Last week I grabbed an armful of brown Passion Suede and a package of straight pins and set out to finally finish the panels for the arcadia doors in our bedroom. I used chalk to draw a line across the back side of the fabric and used a level to make sure my line was straight. I used almost 40 pins to set the hems. I plugged in the 1968 Singer Selectric, lowered the foot, and joyfully anticipated the five minutes it would take to sew the hems and the opening for the curtain rod. I would be able to cross this off my list of endless house projects begun with the best intentions that generally remain half-finished. I stepped gently on the pedal, and a dull whirr, like a record playing on the wrong speed, followed. The motor had died.
I have researched the life of the family sewing machine since its demise, which has added to my already heavily nostalgic tendencies. When my parents moved to the United States from Germany, my mom got a Brother sewing machine. She used it to make curtains, pillow cases, bedspreads, and slipcovers for their modest first apartment above a little grocery store in Deal, New Jersey. She upgraded to a Singer the year she became pregnant with me.
In the era before mass-merchandising and sweatshops, clothing fell into the occasional purchase category for my new-immigrant family, and my mom sewed many of my sister’s school clothes as well as her own clothes. Ten years after she arrived in the U.S. and pregnant with me, my mom designed and sewed the most stylish maternity clothes I have ever seen. I love the avocado green coat with half-dollar sized black buttons and Peter Pan collar, the chocolate brown mini-dress with white polka dots and a scarfy collar, the white sundress with ladybugs and black piping and little bows at the straps.
The pre-war Victorian fixer-upper house my parents eventually bought had an unfinished third floor that served primarily as a workshop and storage area. There were walls of armoires that contained outgrown clothes and shoes that my mother could not throw away. My friends and I would go up there and dress up in the beautiful taffeta party dresses my mom had made ten or fifteen years earlier and finish the look with intensely pigmented lipstick and eyeshadow. In the pictures, we look like drunk 8-year old bridesmaids.
My mother taught me to sew on the Singer. She taught me to sew twice: the first time when I was twelve and decided I wanted to make my sister an apron to wear in the kitchen of the little townhouse she would move into after her wedding and the second time when I was about thirty and had decided that a properly craft-obsessed person needed know how to sew. The second time, it was like the fog had lifted and I got it, and the rich tradition of almost-finished projects and regular visits to the fabric outlet was born.
In almost every family photo my parents have, I can find something my mom made. I have by no means carried on her tradition of being a great seamstress, but I love stitching pretty grosgrain ribbon along cloth diapers as baby gifts, taking scraps of fabric and making little wine bags, sewing fabric onto blank note cards, and starting projects I don’t have time to finish.
At 73, my mother finally got her state of the art sewing machine. It threads the needle automatically, which most of them do now. She would not be able to see the eye of the needle otherwise. It has a button-hole function. It shows you a picture of the stitch you have chosen. If you want, you can take your foot off the pedal for “cruise control sewing” and let the machine run along at a set speed.
The old sewing machine has made me think of the lifespan of things and people. I am not sure what to do with the machine that made my crib bumper, little hooded baby towels, and drapes for my bedroom. The brown and cream two-toned latched carrying case still bears stickers from moving companies representing its travels over the years, sort of like old lift-tickets hanging from zippers of coats used once or twice a year. I sit back and reminisce about the “sewing room” on the third floor of my parents’ first house with its unfinished wood floors and mothball-filled closets of outgrown clothes and space heaters to keep it warm in the winter where my mom spent hours trying to make something out of very little.
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