Friday, March 13, 2015

A Vintage Dress for Annie, and a Memory

The bodice is done and the bias strips *will get sewn on today, mark my word, or else*. 

This pattern is one of many that I inherited from my grandmother. It's from the early 1950s, when she sewed the dress, not the coat, for my aunt who was born in September 1950.  I am making it up in hot pink with white polka-dots for the dry run!


Bonus: here is my grandmother around the time she graduated from college with a double-major in English and History, at the tender age of 19.  


Her name was also Pauline, and she taught me the basics of sewing when I visited her house in Charleston, South Carolina when I was a little girl.  She was masterful, an absolute genius with textiles.  She also gave me pearls of wisdom. Once when I was an angst-filled college student studying philosophy, and she was in her final months with cancer, she stayed up late talking to me and told me that if I wanted to "find myself" I did not need to go hunting somewhere else.  "Just shake your sheets!" she said, using both hands to shake an invisible sheet in the air, "and there you are!"  

And I did, and here I am. 

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