The Stash

A short essay I worked on today.... 

Chocolate brown baby-whale corduroy hosts a flock of chirping canaries, crisp cottons discombobulate with heady mixtures of celery, rose and aqua, while the gentlest yellow beguiles with the palest of blue buds. These are a sampling of the fabrics that make up my ever-burgeoning stash, one which had been growing in direct proportion to my fear of using it. Mad for colour and fashion since I was small, and inspired by four older sisters who let me tag along to the fabric shop, I have oft believed that my passion for textiles was unavoidable, if not genetic. 

My Quebecois grandmother was a seamstress not just for her own family, but for many of her neighbours as well. My mother tells me how how she sat at my grandmother's feet as she sewed, the fabric spread, then cut, on a freshly washed kitchen floor. I have come to appreciate Grandma Kelahear's skills through the white-cornered, mono-chromatic photos that document my family's progress before I joined it. One of the earliest images depicts my grinning, newlywed parents posing at the door of a perfectly polished automobile, she in a pencil-skirted, smartly-tailored going-away suit.  A photo taken the following year shows Mum wrapped in a flared, camelhair maternity coat, trimmed with oversized buttons that I have determined reveal a dynastic flair for the whimsical. Dog-eared snapshots of giggling moppets sporting short bangs and impossibly sweet, billowing party frocks proliferate from the mid-1950s onward.

My penchant for surrounding myself with beautiful fabric began in my twenties, gathered speed in my thirties - a hazard of working mere blocks from the fabled fabric shops of New York City - and settled to a constant craving in my present forties. None of this would be particularly notable were it not for the fact that while I accumulated it, I was too intimidated to use it. My high school home economics class sewing module was decades past and even then, the blouse that resulted could best be described as a nice try. This crippling fear of enacting a fabric cutting faux-pas was aided and abetted by an inherited sewing machine that seemed to resist all my attempts at securing the proper tension. Patiently, doggedly I would review the section of the manual that detailed the process, over and over, pulling the thread down, tugging it up and through the eye of the needle. As for the bobbin case, time and again I pinched latch Q and pushed the bobbin case onto stud R, making sure cutout S pointed upwards. And each and every time the thread clenched in angry fists where straight stitches had been promised, the cock-eyed tension in the air cut only by the pitiable and increasingly unintelligible moaning that seemed to emanate from the deepest recesses of my soul. Away went the machine, only to reappear on my table whenever the memories of my last attempt had sufficiently dimmed.

But last spring, I had my machine tuned, the first step in vanquishing my fear of cutting and sewing. I soon understood that while my machine worked, I still lacked confidence. The antidote? Lessons! Now, I have just completed several smashing cushion covers, and just this summer a woman who passed me on the street complimented me on my ‘60s-inspired halter dress. Without thinking, I swung around and shouted back, “I made 

it!” I like to think my grandmother knows the small girl she hardly knew is now a sewer, I only hope she doesn’t know that she may have created a monster.