…by Sheena.

In the last couple of weeks, Sheena has posted some lovely shots of things that make me feel all warm inside. I can relate to things like button boxes, a patchwork of threads, pins and other things deep within my soul. I used to sew a lot. I fact, for a period of about four or five years, I made almost all of my “going out” clothes. I made my Mum laugh when I was “inventing” something. I’d do stuff like laying a piece of fabric on the floor, laying down on top of it and getting my Mum to stick a pin in at the level of the nape of my neck or my knees or whatever. I was very inventive and am dead proud of lots of the things I made although sadly they are almost all long gone now.

I started to do it because I couldn’t find clothes in the shops that I wanted to wear. So, faced with the choice of wearing hideous “Miss Selfridge” garb or making something I actually LIKED, there was no contest. I had no training to speak of, other than needlework in the first year of secondary school where I made a purple cushion cover from a bit of acetate “satin”, quilted with kapok. It was, as I’m sure you can picture from this description, quite without equal in the hideousness stakes.

My Mum also helped me with things like working out how to use a pattern and to thread my sewing machine. Despite my Mum’s best advice, I was too impatient for the most part to follow good practice. I never tacked anything, it took too long and was a pain to take out when it had been sewn over with a machine stitch. So, I developed a kind of sewing Russian roulette – I pinned everything with pins at a 90⁰ angle to the line of stitching I wanted to do, then just sewed over them. Most of the time it worked fine, occasionally a pin would take a direct hit from the sewing machine’s needle and then the usual outcome was a broken needle tip flying out of the area…obviously not a great outcome. Funnily enough, the pin would usually survive, albeit with a big dent in it. I still have lots of pins that are shaped like boomerangs because of this practice. In the words of Valerie Singleton “don’t try this at home”.

Now I feel all gooey about why my life became so busy I don’t have the time to sew any more – the problem that stemmed learning to sew hasn’t gone away. I still loathe everything in the shops although I’m sure you realise that it’s no longer Miss Selfridge that I go into, poke around for a bit then leave feeling miserable, it’s mostly Marks and Sparks these days.

The cutie little Union Flags are pins too. I inherited them in my sewing box that came complete with contents even though it had lived under a stack of paint tins in my ex-Mother-in-Law’s shed for 20 years before she dragged it out and gave it to me.