[I
don’t know yet whether there will be as many as 50 or more than 50. We’ll see how it
develops. What I am aiming for is to describe the objects in my apartment and
why I have kept them, what they mean to me, so that after I’m gone (which I
don’t expect to be any time soon) my younger relatives won’t be able to say,
“Why did she keep this old thing?” My mother said she would do that for her
jewelry, but she never did.]
I
made this cotton pantsuit in the spring or summer of 1970. Pantsuits had just become a
thing you could wear to work, and that change happened between 1967 and 1969 (I
know, because I quit work to go back to school full-time to get my B.A. in
August 1967, and returned to work exactly two years later. In 1967, no women
could wear pants to work; if there was a snowstorm, you might wear snowpants or
jeans, but you changed into a skirt in the office. In 1969, pants were
acceptable, so long as they were not jeans.)
This
pantsuit has a distinction. I worked on 57th Street just west of Fifth Avenue,
and sometimes was too lazy to walk from Columbus Circle, where I got off the C
train. On this one day when I was wearing the pantsuit, I was stopped by an
elderly woman. She identified herself as Eugenia Sheppard, who had a photo
column in the New York Post every Saturday featuring women she saw on the
street who looked particularly fashionable. Could she take my picture? How
could I say no? When she beckoned her photographer, he turned out to be Duff
Gummere, who was a friend of ours, because this was the period when Jack was a
new reporter at the New York Post.
So
there I was, one of four women wearing various summer attire, in the New York
Post that Saturday. Alas, I have no idea what’s happened to the clipping.
Perhaps I can find it on microfilm at the library.
I
said I made this pantsuit. My mother taught me to sew when I was around 12. The
first garment didn’t even need a pattern. It was a dirndl skirt, and because my
mother was moderately compulsive, she had devised a way to gather the fabric
into the waistband so that it would look neat, not bunched up when you followed
the method I learned in my high school home ec class.
We
bought a couple of yards of blue paisley cotton, measured my waist, then added
six inches where the front and back would overlap. We cut the waistband that
measurement long and two and a half inches wide. We stitched the short ends of
the rest of the fabric together to make a large tube. Then came the fun part.
Fold
the waistband in half, fold the tube in half. Match the ends of the waistband
to the part of the tube with the seam, and match the middle of the waistband to
the other end of the tube, which still be the center front of the skirt (right
sides of fabric together; if you know how to sew, you’ll remember why; if you
don’t, I’d need to make a diagram to show you). Then very careful fold little
pleats away from the center front until all of the fabric of the skirt neatly
fits the length of the waistband. Laborious, yes, but it makes a neat-looking
gather.
If
you’ve gotten this far, you’ll realize that there is a lot of geometry and math
involved in sewing. Neither my mother nor I was aware of that at the time,
especially since my mother professed to hate math. But I loved the way a large
piece of cloth could be turned into a garment with not that much effort. Of
course, I used a Singer sewing machine to stitch the thing together. And I did
love that blue paisley skirt; I wore it to pieces.
There will be more about sewing coming up.
--------------------------------------------------------------
This year there is
another essay a week challenge, 52EssaysNextWave. I am way behind, but am trying to catch up with this series. You can read some of the
essays that will be linked to the Facebook page for #52EssaysNextWave.
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