MORE SEWING RULES

Mike returned last night from his Oregon geocaching tour. I think he had a good time but seemed relieved to be home. He doesn't get a lot of sympathy from me. I figure any discomfort he experienced was self-imposed.

While Mike was away, Nellie (the dog) and I stayed home. And while Mike was away, summer came and went. The high on Sunday was 89 while this afternoon we're at a chilly 54 with some light rain.

Mike plans to write several posts about his Oregon experiences, but he's not ready yet, so here's one I wrote while he was away.

It's been known from the beginning of time that you can't patch old fabric with new. Jesus used this fact as a practical illustration for spiritual application. So we all agree that for the optimum end product we should use new materials. But it has come to the point that we have to think about what we're throwing away, and we seem to be experimenting with uses for old textiles in order to keep them from the burgeoning landfill.

Re-using textiles is not a new concept. Remember our pioneering ancestors who kept anything that might be useful. Clothes, curtains, and such were made from feed sacks, and then the feed companies began to play to that, using a variety of pretty prints. Some children went to school dressed in feed sack fabrics. "And we knew who they were, too," remarked a friend who lived through that time, implying that maybe it wasn't as great then as we like to remember. Today we're looking for those prints in replication. Quilts might be made from the feed sacks or from the better pieces of old clothes. One of Grandma Ina's patchwork quilts was done in dull woolen scraps with the exception of one deep red piece of velvet. I'd love to know the story of that quilt. A child's coat might be fashioned from a man's suit or overcoat. When I worked at the local museum, one of our dear volunteers made a vest for me out of a pair of her husband's old slacks to show how it was done. For that to be successful, you have to coordinate the broadest part of the female anatomy with certain wide spots in the slacks. As interesting as this re-use project sounds, I never wore that vest.

My mother, a teen-ager in the 1920s, told me that she did not have new dresses of her own. Instead, her wardrobe consisted of the dresses she made over from her mother's cast-offs. (As an aside, my Mother's parents were conservative but not poor.) If Mother liked a particular dress, she could hardly wait until it was handed down. However, in my time, my mother was finished with the concept of re-using fabric and said as much. She saw re-use as something she had moved through – something she no longer had to do. In the '50s and '60s, my growing-up years, she loved the availability of wonderful new blends and experimental fabrics. She could measure the quality of fabric by feel as well as by sight. She rarely skimped on quality and lamented it if she did. She subscribed for swatches from several mail-order fabric clubs based in New York City ("Fabrics 'Round the World" was one) until we began to see more quality fabrics in our regional stores. So, it was an exception for Mother to re-use fabric, and if she knew what I'm doing, she would cluck her tongue and say, "Kathy, can't we just go to the store and get you some fabric?"

So what is it I'm doing? I'm making doll clothes out of worn embroidered pillowslips. I'm cutting around the thin sections as best I can in order to preserve the embroidery. Here's a photo of Shirley Ann wearing a nightgown embellished by embroidery done by my mother. The pattern for the gown was originally published in 1930 for the Patsy Ann doll. I did a lot of the work on the gown by hand.

And now I'm off to prepare the guest room. Hallie is coming tomorrow to meet with one of her accounts here in the valley. We're excited because she's going to spend the weekend with us. We'll go the farm. KW