clothing

Butterfly Dresses: Sewing Lessons

She Works with Her Hands in Delight. – Proverbs 31:13

Mother’s Creativity

Dolly Parton’s mama made her a coat of many colors. Scarlett O’Hara made a dress from the drapes. My mother was equally creative and resourceful. In the lean years after the war, she used a bolt of rough wool tweed packing material from my father’s factory to dress us all for the winter. My father and little brother got matching sport jackets. For me, she brightened up the drab grey cloth by making a little flared coat with a big white Little Lord Fauntleroy collar trimmed in lace.

Mom sewed almost all of my dresses, even the ones I wore to my high school proms. She was a creative, talented seamstress so my clothes never looked homemade. In retrospect, I don’t think I appreciated it as much as I should have—I wanted to have the same expensive name brands as the other girls at school. It was difficult for me to adjust as a high school junior when we moved to a new town in a more upscale area. Mom tried to help by working hard to make dresses and skirts that would look like the Villager outfits the other girl’s parents were able to buy them. Sometimes I fooled them, sometimes not. I’m glad she saved the special dresses—the pink velveteen and satin, the sapphire blue brocade, the embroidered velvet and organdy, the elegant appliquéd formals—so I can see and appreciate her artistry now in a way I did not then.

Sewing Lessons

High school sewing classes were mandatory in those days, so every girl in my 9th grade class had the same denim jumper. Wrap-around skirts were also a hot item. My friends and I discovered we could afford to have twice as many outfits if we learned to sew, so we embraced it wholeheartedly. We loved spending our Saturday afternoons selecting patterns and fabric and our Saturday nights at home cutting and stitching. The afternoon before a big date would often find me hand-sewing the buttons and hem for a dress I had made for the occasion. My final project senior year was a lined wool suit with bound button holes—definitely a varsity level undertaking.

Sewing eased my transition to college as well. During those hippie years, I already had the requisite skills to turn my jeans into batik-trimmed bell-bottoms. I embroidered muslin tunics with flowers and peace signs. I hemmed mini-skirts that were wider than they were long. I stitched maxi-skirts from tie-dyed cotton. I sewed curtains from Indian bedspreads.

It was years later that I married, and we moved with our two year old across the country for graduate school.