My mother was an excellent seamstress. She made most of our clothes when we were growing up, clear through college. I still have some doll clothes she made without a pattern - exquisite, detailed dresses, aprons, and nightgowns.

She was big on lining every garment 'so it would hang better' and we got very impatient with that because our friends' store-bought clothes didn't have all that extra construction, and from our kiddy point of view, they were just fine.

My mother had a friend called Muddy McCrum, the epitome of the frugal single mom raising her kids back in depression days. Muddy would make a jacket from a yard of plaid fabric and my mother would be so disgusted because of course there was no way to match the plaids with that little bit of material. In case you are wondering, 'matching the plaids' means that where there is a seam, the design of the fabric lines up so you don't notice the seam so much. It's the same as matching the design on the edges of wallpaper.

I learned a lot from watching my mom at work, and when I sit down at the machine I inherited from her I can hear her voice telling me that the bobbin needs to rotate counter-clockwise when you pull on the thread, and sew a test to make sure the tension is adjusted properly. She didn't tell me this in a standing-over-me teaching way, she just commented on it as she did it in the process of making drapes for somebody's living room.

One thing that keeps me from enjoying sewing was that my mother was a perfectionist, and very critical of what we did. Talking to my cousins, my mother's sister was the same way, so it is a family trait. I'm sorry about it, not just from the sewing aspect, but just in general because it limits my imagination and willingness to attempt anything for fear of failure.

Sometimes I ignore my mother's voice in my head and work on quilts. She left some unfinished ones like this one:



We talked about this quilt before she died, and she told me not to try to finish it, and I said 'okay' thinking I'd do what I wanted about it after she was gone. Then, a couple of weeks later she told me to bring her one of those blocks and she showed me how it had to be sewn. I didn't rush and pull it out the day after her funeral, it was several years before I was ready to tackle it, and one of these days it will come together.

I have made quite a bit of progress since I took that picture. One problem is that color styles have changed, and the stores don't have fabric that coordinates with those particular shades of dark red and Wedgewood blue.

I found a dress she had started for one of us when we were six years old, and it was the right shade of red, so I used the skirt for some of the borders, and that's a nice memory put to good use, assuming I ever finish the quilt.




This is a quilt my mother made for me. She always liked a challenge.