Time Created: December 2006
I’ve been embroidering just about all this last week. It’s just a premade cross-stitch kit from the local Ben Franklin store, a pretty lighthouse on some rocks, with a map for the background. For whatever reason, whenever I walk into that store, I gravitate over to the craft section and usually pick up something. It’s probably a good thing there isn’t a Ben Franklin near home, else I’d be spending a lot of my money on these crafts.
I don’t recall when I first learned how to sew, but I know I learned from my Mom. She enjoys sewing and embroidery. We even have a loom in our house, not that we’ve been able to use it for more than just coat storage for years, since our house is so small storage is a high priority. She’s currently working on a large quilt, though.
Sewing and embroidery seem to be becoming lost arts. Well, maybe not lost, but certainly hobby-level. It’s far more economical to buy a cheap shirt made in China than to spend the time making your own clothes. It wasn’t this way even when I was younger, well, either that or my Mom really liked making clothes for her little girls. It still helps to know some basic sewing in order to fix small holes. Still, most of my friends in college were rather impressed with my domestic skills. Very few of them could cook, much less sew. Any time I had a tear, or wanted to make something simple, I’d whip out my needle and thread and get to work.
I’m really old-school when it comes to sewing, too. I greatly prefer hand-sewing to sewing with a machine. It takes far longer but I greatly prefer the results. Admittedly, the fact that our sewing machine is currently broken so that it only sews backwards doesn’t help. I tried sewing the outfit I made for working at the Renaissance Festival with it and, well, I’ve had to replace almost all of the seams after three years of use. And sewing the hem of a skirt is a whole lot of hand-sewing. It’s somewhere between 6 and 9 feet long. Still, I greatly prefered making my own clothes for that over buying or borrowing some. I could design it in colors that flatter me, in a style that’s both simple and appealing, and can actually work in both cold and hot weather, rain or sun. All I have to do is loosen a few of the ties on the outfit and the air can flow through it just fine, and it’s made of flannel and microsuede, great fabrics for working outside. They’re tough fabrics, too.
