I’ve never liked sewing. I was never good at it. I got a D in sewing in seventh grade. I think I almost spent as much time ripping stitches out as I did sewing them together. But, I grew up in a time when many of the clothes I had were made by my mother, and my sister and I still picked out material and made clothes for school through HS. It was not that I didn’t know the basic operations of sewing, I just had no desire to do it. Not wanting to sew, I refused to learn or get good at it.
When I took education classes in college. I read Alfred North Whitehead’s philosophy on learning I liked his ideas on how we learn. He has been described as a New Liberal, or social liberal.
Social liberalism is the belief that liberalism should include social justice. It differs from classical liberalism in that it believes the legitimate role of the state includes addressing economic and social issues such as unemployment, health care, and education while simultaneously expanding civil rights. Under social liberalism, the good of the community is viewed as harmonious with the freedom of the individual.[1] Social liberal policies have been widely adopted in much of the capitalist world, particularly following World War II.[2] Social liberal ideas and parties tend to be considered centrist or centre-left.
Alfred North Whitehead, OM FRS[1] (15 February 1861 – 30 December 1947) was an English mathematician who became a philosopher. He wrote on algebra, logic, foundations of mathematics, philosophy of science, physics, metaphysics, and education. Whitehead supervised the doctoral dissertations of Bertrand Russell and Willard Van Orman Quine, thus influencing logic and virtually all of analytic philosophy. He co-authored the epochal Principia Mathematica with Russell.
One quote from Whitehead that stuck with me was (I could not find the exact quote but it was something like) “Children learn what they desire to know”. This has been my experience with learning. If I don’t want to, I won’t. If I want to, I will. I was never interested in learning about sewing. For those of you not familiar with Alfred North Whitehead, he wrote many essays on education including The Aims of Education. Here are a couple of his quotes:
I suggest that no system of external tests which aims primarily at examining individual scholars can result in anything but educational waste.
The race that does not value trained intelligence is doomed.
In ancient times cats were worshipped as gods, they have never forgotten this.
The merely well-informed man is the most useless bore on God's earth.
When I left my parent’s home, I got far away sewing, although I always had a sewing machine. It was considered as necessary an item for women to own as a washing machine. I made baby diapers from flannel for my first daughter. Later, I made one quilt. I have found it is good in life to have a hobby or something that you really enjoy doing to occupy your time and fulfill your creative side. I crocheted. I embroidered on my jeans in the seventies. Then, I started cutting stones and beading (really another form of sewing). These were my two hobbies for thirty years, and many times my way of earning a living, I no longer owned a sewing machine. (I did have a loom.)
Then my husband died.
Part of dealing with the death of a close person is getting rid of their clothes. People put it off, but soon everything gets packed and donated. I found I could not get rid of my husband's clothes that easily. I could see him in every shirt. I gave many of his clothes to his son, they were about the same size. I decided I would make quilts from the rest. Then it would not be like getting rid of them. It would just be turning them into something else: remembrance quilts.
I had hated sewing up to this point in my life, but now I wanted to learn. I bought the cheapest Singer sewing machine, I had only ever sewed with very basic machines, and a beginning quilting books, I Can’t Believe I’m Quilting, by Pat Sloan. I made every project in the book. I cried every time I cut a shirt up. This was only a couple months after Skip died, and I was deep in grief. It was a very cathartic experience. The sinking realization that he was gone.
Here are three beginning projects from the book that I made:
Friendship Star quilt:
Basic nine patch:
rail Fence baby quilt:
I worked up to being able to do this quilt called the Wandering Star. Each star is 17 pieces made from 17 of my husband's shirts. The outer border was his robe:
I quilted for about four months while I thought and tried to get some kind of grip on my life. Then, I decided I could not take care of my house, and I would lose it if I didn’t sell it. I spent the next few months painting and fixing things up. I sold my house in two months and moved into a tiny trailer I could not sew in.
I went to Iowa to help my parents for several months, and when I got back my sewing machine went in storage at my sisters. I had no room to sew. When I finally got it out again, I realized I had lost major pieces in all my moving, and that I could no longer sew with it. I have not sewed in three years. My sister bought me a really nice quilting sewing machine the other day, one much more expensive than I would have bought. It makes quilting almost automatic. It does things for me I had a hard time doing on a simple machine, applique and free quilting. It hums. I had already cut the pieces to two more quilts three years earlier, so I started sewing right away. Maybe I will have some new quilts to show the DK Quilters Guild soon.
I wrote this diary because I wanted to share with you a way to make remembrances of the people you love. If you don’t want to sew yourself, think about taking some of your loved one’s clothes to a person who can make a quilt for you. Quilts are heirlooms that can last for hundreds of years. You can pass down the story of the person in a small tag on the back explaining the quilt. Then you have something to keep you warm and snuggle with on cold, rainy, sad days, when the person you love can’t do it anymore.