I was inside a fabric store for the first time and trying to buy some remnants. A few weeks ago, I got a sewing machine as a gift and life has not been the same since. For one thing it took me back to childhood when I helped (often grudgingly) my mother with her sewing projects. Her sewing machine was extremely temperamental and it took a lot of effort to keep it running. She persevered and there was a lot of output to show for it.
It took me a few days to get a sense of how fabric, needle, thread, stitch and tension are related to each other and how to find the proper balance using my own sewing machine. Reading about this tailor on her push-cart helping people restore pieces of clothing was very heart-warming. I dream of being able to give my old clothes a second lease of life in the form of a quilt. This is something my mother was particularly adept at doing and some of my favorite quilts from childhood were made of her old saris and other pieces of fabric from the old, worn out clothes of the family.
When the quilts had run their course, they would be exchanged for steel utensils. There used to be a woman that came to our house with her assortment of containers and pots she would trade for old clothes and quilts. Every piece of clothing any of us wore had an end of life story that was not about being discarded or trashed. Just about every item of clothing had been altered and mended over time.
The sewing machine as cranky as it was did pull its weight in our house. For bigger projects involving curtains and table-cloths, my father would step in to assist. I remember my mother going from having no tailoring skills at all to being able to sew her sari blouses to beat the work of her favorite tailor all in the matter of about a year. I remember being impressed that she could achieve such mastery in what seemed to be a relatively short period of time. So here I am trying to make my first tunic with some remnants thinking about the sewing machine that I grew up with and the memories it had created.
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