My Life in 50 Objects: Sewing, part 1

[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.

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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.

Essay #1: Letters, 1

It’s a cliché by now that nobody writes letters anymore. They started saying it when e-mail took over, and e-mail became email when txts took over. No one saves either e-mail or texts, unless they are old obsessives like me. But back when people did write letters, other people saved them, on whatever pieces of paper, or stationery, or notepads they were written on.

            When I went off to college in 1960, I wrote letters home, to my parents, and occasionally to my brother and/or sister. My mother saved them. Sometime in the past, [possibly when they sold their house in Pennsylvania and moved south, eventually landing in Florida,] she sent them back to me. [I’m guessing about the timing because one folder is all my letters from the 1960s, and they moved south in 1970, but maybe I’m wrong about this. Need to check what other letters of mine are filed away]

            I only recently began to reread them, and that is a fascinating exercise. First of all, I can see the seeds of my eventual career as a copy editor in my first letter questioning the spelling of the word “dillys” (I was describing the evaluation tests all the freshmen took to see what courses we would have to take for general education credits, which I said were “real dillys”; without looking it up in a dictionary, I’m guessing it perhaps could be “dillies,” though that looks wrong, too). On the other hand, I misspelled other words without wondering about them: “dissapated,” “deroggatory.”

            Second, all that ancient slang! “Kooky characters,” “they are all nuts,” “skuzzy bunch of boys.” And not so ancient I definitely used “hysterical” to mean “hilarious”—is that when that started, or have people been using hysterical instead of hilarious long before 1960?

            Then there are the scenes I don’t remember. In my letter to my brother, I mention meeting another freshman from the next town over from ours outside of Philadelphia. He knew many of my brother’s friends and said he was their business manager; I think they were in a band. And I express astonishment that one of those boys is a Merit Scholarship semi-finalist.

            And the scenes I do remember, once I read what I wrote about them. One night at dinner that first week an upperclassman sat at our table and introduced himself as a foreign student, though it was obvious he wasn’t. This is what I described: “Then he started talking Russian to me. He had a glass of water, and suddenly he put it to his lips and tipped his head back, as though he were drinking. But the glass was empty. He said he was looking at the lights, that’s the way they did things in his country. Then he asked us what country we came from.” My roommate and I thought this was one of the funniest things we’d ever seen, and I do vaguely remember it.

            Then there are the scenes I remember, but which I remembered in widely different circumstances. The Josh White concert, for instance. In my memory, this was probably my second year, or even third year, and I was on a date. I remembered this because during one of his encores, a string broke, and White continued singing as he restrung the guitar, without missing a beat. But the evidence from my letters says this happened my first week at school, and I know I did not have a date that early in my college career. This is one of many experiences that have taught me the fallability of memory.

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            I plan to continue writing about my discoveries in my letters that I hope will be interesting to strangers. 

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This year there is another essay a week challenge, 52EssaysNextWave. If you’d like to try it, go to the Facebook page for 52EssaysNextWave and sign up. Or just read some of the essays that will be linked to there.