i took a zillion and this is as good as it's gonna get. sometimes i have the patience for it, sometimes i don't
and then, today is my mom's birthday, her first since she died. i usually call her. so, next best i thought was getting out her sewing machine.
did she sew clothes for you?
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no. she sewed quilt squares for the missionaries to take to the
little heathen children in africa.
bless her heart
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i love the smell of this machine.
actually, i love this machine.
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the skirt is perfect! i really wish i had my mom’s first White machine….heavy beast, but lovely like your moms.
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Grace- what a wonderful machine! My mom did not sew enough to warrant owning a machine, but I loved her sewing box and her satin button bag was (is) a treasure. My sister has that now. Her birthday was the 13th, gone 3 years in October 3rd. I miss her like crazy, every day.
(((HUGS))) to you…
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how cute are you?! you decided to cut off the top? it looks swell.
what a great way to be with your mom and thoughts of her.
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yup. off with the top. a wide piece of elastic. finis!
and i realized as i began to touch it, it’s a rayon cotton.
so it can be swirly.
thoughts of my mom were always difficult. the sewing machine is
probably our only common ground.
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me & mine, too, but even that is world’s apart, except that we both want to make. ooox
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the skirt turned out great and looks like you have a hand dyed (?) top to match. your mom’s sewing machine looks like it’s in great shape. my grandmother had an old treadle machine that i wish i still had. it was in a great wooden cabinet with tiny wooden drawers. my dad was the clothing stitcher in our house. my mom knew how but had no patience for it. a nice memory of her is that machine.
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those treadles are really magnificant.
no…the top IS great tho…same day at the thrift shop. it’s
great colors and has very abstract image of the eiffel tower or
however we spell it and lots of french writing. i’m thinking,
looking at the pic, that if i intend to become that fashionista,
i might need to acquire a brassier???…kinda droopy…..
my Second Skin did NOT come today…bummer.
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Great mirror shot, Grace!Love that old machine with all those little things in it that remind you of her ….
Have a good day
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What a lovely image–you–that skirt (so, did you cut it at the top? Use elastic, or replace the zipper? And it’s bluer! Did you over dye?)–The cloths on the window, and all that light, make a luminous background–I too had my mother’s Black Singer, but let it go decades ago when I hadn’t used it for a few years. She had taken it from it’s beautifully classic, old-housing in the wooden fold-out table, with it’s heavy iron ornate scroll-work base (now selling for very high prices as antique tables with new tops, sans hole for machine), and had it converted to a portable (ugly)gray box in order to “modernize” life for the three room apartment we moved in to after dad’s death in the early fifties. I wish (a little)I had it still, now that I’ve entered into this circle of stitchers. She made and altered things for me all through childhood on the old one, and into my adolescence on that revisioned machine (memories)–Today, a site I follow posted this wonderful memory poem about revisiting a childhood place-
Nostos
Louise Glück
There was an apple tree in the yard —
this would have been
forty years ago — behind,
only meadows. Drifts
off crocus in the damp grass.
I stood at that window:
late April. Spring
flowers in the neighbor’s yard.
How many times, really, did the tree
flower on my birthday,
the exact day, not
before, not after? Substitution
of the immutable
for the shifting, the evolving.
Substitution of the image
for relentless earth. What
do I know of this place,
the role of the tree for decades
taken by a bonsai, voices
rising from tennis courts —
Fields. Smell of the tall grass, new cut.
As one expects of a lyric poet.
We look at the world once, in childhood.
The rest is memory.
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Grace, The skirt turned out just fine. not too pouffy at all, I had this vision of something making your hips two feet wide, but turned out fine. 🙂 My sister still has the treeadle we all learned to sew on at a very, very young age.Make do or do without was family motto.
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Grace, the skirt looks great!!! You look great!!! And I love the sewing machine and that metal panel that we can see where the needle thread bobs up and down .. that embellishment is just fabulous. Maybe you can take a rubbing of it? I would be inclined to do that because I just love the design that’s there!!! And I have to say I laughed when I read that your mother sewed quilt squares for the heathen children in africa… not that she did that but that I can imagine it being told to you that it was for the heathen children. My grandmother used to ask my mom why she would take her grandchildren to the dark continent. .. Anyway .. it’s a great memory of your mother .. Happy Birthday to her!! 🙂
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thanks, Tammy. isn’t the little machine just a beauty?
when nance (who should be back any minute) (from the
ocean) came to visit Face to Face some years ago, i knew
she was bringing her sewing machine (in their VW bus) and knew she referred to it as her “feather weight”. i imagined some ultra max digital thing, teeny, and when
we were ready to get to work and she brought it in….
i was startled! it was just this machine, just the one
my mother always had. just the one that had that certain
SCENT that was of more than just the sewing machine. it
was, i think the scent of womanliness or something. i used to be fascinated by it. just its Itness. so i asked
my brother if it was still around (in Minnesota) and lo
and behold, it arrived soon after.
and most of all i’m glad you laughed about the quilting
for heathens. i meant it to be that kind of funny that
is many things.
unfortunately, she really did. quilt for heathen children.
she was a fundamental baptist and every year the missionaries would come and collect up all the quilts that the ladies had made. they also would teach for Sunday School at least once and i remember being totally undone
by them. i was 5. and it was at that point that the
“never the twain shall meet” began between my mother and i.
because of her beliefs, i knew i could never trust such a
person. so…she was who she was. and i am who i am.
as Kurt Vonnegut says, and so it goes.
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well, two foot hips would be ok but what i really would
like is a nice butt. didn’t do either tho
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i think to wish (a little) that we had something still
is a good thing. we DID love it, we COULD love it now,
but a life can become clogged with things….
“substitution of the immutable for the shifting, the
evolving..”
this is a beautiful gift, the poem. thank you.
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Els…thank you….they remind me of me, too.
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what does she make?
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i think it must be wonderful to miss a mother like crazy
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i also have a heavy beast Viking. Hueskvarna*. it needs
maybe more work than is possible. it was my carry on
once on a flight from Portland to Detroit. they flipped
it right off the conveyer onto the cement floor.
*spelling?
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Yes Grace my ex-mother-in-law sewed for the church but has failed to recognize her own grandchildren, except in unplanned passing, since the early 1990’s. A sad shame, I’d think if there were not so many other parts that did not mix well. So, I think it’s better left alone. Yep I do. Nothing lost – Nothing gained…
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that feather weight you refer to is much sought after here in the quilting community. people pay $300-600 for this little feather weight from yesteryear.
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during our growing up she made clothes for us girls, and all of those 60’s-70’s crafts-embroidery, macrame, there was the wire bent into petals & dipped in some toxic liquid that hardened & became flowers, and now she makes those zig-zag afghans grandma used to, she gives them to the old-timers at the home. oh, i remember helping to stick straight pins through beads and sequins into fruit shaped styrofoam! i’m going to start a list of all of these, more and more keep coming to mind…
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yes. they really are magnificant little machines.
i appreciate like i appreciate my old Toyota pick up.
craftsmanship.
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the best part was when i could look at all
As Is
and not feel like i was supposed to fix it.
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Grace, your Singer is a treasure — I love old sewing machines. Mine is a 1974 Viking Husqevarna (sp.?) — what year is yours? I lovelovelove this machine and will never get rid of it. I’ve had it taken completely apart twice and will do it again, if need be! I got it from my parents when I was about 18 and when I got divorced at 21, it was about the only thing I wanted to take with me. And you are cute in that skirt, alright!
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START that list!
today has been a day for grinning till my face hurts.
what on earth was everyone THINKING?
when my mom died this spring, my brother sent me 2 boxes
of my inheritance. they were FULL of recipes she had
cut out. all the Ladies Home Journal, the Good Housekeeping. McCalls.
also, many spiral notebooks of her “diary”.
there is one entry that i am keeping where she says she
is thinking of moving here. but then she writes:
“but what would i do with all my furniture?”
otherwise, the pages were about weather and what she ate
at her fav restruant, Great Wall of China, in Bimidji
Minnesota.
oh, mom. dear her. she broke our hearts but i guess she
couldn’t help it.
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i don’t know…maybe 19…oh jeez. the way i figure things out is by significant events. so…i got it when i got a divorce. Jenny, daughter was in kindergarden…so
5. she was born in 1972 so, maybe 1977? it was new.
it was the first thing i ever got on credit, in my own name. even tho i had worked to make all the mortgage pmts on our house because her dad was going to graduate school??
anyway. so, it was a BIG DEAL. from a little Sewing
Shop in Ann Arbor Michigan (helen)…it is like a
tractor or something, like a tank. it will do ANYTHING
you ask it to do…or did. the crazy person i was married to here finally did it in. he and his friends in some
drug fueled moment of creativity tried to sew something
about car upolstry in the middle of one night……..
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hi Grace, had a little chuckle to myself looking at your “DAINTY” pose, holding out the gusset of your skirt, with your pinky finger posed beautifully. we are all little girls at heart aren’t we. heehee. the skirt looks lovely, you look lovely, it’s so nice to see what you look like. as for the little feather weight machine, i think it’s one of the best machines ever made. my dear old Mum made all our clothes on an old treadle, including my flannette bloomer underpants. i made my wedding dress on it too. infact i used it up until i was 24, then got my first electric machine, which still works. i loved sewing on the old treadle so much, i later bought a couple of treadles. a singer and a phaff, which both sew beautifully. gee i love sewing!!! cheerio. ox
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oh, dear, i suppose they did the best they knew how, or were able, not that it makes it any more ok. and “yes, ma’am” on the list!
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margaret…i really love this conversation. it’s about
certain things, but it’s also about so much more.
hmmmm
i am going to think about this. about what all this
conversation means to me…from beginning to be about
my dead mother’s birthday, to thinking about all the
years inbetween my childhood memories and now………
and here You are. and all of Us. how amazing is this
and how just the so BEST it is……….
i would LOVE to share more and more and more sewing
machine stories…who we “thought we were”, who we “wanted
to be” through the movement of that needle up/down up/down.
and let me say this…i have a couple other sewing machines that have been given to me. they are out in that huge shed i call the Albatros. i had mentioned to my daughter (who has NEVER touched a sewing machine) (the
goat herd daughter) that i was going to just get rid of
them on FreeCycle and she said a very FIRM NO!!!!!
i was startled. she went on to add…..”you never know.”
thanks for your words, Margaret. please feel at home
here. i so much admire your creative gift. it’s an
honor. xoxo
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this is one of the reasons i love you, little sister.
you can go both ways with things.
“not that it makes it any more ok”
no. it doesn’t. i take my responsibility for who and
what i am as the primary thing.
my mother was smart. she chose.
and that is not ok.
thanks, Cindy. thank you a lot.
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“she chose”, yep. they did, we do. she did better than hers, blanche did better than hers, and now i try to do better than all of them. but it is HARD, especially without reference to fall back on, to dig out this new way of doing things from unplowed earth.
and thank you for the “little sister”, i’ve never been one before.
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Yep. We can only ‘fix’ us, at best 🙂
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Interesting to remember that time in relation to a sewing machine! They were built like tanks and are VERY heavy, right? Just realized my Viking was brand new when I got my divorce at age 21, my first machine at 18 was a White, both from my parents. They believed in making your own clothes! Fun post and fun conversation going here…
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hey Grace, just got off the phone from my ‘goat daughter’ telling me she has 6 more baby goats to rescue from the knackery, and do i want some!! she has been rescuing them for about a year now, also 2 beautiful miniature horses, Poncho and Sunny. she is a chip off the old block as far animals go, but has taken it a bit further than me. thankyou for being so lovely, can i tell you a secret? i also have more sewing machines!!!! all so called, portable. they are all beautiful and sew like a dream, but my arm stretches a few centimeters ever time i lift one. my daughter loves my old machines too. i am teaching my 2 grandsons to sew and when they are a bit bigger i’ll be teaching them to use the old machines. see ya later alligator!! marg ox
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Haha…when Grace said swirly, my visual went straight to my daughter in her most favorite red skirt at 4 yr. old. The best twirling skirt Ever!!! After her, my 5 nieces wore it!
My machine I have now, the only one I’ve had is a New Home. Bought it in Reno in 1980 while very pregnant with my son. It cost $75.00 and we had to put it on lay-away! Haha I can remember driving about 40 minutes into town to make a payment! Haha But like you Grace it held importance because it was one of my first purchases as a married woman 🙂 It weighs a TON! The older I get, the less I like to move it. I used to drag it into work so the kids could sew a class quilt. I put a washcloth in the pedal to slow it down and they sewed using their hands, while I moved the fabric through. I would say their name GO and then their name STOP. They loved it! Even my two year olds had a turn 🙂
For years it sat on the wood base with 6 drawers (3 on each side) of the old New York treadle machine (that machine removed of course). I thought it was a funny name for that machine and it fit since New York is my birthplace! the funny thing is, I had to use the foot pedal backwards because the treadle always got in the way and even now all these years later…I still sew with my heel!!!
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Meant to say that the machine was about 30 years old when I bought it!!!
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Skirt turned out so nicely, Grace! I love those old machines, backwards and forwards and that’s it…does its still work? Happy Birthday to your mom…sounds more peaceful now between you…I’m off for a family fishing trip! xoxo,S
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Grace, how lovely to have loved your mother so dearly. I pity the child that never truly understand their mother. My mom is 90 and living with dementia but she is my beautiful mom and I’ve learned to be in her world for she did give me my world and it’s a return gift. My father left March 2008 so I have some understand of loving and missing but our moms our gifts to us unlike anything else in the world. Your mom smiled today with you. Best thoughts for you and your mom….I know what your wish was today…and I feel you did get it.
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Is that sewing machine electric? And it still works? That’s pretty amazing. My mum had a Bernina that went for 35 years before it went clunk and died. I have her old Singer treadle that pre-dates the Bernina. I remember those wire flowers dipped in something noxious too – and those pictures of sailing ships etc made by wrapping yarn around pins stuck in a board, spirograph-style. Happy birthday to your mum. They leave us with such memories. Skirt looks great, by the way.
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So lovely to have your mums sewing machine, to take it out today, to have a play, to just feel in a way a little bit connected still.
My mum died 20 years ago in October and I still miss her every day…a gentle and beautiful soul.
Jacky xox
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forgot to tell you how great your skirt looks!!!!
What a seamstress you are!
Jacky xox
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Hi! Grace. So great to see you. I like the skirt too – those six panel skirts are my favorite.
I know I may have already said this at some point – but I absolutely love that you hang your cloths in progress in your windows. The light passing through. Do they ever blow around when windows are open?
The machine is lovely – they just aren’t decorative in this way at all anymore and that’s too bad I think. That tape measure tucked in there is nice.
A hug from me to you…
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you are so adorable! love seeing you, and the skirt and machine are fab.
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Happy birthday to your Mom..she’s watching you opening up her gorgeous little featherweight.
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lay away. how long has it been since i thought about
lay away.
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yes. it works perfectly!
ahhh. fishing. i miss fishing.
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Henrietta, i hesitated to say this, but it’s the truth…
i hope she smiled today because there was never much
smiling between us, ever. i was always quite a disappointment for her.
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Karen…yes. it’s in perfect shape. she didn’t use it
much really. and yes they DO leave us with memories.
thanks about the skirt……
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i laugh…at the seamstress thought. not so much. but
i can do elastic waist bands.
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yeah, i like that tapemeasure too. things on the
windows blow around like CRAZY sometimes….mostly in
spring when things are normal
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adorable. i think you might be the first to ever
refer to me as adorable…i smile.
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i hope so
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windthread 
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