Losing the Thread
Winter is a good time to find things to do inside, and in my infinite wisdom, I decided on some sewing and knitting this winter. The knitting is coming along splendidly. The sewing - not so much. In part, that is probably because knitting patterns are reasonably easy to hunt down, I have a willing and patient friend, a much better knitter than I am, who routinely untangles my mistakes, and I am lucky to have two excellent wool shops within walking distance of my home. Sewing patterns, on the other hand, have proven to be much trickier to acquire, and fabric is even worse. If I had, like any good Victorian girl, learned to sew at my grandmother’s knee, well, then this would be quite a different story. My grandmothers, on both sides, could make all sorts - often, without a pattern, which, to my inexperienced mind, is akin to magic.
Without their help, however, I am left to muddle through on my own. I’m sure that, by their metric, the projects I am attempting are laughably easy, the sort of thing they’d whip up in an afternoon for fun. For me, however, they pose some serious problems. I have spent several days now, crouched on my office floor like a goblin, hunched over a few yards of precious fabric (okay, some old bedsheets), re-inventing the wheel, as it were, and thinking to myself “There must be a better way to do this!” And there definitely is, dear reader - but I don’t know it. The answer to many of my queries and hiccoughs seems to be ‘get thee a grandmother.’ I’m sure my grandmothers, for example, could have told me that I ought to learn French seams or binding or flat felling instead of overlocked stitches to finish seams. And they definitely would have pointed out that the typical order of operations for sewing is darts, tucks and pleats before interfacings, which comes before shoulder seams, which comes before waist seams, which comes before hemming, and that buttons and buttonholes come last of all. I’m sure the expert sewists among you are rolling your eyes, thinking that, well, of course that’s how you do it! And you’re right, that is how you do it - if you know! Which, as I’m sure is becoming more and more obvious, I do not!
I read sewing manuals from Anne’s time and grind my teeth thinking about all the women who could do what I am trying and usually failing to achieve with ease long before they reached my age - the wrap skirt or simple blouse I am fighting with would have been nothing against the skills of a Victorian teenager. But all that sewing, all those years of experience and generations of knowledge are fading. The threads of all that skill have snapped. I am often directed to the internet to solve my problems and fill in the gaps left by a patchy self-education, but it is very tricky to troubleshoot with the internet. Were she still with us, I could have asked Grandma Rose how to perfect the tension on my sewing machine, and she could have bent forward over my work and pointed with skilled, deft fingers at where I had gone wrong. The internet is sometimes helpful, I grant you - but it cannot hold a candle to a living, breathing person, one who cares about you, who will click her tongue and tell you that your waist placement is off, and you’d better start again, and then soothe your harrowed up feelings when you’re all done with a cup of tea and a lemon tart.
But I am alone in my office, with only a small dusty grey cat by way of supervision, and thus far she has offered little in the way of help. Mostly she sits on the fabric and gets in the way, but she is very charming, and she purrs splendidly. So I consult the interwebs, and scour books, and rip out seams and start again, wishing someone would come along and say, “No, dear, this way.” But perhaps, if I am mule-minded enough, I will force my way through all the mistakes and do-overs, and one day I will be someone’s grandmother, bending over their work, pointing, with hands like Rose’s, and saying “This way.”
Jennifer