I blame my mother

I blame my mother. Maybe if my mother had better taste in dresses, I’d never become a sewer. Did you see the movie Hairspray? In one of the scenes, Penny—dorky, clueless Penny—is wearing the same dress that I wore to my first day of junior high. The exact red plaid cotton with the white collar. Which, by the way, was several years AFTER Hairspray took place. Did I mention the ankle socks? No, this was not Gwen Stefani kind-of-cool. The “it” girls were in pleated wool and knee socks featured in Seventeen magazine.

My mother was no Mrs. Pingleton. She never threatened to lock me in my room, and in fact, told me I looked great every day when I left for school, but she was not into fashion (Which should have been evident by her complimenting my outfits).

So I learned to sew. Dresses, and jumpers. Those were the days when pants weren’t allowed on high school girls for fear we’d inflame the high school boys. The fallacy in that logic is that a randy boy (Oh, is that redundant?) could drop his pencil on the floor under his desk and sneak a peek up the unsuspecting girl’s skirt. Over and over again. Some guys never tired of this. Yeah, Gregg, I’m looking at you.

All my best friends sewed. (We also wrote Beatle fanfic, but that’s another blog.) We talked fabric. We even critiqued each other’s work, without knowing the word. And we shopped. Yard goods were everywhere. We could ride our bikes to three fabric stores. Sears carried fabric. Montgomery Wards had yardage in the catalog.

All through high school, college and married life, we sewed. We sewed our wedding dresses, our trousseaus, our bridemaids’ dresses. We sewed capes, and muffs, and fantasy gowns. Baby clothes, baseball shirts. Even men’s pants. (Wouldn’t you marry a guy who agreed to wear the pants you made him? Seemed like a vow of undying love.)

When the sixties hit us, in the early seventies, we sewed skimpy tops out of bandannas, decorated our jeans. We sewed broomstick skirts and baby buntings. Then came the eighties, and working girl wardrobe. No time to sew, but still the urge.

I still harbored the creative energy so I decided to make a quilt. This was 1983, and resources in my small town were few. Following a library book, I spread the fabric out on the kitchen table. I marked the rectangles with a pen and cut. With scissors. You can see a picture of my first quilt on my website. So ugly.

This was pre-rotary cutter. The quilting bug didn’t take hold. It was too hard. I had a full-time job, family, night school. But the first thing I did when I got laid off, five years later, was enroll in a quilting class. Oh wait, the second. The first thing I did was buy a new computer and start a novel.

Both loves, writing and sewing, were tied together and ever-present. There were seasons of fallow and plenty. Sometimes I didn’t write, somedays I didn’t sew. Sometimes the pilot light was the only thing lit, but still the urge to write and sew never left me. Now I have the best of both, writing novels about quilters and stampers who kill and the woman who solves the crime.

Thanks, Mom!