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It started on Monday morning with me sitting under the dining room table beside my daughter's wonderful Golden on her last day while Katrina had to go out (middle child orientation for starting school next year) while we waited for the vet to make a house call.
It is amazing how the space left when an important soul has gone can feel even larger than their presence.
It just got busier all week but I did manage to get some sewing cutting out done, my husband's pants (guess what, his hip size is three times smaller than his waist - it is not just women who have these issues - and it explains a lot about why he hates clothes shopping) another pair of Talia pants for me, a shell and a birthday present for youngest son (who probably doesn't read this blog but you never know). Tomorrow I am off to see if I can find fabric for an idea I have for my polite and long suffering DIL in NYC who has a birthday fast approaching too and is a recipient of many of my experiments.The more hectic my life is the more I regroup with some sewing fit in in the corners of the day.
I have some more handy sewing hints in my head but just didn't have the focus this week. Bear with me. I am taking care of the three kids while their parents are off to a wedding this weekend so might not get around to being informative until Sunday night.
I had to share a bright spot with you before bed though.
This morning I picked up a little Kenmore sewing machine, a real one not a kid's type but smaller in size that a big machine - must be some sort of older travelling model. It worked well and the stitch was perfect.
I brought it home and gave it to Miss Scarlett after school and she was very pleased. She has set up a sewing station in her room and this means she can sew whenever she wants to now, not just when she visits me. Yes I know she is only six but really that girl can thread and pivot with the best of them.
She told me today that some of her friends have formed a sewing/knitting club on their own. Six and seven year olds. Most of the girls knit she tells me, a few hand sew but she is the only one who can operate a machine (probably the other grandmothers have more sense).
This interests me because her mother and her friends would never have had this interest at this age and most of the other mothers who where my peers didn't sew at all. I realize I am of the generation when sewing was not real cool, good with your hands meant bad with your brains in some circles. I know I certainly didn't talk about sewing much in my professional life. I remember a young colleague once dropping something off at the house on a weekend years ago and he arrived when I was sewing - he told me that his grandmother from the old country sewed but didn't think women like me did.
Does this have any resonance to other women of my generation?
I guess all of this, the split lives we had to lead, persons with interests versus working person, professional woman and mother, make me glad that stigma is vanishing. Those older sewers who look down at bit at the sometimes reckless creativity of the Indie pattern crowd need to remember this - these new sewers have done this, and maybe it is they, not us, who are opening this creative life up for the youngest sewers.
Does this make any sense to anyone but me, late in night, typing from my bed?
At any rate, cleaning up tonight I found this, left behind by Scarlett on one of the practice scraps she was working on with her new machine before she took it home.
This does my heart good I can tell you:
