#practical sewing

A month before my sixth birthday, my maternal grandmother passed away. We called her Gammy, and even though she wasn’t around for much of my childhood, I still remember her well. We were going through a hard financial time when I was little, but she refused to let my parents compromise on something so insignificant; she refused to let my parents give us inferior, store brand ketchup. When she would come visit, she came with a few bottles of “good” ketchup for us to use. She was strange like that.

She was strange in general. I remember my best friend at the time was afraid of her. It could have been the eye patch she was wearing, after a surgery. And she had the raspy voice of a sick smoker. She’s why I’ve never even considered picking up drugs, besides my mother’s threats of death. 

I remember being in the room when my Uncle called my mom to let her know Gammy had passed. My mother had already lived through the loss of her father, and a medical event where she knew there was a chance of losing her mother, so she was remarkably composed in the moment. I wonder now if she was staying together since I was in the room. I wonder if she had prepared herself for that call, since we knew it was coming.

I’d later learn that the day my teenage and fully grown adult cousins took my brothers and I to the park was the day my grandmother had called all her children together to talk funeral plans, and told the eldest to make her death worth it and get some airline miles by using her credit card. She wanted to make things easy on her children. 

I was allowed to go to the viewing but not the funeral. Mom wanted to feel free to grieve as she needed to at the funeral. Being five, going on six, I didn’t quite understand what a viewing was. I did remember loving my dress, it was a dark navy and reminded me of a sailor’s dress with the pretty bright buttons. My mother was against dressing kids in black. It was a family custom not to. 

My cousins had gotten there before us, and were waiting in the lobby of the funeral home. They had purposefully already gone through to say goodbye to Gammy, just so they could watch us if we weren’t comfortable going. I was going to, but panicked at the last second so they didn’t force me. My older brother did, and I think seeing her dead hurt him more than it helped, because he still has a thing about death, and loss. 

I know at this point you’re wondering where embroidery comes into all of this, and I promise it does. I’m southern, and a Lutheran, we don’t know how to speak in a linear fashion. 

I could go on about the stories from that week, but another time. By August, the will had been settled and my aunt and uncle brought stuff to our house. The (now) 120 year old oak table, a dresser, a chair, and a number of smaller things. She left me pearls for my wedding someday, and a ring to be kept safe with my aunt “until the right person knew to ask for it”. I remember I got some of the toys my cousins had left in the house from their childhoods, and the most important. I got her sewing basket. 

My grandmother hadn’t done anything fancier than sewing buttons back on and fixing rips for a decade, so the basket was sparse, but I had heard the tales. She made numerous school uniform skirts for my aunts and mother, and a number of dresses. She taught my aunts how to make clothes for their dolls out of fabric scraps, the eldest still going strong with sewing crafts and embroidery. 

I wanted to learn too. It would be great, because then I could also earn a badge in Brownies! 

My aunts, uncles, and mother collaborated a plan. At the start of summer, they came and picked my older brother and I up, and took us to have a week of fun with them, where my parents would come up with my younger brother towards the end. Oftentimes, my brother and I wouldn’t see each other all day, doing different activities with different relatives, but we did learn to ride bikes together in the church parking lot next to my grandmother’s house, which my uncle was fixing up. 

My aunt took me into a fabric store for the first time in my life, in her hand she had the sheet for the badge I was working on. She let me feel fabrics to my heart’s content. Sequins, velvets, polysatins. I was in love with the feel of textiles. She showed me how to use the pattern cabinets. We looked around and she picked up the basics for a small embroidery kit. The next day, it was pouring rain, so we hunkered down inside on her couch with blank fabric in our embroidery hoops. First thing she taught me was how to safely set your needle down by sticking it in the fabric, and then she handed me a pen and asked me to write my name on the fabric.

I learned to embroider in electric blue on white, stitching out my name. Then she taught me a simple tulip, and a cross-stitched basket for the flowers. Flowers were my favorite to do. 

Sewing became our bonding activity. While we stitched, she spoke. She told stories like no one else could. Told me about learning this from Gammy, back when she was a little girl. She told me about gifts she had made, and the ornaments we had on our tree that she had made for my mother, and the joking one for my father since he felt left out. To this day we still hang up the ornament “Joyeux Tim” alongside “Joyeux Noel”.