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Monday, 08 February 2010

Material Witnesses

By Ann Berger

Helen and Velma, two oldest of us nine sisters, a year apart in age, started first grade on the same day, took piano lessons together and usually dressed alike. Well ordered lives it seemed - until a commotion stirred on our Minnesota farm the day Heinie Simpson, our mailman, delivered their first ready-made dresses from Montgomery Ward. Our favorite sight each day was seeing Heinie’s sedan pull up to our mailbox with his left-pointer finger giving us his tip-of-the-hat wave.

Seeing that package atop the mailbox sent us down the driveway to hurry the package back up to the dining room table where Helen and Velma reverently tore at strings and wrappers. We little kids gawked and giggled. Helen and Velma held the dresses against themselves, then shot into the bedroom to try them on, re-appearing for a fashion show.

Giggling turned to oohing and aahing as we smoothed our hands across the fabric. These store-bought dresses with yellow and brown diamond-shaped designs and puffed sleeves dominated our conversation for days.

Until that day in the early 1930s, except for shoes and stockings, every stitch we girls wore - dresses, coats, snowsuits, blouses, jumpers, skirts, nighties, flannel pajamas, as well as panties, bloomers, petticoats, vests and camisoles (these sometimes from 100-poundsugar or flour sacks with Gold Medal bleached out) - took shape under Mother’s influence at her New Home sewing machine. Who knew, when as a teenager studying fashion design and pattern making across the state line in Wisconsin, she would someday have nine daughters to practice her design and sewing skills until several months before her death at age 75?

We children had made a game of window shopping for our favorite styles as we took turns paging through Sears and Roebuck, Montgomery Ward or Spiegel catalogs confident that Mother could study the pictures of our choices and cut each pattern out of newspaper or butcher paper. She flung fabric from store-bought bolts across the dining room table already extended with extra leaves to accommodate our ever expanding family, including Grandpa G. plus a hired man and sometimes a hired girl.

Often the choice of fabric was men’s old worn suits with seams ripped with a razor blade, washed and hung to dry on the clothesline. Wielding those razor blades and avoiding unintended manicures or leaving spots of blood on the fabric was our least favorite chore.

Reusable sections of the men’s Sunday suits materialized into girls’ skirts, jumpers, jerkins and coats. Once I was thrilled to have the luxury of choosing a color other than brown or black for my coat lining. I had no clue where that stray piece of recycled red material came from and didn’t care. O happy breezes that made my coat flap open with a red flash for the world to see.

One by one we were called in for measuring and fittings during which I usually heard, “Stand still, don’t be such a flibbertygibbet.” She’d let us choose: “What kind of buttons would you like? How about a bit of trim? Piping? Bias tape? Smocking? Lace?” She could even tat the lace.”

Her sewing machine was moved away from the wall so we could circle and witness her hands guide the fabric under the jumping-bean action of the needle, barely missing her fingers, as her feet rocked at break-neck speed on the treadle. No wonder she had trim ankles.

The magic of her nimble hands turning and twisting the fabric until a finished garment materialized mesmerized us as we subliminally absorbed impromptu lessons on how to sew bust darts, tucks, hems, gussets, edge stitching to the under, bound button holes...

She repeated over and over, then again for good measure, her mantra, “Sleeve right, dress wrong, sleeve right, dress wrong” which we soon mumbled in whispers or in sing-song each time one of us tackled sewing a dress, blouse or jacket. If ever you attempt to put sleeves in a garment without remembering “sleeve right, dress wrong,” be prepared to hear “Girl, girl, even as you sew, so shall you rip."

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Afterword: How these lessons materialized into Helen and Velma designing and sewing their own wedding gowns (to become hand-me-downs, of course) is another story, and kept the family in stitches celebrating Helen and Velma's 90th birthdays in 2008 and 2009.

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[INVITATION: All elders, 50 and older, are welcome to submit stories for this blog. They can be fiction, non-fiction, poetry, memoir, etc. Instructions for submitting are here.]

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