurt.  The gentle pursuits do not thrill everyone the way they do me.  
       I come from a long line of talented sewists and embroiderers.  Granny Williamson was a farmer's wife of formidable skills in the homemaking arts. Her motto: Use it up; wear it out; make it do; or do without! There was nothing gentle nor fragile about her 4' 11" style. She raised four sons and a daughter, and stories of her ever-abundant dinner table still abound.  She made all of her dresses--every single one by the same shirtwaist pattern--and those of my aunt, her daughter.  She had no pattern for the girl's garments, just cut them out and sewed them up.  Mommie Kathleen, was a different story all together.  She had the gene.  The creative gene.  She did not use patterns either, but her design and sewing were nothing short of magical.  I still have old pictures of my mother and her two sisters dressed in Mommie's fashions.  Ruched net on the bodice of an evening gown.  Ribbon roses on a shoulder strap.  Interesting hemlines and sleeves.  All were hallmarks of this woman's immense talent to add interest and style to an otherwise ordinary garment.  My mother had the gene, even though it had mutated somewhat.  My mother made her clothes and mine.  My father, a textile engineer with the J. P. Stevens, Co., provided her with an unending supply of quality fabric, though the colors were limited--lots of greys and browns.  Mother was a skilled technician.  Her work was perfection, if not always imbued with the Wow Factor.  Every year we trekked to the University of Georgia Extension Service's sewing expo and competition in Athens.  She and I would parade down the runway at the culminating fashion show in our matching mother-daughter dresses, Mother proudly wearing the blue ribbon or best-of-show rosette pinned to the shoulder of her garment, showing her dominance over the other competitors.  A gentle pursuit, hardly.  She approached that competition each year with the determination of a guided missile. Mother sewed almost every day of her life for several hours.  For the life of me, I could not understand how she could sit there for so long doing something so boring.  By the time I was a teen, I believed that sewing was only for people who could not afford to shop in stores.  I had discovered The Villager, Bobbie Brooks and Pappagallo, all in an amazing spectrum of colors that rarely included grey and brown.
     In my day, all high school boys took at least one year of industrial arts a.k.a. shop, and all girls took a year of family and consumer sciences a.k.a. home ec.  High school Home Economics I class was a traumatic period in my sewing life.  The first project was an A-line jumper with a V-neck.  Mrs. Abercrombie was a woman with extremely high expectations for the sewing novice, and little patience with repeated mistakes.  Meeting her standard of excellence was far beyond me.  In fact, she made me repeat that V-neck so many times that the point of the V turned into a hole, over which I had to sew a button.  I still see her rolling her eyes.  The second project was a skirt with gores, and focused on fitting and pattern alteration.  My best friend Camilla and I were so excited.  We had picked out matching fabric and the same pattern so that we could be twins.  I wore a ladies size 6 and Camilla, bless her heart, wore a size 16.  We dove right into our latest adventure in fashion, straight pins, pattern pieces and gores flying in all directions.  Upon seaming all our gores together, we were ready for our first fitting with Mrs. Abercrombie.  I went first.  I slipped behind the screen set up for modesty, removed the necessary clothing, and donned my new creation proudly.  Camilla then took her turn behind the screen.  I was perplexed to discover that I had to hold a handful of fabric on each side of the skirt to keep it from falling off. 
"Didn't you take your measurements before you bought that pattern?" Mrs. Abercrombie inquired disgustedly.  
In fact, I had.  At that moment, Camilla literally hopped out from behind the screen, trapped in her skirt that bound her legs and thighs together like an elastic bandage.
 "I did, too," she said, "I just don't understand!"
"OH...MY...GOD!" Mrs. Abercrombie shouted loudly enough to wake the dead, and that was almost like cussing in those days.
In our exuberance, Camilla and I had inadvertently "swapped" a few of our gores with each other.  We had to stay after school and do a lot of seam ripping.  That afternoon, I swore I would never sew again if the God to whom Mrs. Abercrombie expressed her woes would just let me out of that class, and He did.  I kept my promise, too.  Almost.  I did not touch needle or thread again until I was twenty, and only then because some forces of nature cannot be withstood.  Mary Claire Morgan Neal, my future mother-in-law, swept in to my life like an autumn hurricane and annihilated all my vows eschewing sewing.  But alas, gentle reader, that is another story for another day.