Teaching the Girls to Sew! (Fun Dolls Eyelash Bunny)

Don't worry readers, I didn't give my just-turned-three-year-old a needle and a pair of sharp shears. But I did let her use toddler-appropriate kiddie scissors, and I was really impressed with how carefully she cut out her pattern pieces!

Let me step back for a moment.

Twenty-three years ago my brother (then seven) and I (10 at the time) got a really fantastic Christmas present from our sewaholic mom -— doll-making kits. We spent a couple of days sitting around the kitchen table carefully dying our doll fabric with tea, cutting out our pattern pieces, embroidering the faces, sewing on hair, and stitching the seams by hand (see photo at top). It was awesome, and I loved every minute!

My mom still has "Annie," one of the finished dolls at her house.

Anyway, when my niece T came to stay with us for a week recently, she asked if I could help her fix a split seam on her travel pillow. Instead of sewing it for her, I handed her a needle and thread and showed her how to use them... and was impressed at how quickly she figured it out and sewed a sturdy little seam on her pillow.

T was so excited by her success, I decided to give her a more fun project. I gave her a little Japanese doll sewing book and she picked a moderately challenging doll pattern. Little Z couldn't be left out, so I promised to let her make the same pattern.

The pattern: "Eyelash Bunny" from the book Aranzi Aronzo Fun Dolls (Let's Make Cute Stuff). It's a fantastic book full of cute, modern-looking little dolls with excellent comic-book-style instructions. The eyelash bunny in the book is sad, but T decided to make her happy and add button eyes:

Fabric & notions: I let the girls choose fabrics from the stash.

• T made her bunny body out of a stretchy white fleece from an old blanket, and the dress from a lovely floral cotton I had picked up a few years ago in Portland at the Bolt modern fabric shop.
• Z chose some yellow cotton flannel left over from diapers my mom made her a few years ago, the same floral for the body, and some red felt for eyes.
  

The process:

• T's bunny (aka "Mini-Me"): T had never sewn before, but took to it very quickly. She cut out all her own pattern pieces and fabric, did all of the stuffing and most of the sewing. She had a few moments of impatience with the hand-embroidery parts...
  

  ...but absolutely LOVED "driving" the sewing machine and very quickly learned to back-stitch, pivot and the like:

• Z's bunny (aka "Foo-Foo"): Z obviously couldn't do as much as her big cousin, but she made quite a try. She cut out a few of the paper pattern pieces, cut out the felt eyes and nose and glued them on, and drew a second face (that I embroidered for her):
  

  Her Nana Gail helped her cut out most of the fabric pieces, T stuffed the doll and I sewed it together.

I've taught some adults to knit before but this was so much more fun—the girls were so very excited and enthusiastic and proud of their creations! (And I found it so much easier to be really really patient and helpful with them... I think sometimes when I've taught adults I get frustrated if they don't pick things up quickly.)

I promised T that next time she visited she could sew a ruffly (and sparkly) skirt! I think she's really caught the sewing bug...

Have you ever taught anyone to sew? What was your experience?

P.S. I finally got around to setting up a Facebook page for Polka Dot Overload... will try and cross-post everything there if you prefer to follow me that way!

Vote for Lowell Textile History in 3D! (and my amazing mom)

One of my mom's award-finalist 3D models of Lowell, Massachusetts: the Boott Mills complex on the Merrimack River. Part of this section is used as a museum dedicated to the history of the textile mill era in New England

Readers, my mom—and my textile-history-rich hometown, especially its schoolchildren!—need your help.

I may have mentioned my amazing mom Beryl Reid a time or two or three zillion. My mom is the kind of woman who can do ANYTHING. When she's visiting I might come home from work to discover she's reupholstered all the furniture in fabulous fabric with lovely piping, sewn up 67 cloth diapers and a bevy of baby carriers, repaired the bookshelf, designed several dozen intricate three-dimensional building models to appear on Google Earth and done some intense genealogical research--all while my daughter was napping after a fun-filled trip to the Central Park Zoo.

Well, maybe not all in one naptime. Anyway, I bring her to your attention once again because her Lowell collection--200+ three-dimensional models of buildings in my hometown of Lowell, Massachusetts, which you can see on Google Earth--is one of only 6 finalists worldwide in Google's "Model Your Town" contest. Guys and gals, this is a really big deal! And she needs YOUR vote to win! (You can vote here--make sure to click on her set of models before voting, or it'll accidentally vote for a different set).

What's the sewing connection? Seriously, it doesn't get more textile-tastic than Lowell.

• Lowell is a national historic park. Really, my hometown is a park, dedicated to American textile history. Everywhere you go, you'll see canals, old mill buildings, working trolleys, giant spindle sculptures... and that's because (from the park website):
  

  Source: teachingamericanhistorymd.net via Mikhaela on Pinterest

  Lowell’s water-powered textile mills catapulted the nation – including immigrant families and early female factory workers [Mikhaela note: the famous "mill girls"] – into an uncertain new industrial era. Nearly 200 years later, the changes that began here still reverberate in our shifting global economy. Explore Lowell, a living monument to the dynamic human story of the Industrial Revolution.

• Today, Lowell is the home of the American Textile History Museum and the New England Quilt Museum.
• Our minor league baseball team is called the Spinners, and the logo is... a spindle. Yes. We are serious about textiles.
• Typical class projects and field trips for Lowell public school students include: learning how to spin, weave and quilt.
• Knitters take note: until recently, Lowell was the manufacturing home of Classic Elite yarns... sadly their production has moved overseas and the Hub Mills factory outlet store I used to frequent when I was learning to knit is gone to a nearby town, too.

Also, if my mom wins, the prize is a donation of $25,000 to the Lowell public schools—very fitting, since my parents are both retired public school teachers, and my brother and I both attended the Lowell public schools. Lowell is a large, diverse working-class city made of up immigrants and their descendents from many eras, from the Irish workers who originally worked in the mills in the 1800s to Cambodian refugees who resettled in Lowell in the 1980s. And the schools could really use the funds.

So, please take a look at the contest--and if you like my mom's models of Lowell...

...please vote for her!

P.S. My husband and I had our wedding in Lowell, in a park right by one of the old boarding houses the mill girls used to live in:

Sew Grateful Guest Reflection: "Surrounded by Sewing"

Above: A lovely doll my mother made when she was learning to sew in the early 1960s. "She’s lost her face and is a little sad-looking but notice the fancy hairstyle and the gathers on the sleeves and bodice. She used to have a petticoat and pantaloons but they are gone now."

How much are you loving Sew Grateful week? A big thank you to all my long-time and new readers who entered my first giveaway--it's so much fun to read your plans for what you might do with your winning vintage pattern!

Tomorrow I'll be sharing the story of how my beloved grandmother Melba taught me how to sew in a bittersweet week bookended by a road trip to a Mississippi funeral and a scary ambulance ride to a small Georgia hospital. And this weekend I hope to share my finished Sew Grateful sewing project.

In the meantime, here is a guest post from my amazing mom Beryl Reid about how HER grandmother taught HER how to sew. (Along the lines of this family tradition, I think my mom will have to teach little Z how to sew!)

"I grew up surrounded by women who sewed. My grandmother Drue was my first sewing teacher. I was living with her in Corinth, Mississippi in the summer of 1960 (I was about eight years old). There was, of course, a sewing room in the house, with an amazing pedal driven sewing machine.

"Me (in school photo) the year I learned to sew... in Corinth, Mississippi."

I had been sewing “by hand” for a long time, for as long as my memory goes back. I had just finished making a doll that wasn’t really for playing with... it was a Civil War era doll that reflected my obsession with history. I wanted to make a really detailed and authentic period costume for the doll.

"This is a photo of us kids, sitting on one of the rag rugs my grandmother made at the house in Corinth. I'm on the far left."

My grandmother decided I should learn to use the sewing machine for the doll’s costume. She sat with me for days, making sure I knew how to thread the machine and run it. Her method of teaching was gentle, but “hands off”. She let me make all my own mistakes and knew that getting me started was all that was needed. There was no “hovering” or nagging or recriminations... at all!

"This is a picture of my sister Melinda, my cousin Pam and my brother Michael... my grandmother Drue made all these clothes."

Most of the time I was left alone with the machine, my imagination and time to figure out what to do on my own. She might suggest some techniques... especially the gathering of the skirts and pantaloons. She would show me, then leave the room. Often, she would be in the next room, working on one of her own projects.

Every woman I knew in my family and extended family did some kind of home sewing or “making.” Drue had grown up in the rural South, the wife of a sharecropper—and in that culture, you often couldn’t buy something nice to wear, but you could make it yourself. She loved to make clothes, quilts and rag rugs... it was a legitimate creative pleasure for her and the women of my family. Both of her daughters (including my mother) had learned the same outlook and were both skilled at sewing, knitting and the art of “making it yourself.”

"Drue (center, between my sister Becky and grandfather Garland) sets up a quilting frame in preparation for a quilting bee."

By the time I returned to my mother and father after that summer, I knew how to sew. I had to re-learn it a bit when I started using my mother’s electric Singer, but that didn’t take too long. My mother Melba didn’t have to teach me. She added a few practical tips to my outlook on sewing, mostly of the time-saving sort:

• She scorned the use of pins... a few upside coffee cups on the pattern were enough.
• She also didn’t really believe in chalk or marking... a dart should be memorized and just done.

Speed was important to my mother. She worked full time as a book keeper when I was growing up, so sewing was done after a long day and was often because she wanted a new outfit for herself or me and my siblings—it was a practical activity. She did love to dress up (she inherited this from her mother!). They looked like models from a magazine to me and I admired them as gorgeous, stylish and capable women.

By the time I was eleven, I had progressed to making my own dresses for school. I remember one dress, it was a turquoise blue “mini” dress (remember this was the time of the “British Invasion” and skirts were inching up!) it was sleeveless and had a large double ruffle around a scoop neck, almost like a big necklace or flower lei. I can’t tell you how proud I was to wear it to school!"

——Beryl Reid (aka Mikhaela's mom)

Four (sewing) generations:Beryl, Melba (holding Mikhaela) and Drue in the early 1980s.

I'm afraid I don't have any pictures of my mom's ruffled blue mini dress, or of any of Drue's beautiful quilts (my mom thinks there might be one in her attic but she couldn't find it)... but here's a bonus photo of me as a baby in an outfit my mom sewed for me--I love the sweet purple rick rack!

So tell me, dear readers--do you have any family sewing traditions?

Polka Dot Archives: My Year 2000 Makeover!

From my 2000 sewing notebook

Around the time I got serious about learning how to sew--winter 1999/2000--I decided it was high time for a Mikhaela makeover. I was 19 now and in college, and I had outgrown my grungy high school look. And combing through all those lovely pattern catalogs, I decided that maybe wearing dresses and skirts might be fun for a change.

As you can see above, my high school fashion uniform was quite... casual: self--cut uncombed hair + metal-framed glasses + threadbare thrifted (or punk rock) T + ill-fitting stained jeans + steel-toed Doc Martens or Converse sneakers. Here I am in full regalia in 1997 at the Rhode Island School of Design's high school summer program:

And with my parents as a Harvard freshman in 1998 (I used to remove my glasses a lot in photos):

After some study and trips to the eye doctor and the hair salon, I put together my new look, as described in the above sketch (still with the Doc Martens, by the way). At the thrift store, I began heading for the dresses, skirts, tank top and cardigan aisles instead of the men's T-shirt rack:

I even started rocking sweetheart necklines! I still have and wear the below $4 dress find, a beautiful black velvet strapless number with an elastic-shirred back, big front waist bow and all-over squiggle burnout pattern:

And I acquired some stain-free darker jeans. But as you can see from my notes, while I was willing to do skirts and makeup, I was SO not about to start shaving my legs (that came years later). Some more "after" examples, from 2001:

Of course, no "before" and "after" story is ever that cut and dried. In high school I did glam up for prom--I even painted my nails green to match my consignment-store dress (though I think my mom talked me out of "matching" green lipstick):

And to this day I still rarely wear makeup and often sleep in many of those old tees ("Go Ahead, Make My Day", "I May Grow Older But I Refuse to Grow Up"). Still, from 1999-2001 was when started to think seriously about fashion and style, and realized it could actually be fun! It was also the beginning of my habit of re-evaluating and updating my wardrobe and overall look every few years, though never quite as drastically as that first time.

So, what was your biggest self-inflicted style evolution? How do you feel about it today?

Update! In retrospect, I wanted to add one note to this post--I by no means meant to imply that more girly or figure-hugging or stereotypically feminine looks are generally "better" than more butch or androgynous styles, because I don't believe that at all--I love seeing women rock those styles! But for me, dressing in those ill-fitting tees and jeans came from being a bookish punk rock nerd girl and the frequent target of harassment by classmates, having low self-esteem and just generally not feeling very pretty--I felt exposed in more girly looks, like everyone was staring at or laughing at me.

So this makeover was not about conforming to outside pressure to look more girly--it was more about transitioning from an anti-style to finding my own sense of Mikhaela style, if that makes sense!

Vintage Singer Update: 96 Years Old, and Sewing Just Fine!

IMG_6842, originally uploaded by beryldrue.

Many thanks to those of you who tipped me off to the serial-number lookup on Singer's website! They even had a PDF of the instruction manual.

My grandmother Sylvia may have learned to sew on this machine in the mid-1950s, but it was already an antique when she got it. It's a Model 66 (G-Series), manufactured at the Elizabethport Factory in Elizabeth, New Jersey in 1914, along with 25,000 others of the same model.

As you might guess, it was originally treadle-operated, but at some point before my grandmother got it it was retrofitted with a motor and electric foot pedal.

My mother Beryl took it for a test drive (see her photo gallery here) and reports it has perfect tension. Sadly she lives 5 hours away, and I'm too close to delivery to want to travel anymore... so I probably won't lay my hands on this beauty until well after Cartoonist Baby arrives! Luckily this reminded me that my good friend Mary has a similar machine right here in Brooklyn, so maybe I can play with hers.

No offense to my computerized Viking, but I doubt she'll still be in service in the year 2101... and she was never this pretty!

The Vintage Singer Mystery Solved!

I mentioned yesterday that my mother and I were still puzzling over the origins of the beautiful vintage Singer that turned up in her flooded basement the other day. Mystery solved! After some thought and digging around in her own basement, my Bobie (grandmother) realized that it was indeed her first sewing machine, the one she learned to sew on in the 1950s--she even found the thread and projects she had for it, and the table she had it installed in. She apologized for not recognizing it instantly--but I told her that when you're 87, you're allowed to forget things occasionally!

So here's the story, as she recalls it! She didn't do much sewing at home, or right after she was married (in August 1944)--and soon, she had four young kids to take care of in a small apartment, not leaving her much free time! She did do some crocheting and knitting, however, like this lovely baby blanket she made for my Aunt Elissa in 1947, and which has now been passed down to me for my little girl! (Sorry for the weird cropping, but I was making a bizarre face!)

Eventually they moved to a bigger house and she decided to learn to sew dresses for her two daughters--who had particular ideas about what they wanted to wear, unlike my dad!--and clothes for herself. She thinks she got the machine from her family, and that they had had it for quite a few years before that. When she upgraded to a newer machine many years later, she gave the old Singer to my parents, and into the basement it went.

Here's a photo of Sylvia (that's her name, by the way--Sylvia Katler, born Sylvia Fishman) in the 1940s looking sharp in her Coast Guard uniform--she's on the right, and that's her sister Sarah and brother Milton. Most of her nine brothers and sisters were also in the service during WWII (Milton was too young, but served in the Korean War).

Here are some photos of her with my grandfather Leon Katler, also from the 1940s--don't they look glamorous?

And here they are in 1947 as new parents:

Here's a picture of the four kids with Leon from the 1950s, but I don't know if she sewed that dress (and I can't tell which is my dad and which is his brother, they looked a lot alike back then!):

Here's a recent photo of me and Sylvia at my baby shower, with my grandmothers-in-law Theresa and Wilhelmina!

And should you be interested, in college I put together a short collection of some family stories she told me about her life growing up in old Jewish Boston, her time in the Coast Guard, and beyond!

Beauty from the Basement: A Vintage Singer Unearthed

My parents have spent the week cleaning their flooded basement (they live in Massachusetts, hit by torrential rains recently)... and look what turned up! Isn't she pretty? I love the paint job. My mother can't remember how it got there or where it came from. We asked my Bobie (grandmother) but she said it wasn't hers--she did her sewing on a newer model.

Whether she works or not, I think she'll be going on display in mom's sewing room!

I do love my computerized Viking (and will miss her dearly when's she at the shop), but she just can't compete on aesthetics or durability.

On a much, much more sobering note... I can't help thinking of some vintage Singers we saw on our roadtrip in Southwest France last year. On our way from Limoges to Perigueux, we stopped for a few hours at the Centre de la Mémoire at the Village Martyr, Oradour-sur-Glane.

642 residents of the village were massacred by a German SS company on June 10, 1944, and the site was preserved and left standing as a quiet memorial to this horror, open to visitors. The roofs and shutters have rotted away, everything wood or cloth is gone, and all that's left in the houses and yards are rusting cars, bicycles, bedframes, stoves... and sewing machines.