I packed three sewing machines and all the extras for the family gathering along with my ideas of what to sew. But the young women and granddaughters had their own ideas that came out as soon as I lifted my Featherweight Singer out of it small black box.
First, I had to deal with the crowd of curious little folks.
“What’s that? How does it work? Can I try?”
“Sure,” I removed the spool of thread and the bobbin, set the foot pedal on the table near the machine and reached for a piece of paper.
“Come here and sit on my lap and we’ll sew.”
We dropped the presser foot on the paper, I controlled the pedal with my fingers and the needle precisely punched a row of holes across the page. For the 2-, 4- and 5-year-old pre-schoolers, a few minutes in front of the machine sufficed before they hopped down to play.
The older girls and adults stayed with plenty of plans for the seven sets of sample fabrics from the fabric shop.
“Can we make doll quilts out of these Strawberry Shortcake pieces?” my daughter asked.
Within an hour, we had two small quilts decorated with strips of lace covering the dolls – and three other block quilts taking shape. The 14-year-old granddaughter chose the sophisticated floral fabric. My daughter pieced a top for the long-promised Halloween quilt to accompany her son’s yard of fabric printed with Halloween candy. His quilt lacked a filler, but it pleased him immensely, “Thank you. This is awesome. It looks super cozy,” he told me.
The 7-year-old granddaughter took the bag with seven strips of farm animals, fields and hay and disappeared. The strips became quilt blocks which she arranged in rows. She even wrote down the sequence of pictures for each row. Her mom began chain stitching the blocks together. Before she went to bed that night, a large hunk from a brown fleece blanket backed her quilt.
As we folded up for the day, the 17-year-old granddaughter sidled up to me, “Is that hard to do?”
“No. Sewing is easy. I can show you next time.”
The next time we pulled out the machines, the 14-year-old agreed to make the Beatles fabric into a table topper for her St. Louis aunt. She mostly worked alone while I coached her 11-year-old sister on the techniques for strip quilting to make a colorful Marie Engelbreit wall hanging. She amazed me with her ability to sew quarter inch seams and the precision of her lines of blocks. She finished it with a bright yellow seam binding.
The 13-year-old wanted to make a pillow. She chose fabric from the small stash I brought, cut out a square pillow and sewed the pieces together. A rarely used car neck pillow provided stuffing and she sorted through the decorative buttons to finish it.
Opening that tin of buttons caught the attention of every girl from 7 months to 17 years. With pacifier in her mouth, the baby grabbed fistfuls of buttons to inspect and drop. Her older cousins shouted out their finds, “Look, an elephant.” “This flower would look neat.” “Wow! Look at this one.” “I want that one.”
The four-year-old granddaughter pawed through the lace and seam bindings. The stiffness of the bias strips proved to be perfect for practicing her skills with the scissors. She reduced the bias tape to scraps. The two-year-old climbed up on the bed and practiced poking pins through fabric. When she had two pieces attached with the pins hanging down, she slid off the bed holding the pinned fabric over her dolls.
“Be careful, don’t poke your babies,” someone said.
“I’m going to poke my dollies,” she assured us and laid the fabric over them.
The 17-year-old negated quilt making and made a colorful shoulder bag with a strap of quilt binding finished with an embroidery stitch.
As we began gathering up the scraps, threads and machines, the 15-year-old appeared, “I want to make a pillow, but not one like hers. I want to make a round pillow.”
Thinking of the trick of constant turning for a round piece of fabric and the late hour, I said, “I think a square pillow is a better starting point.”
She picked out fabric and buttons and quickly finished her project with the help of her now experienced cousin.
As she proudly showed off her pillow, we gathered up dropped pins, buttons, snippets of binding, fabric and threads and put away my machines until the next sewing circle – it can’t be too soon for me.
(Joan Hershberger is a reporter for the News-Times. She can be reached at jhershberger@eldoradonews.com.)