Mary Helen’s essay accompanies her exhibit of “Bathrobes I Have Sewn” in the Po/Art/Ry show at Artifactory, 120 N. Dubuque, Iowa City. She and the other exhibiting artists will read from poems accompanying their artwork during the no-cost opening reception this Friday, April 4, 6:00-8:00 PM. The show will be open on Saturdays, 1:00-3:00, and by appointment thereafter.
Should I Write or Should I Sew?
I’m three, or maybe four, scrunched up with my knees bumping into my chin, sitting in a brown box-like thing made of pressed wood. It happens to be the lift-off cover of my mother’s portable sewing machine, turned upside down on the floor. Because the cover is upside down, the convenient carrying handle on top is underneath it instead, making it rock side to side in a most satisfying manner, like a little boat riding the waves.
About ten years will pass before the sewing machine itself—a curvaceous black and gold- trimmed Singer–becomes interesting to me. I have Miss Smith at A.E. Burdick Elementary to thank for that.
Miss Smith was the Home Ec teacher at Burdick. (Note: I don’t think any of us eighth graders realized that “Ec” was short for “Economics.”) Miss Smith had wavy white hair, about chin length, kept in place by little bows clipped into the waves on either side of her face. She explained to us one time that her hair had turned white, all at once, when she was in her twenties. It wasn’t that she was old, she wanted us to know. No one had the heart or the nerve to tell her that she could have worn her hair in golden locks or red pigtails and, to us, she would still be old.
I don’t remember the cooking part of Home Ec, impressed though I was by a classroom equipped with multiple kitchen stoves—some gas? some electric? not sure—each one anchoring its own little cooking station. I do recall that we got to eat whatever we had cooked—reward or punishment, as the case might be.
We spent half the sewing part of the semester on a “sampler” of hand embroidery stitches: rows of chain stitching, cross stitching, blanket stitching, buttonhole stitching for hand-made buttonholes (fat chance we’d be making any of those), and more. We also practiced hem (aka “blind”) stitching, which, of all the stitches, would actually come in handy for shortening our skirts. It was the Sixties, after all. The 1960s.
Finally, we got to the part where we would learn to use the sewing machines. We would use them, Miss Smith announced enticingly, to make something we could wear! What would it be?
An apron. Absolutely no irony intended by Miss Smith and none perceived by us eighth graders, although I, for one, was disappointed that we weren’t going to make an A-line skirt, suitable for blind-hemming well above the knee and wearing to Friday night dances.
We weren’t going to use a printed pattern, Miss Smith explained. Instead, we would measure and cut the fabric—gingham checks in our choice of several colors–into three rectangles: the biggest one for the skirt of the apron, a much smaller one for the sewn-on patch pocket, and a long narrow one for the all-in-one waistband and ties. Along with how to use a sewing machine, we would learn to baste and gather and to sew safely over straight pins, as needed. Our embroidery training would come in handy for trimming the pocket and waistband in a contrasting color—also our choice.
I picked yellow gingham for the fabric and green for the embroidery on the pocket. I would not quite get to trimming the waistband before semester’s end, but my green cross-stitched x’s on the pocket filled their little yellow gingham squares so perfectly that Miss Smith gave me an A anyway.
When it came to producing finished and usable items, sewing preceded writing in my life—unless you count the plays I wrote for my neighborhood friends to perform (our parents the patient audience) or the novels we all wrote in notebooks at the picnic table in my backyard one summer.
I’ve been asked: how do writing and sewing complement each other in my life? They don’t! Mostly, they compete for my time. I remember how delighted I was to learn that poet Rita Dove also did unwriterly things like pinning pattern pieces on fabric laid out on the floor to make a party dress for her five-year-old daughter. This was after she won the Pulitzer, but before she became the first Black Poet Laureate of the U.S. and, at the same time, the first woman to be awarded that honor. Whether she is the only Poet Laureate who ever sewed a party dress for her daughter, I don’t know.
Sewing and writing have a lot in common. Both require patience, a certain amount of planning—although plans can change as you go—and painstaking attention to detail, including the locations of stick pins. With my kind of sewing, there’s usually a printed paper pattern, yes, but a story has a pattern, too—it rises and falls—even if the way it turns out is often a surprise. (In writing that is usually a good thing; in sewing, not so much.) There’s plenty of cutting and trimming, stitching pieces together and taking them apart, in both endeavors.
My own determination to “get it right” is, I hope, as evident in what I sew as in the sentences I write. That’s why it takes me so long to write or sew anything. A simple pattern and a deadline like holiday gift-giving can speed up robe production, but a novel takes years no matter what.
For both, the single most important step is finding your material.
