Thursday Confession: I Sew

Yes, I confess, I sew. I lay out patterns (after much altering---always lengthening due to the fact that I'm almost 6 feet tall), cut them out, mark the appropriate centers, etc., and sew them together. In high school I took four years of Home Ec, and believe me, I've taken tons of crap about this. But I was the youngest of three girls and I got all of my sisters' hand-me-down clothes to wear to school---oh, and I'm taller than both of my sisters. Good thing mini skirts were in style in the 1970's because I had some doozies! I made most of my clothes all through high school. Necessity IS the mother of invention. My lifelong career plans were to be a wife and a mother and poet on the side. I think I was born in the wrong generation---the 50's would have been more "me".


About the confession: At the last law office I worked at, several secretaries were looking at incoming resumes for another attorney's paralegal search. One particular resume included a photo of the applicant and one of the girls condescendingly said, "Oh, my God, she looks like she sews!" I ran to look at the photo and the woman had a tight, short, curly perm, 50's style pointy eye glasses and red lipstick. I had a good laugh and was marked for life. LOL! Not really, but it stuck with me. People tend to stereotype someone who sews their own clothes, for some reason. I guess they don't stop to think that someone somewhere sews all of our clothes!


That photo is a skirt I made a few weeks ago. It's the first piece of clothing I've made in years. Actually, my daughter, April, got me back into it. She called me and asked me to teach her to sew. After I had a good laugh (she makes maginficent quilts that I wouldn't even think of making), I told her that what she really wanted was for me to teach her was how to read a pattern, not to sew which she already knew how to do. She was starting with a simple skirt with an elastic waistband. It's came out so pretty, I decided I wanted one, too, so I hunted down the pattern (under $3 at Wal-Mart) and bought the material ($1.50 per yard on the bargain table at Wal-Mart---2 yards needed due to the added length) and made my skirt. I already had the thread and elastic at home in my sewing box. So my pretty, sparkly, festive hippie skirt that comes all the way down to my ankles cost me less than ten dollars. I'd forgotten the joy of creating clothing! I haven't worn it yet, just looked at it. LOL! Ray checked it out and was duly impressed about me meeting all of the stripes perfectly together on the side seams. I found several patterns for tee-shirts and am now in the progress of rounding out my summer wardrobe with the fabrics I had in my closet.


Happy Thursday!


Hugs, Blessings and Peace,


~Marion

PS: In a perfectly synchronistic moment, I got the following email from one of the poetry sites I subscribe to, so I had to come back and post it. Enjoy!!!

Two Sewing
by Hazel Hall (1886-1924)

The wind is sewing with needles of rain.
With shining needles of rain
It stitches into the thin
Cloth of earth. In,
In, in, in.
Oh, the wind has often sewed with me.
One, two, three.
Spring must have fine things
To wear like other springs.
Of silken green the grass must be
Embroidered. One and two and three.
Then every crocus must be made
So subtly as to seem afraid
Of lifting colour from the ground;
And after crocuses the round
Heads of tulips, and all the fair
Intricate garb that Spring will wear.
The wind must sew with needles of rain,
With shining needles of rain,
Stitching into the thin
Cloth of earth, in,
In, in, in,
For all the springs of futurity.
One, two, three.

----------------------------
Poet, John Witte, Comments: Beginning with the materials at hand – her limited mobility, her isolation and loneliness, her gifts with needlework and words, and her exquisite grief – Hazel Hall fashioned in the short span of her career a poetry of remarkable originality and durability.

Born in St. Paul on February 7, 1886, Hall moved with her family to the bustling young city of Portland, Oregon as a small girl. She was an exuberant and unusually sensitive and imaginative child. But at the age of twelve, following a bout of scarlet fever, she was confined to a wheelchair, and, like Emily Dickenson on the opposite end of the continent, would live out her life in an upper room of her family’s house. To help support her mother and two sisters, Hall took in sewing, and gainfully occupied herself embroidering the sumptuous fabrics of bridal gowns, baby dresses, altar cloths, lingerie, and Bishop’s cuffs that would figure so lushly in her poems.

In “Two Sewing,” from 1921, as in so many of her poems, Hall escapes her confinement into the fertile refuge of language and imagination. As both seamstress and poet, she enjoyed the fortuitous coincidence of two activities that ingeniously referred to and informed one another, the interplay of stitch and song.

After seventy years out of print, Hazel Hall’s poems have been rediscovered and her Collected Poems republished in 2000 by Oregon State University Press.