A Person of Size

I'm throwing out lots of stuff in preparation for throwing out lots more stuff when I'm older, and this washed up on the tide of junque from yesteryear: a Simplicity pattern -- wait! What's a "pattern"?

A pattern is a guide, printed on tissue paper, for cutting appropriately sized pieces of fabric for sewing, and the envelope includes a printed step-by-step illustrated guide, in three languages and with idiot graphics, as to how to sew the pieces together and do the other tasks required for completion, such as pressing open the seams and inserting elastic into the tunnel one creates for the waistline. Apparently at one time (the presence of a bar code indicates 1975 or later) I got the jones to sew for myself an elastic-waist skirt or capris, and I did, because I used the pattern and kept the tissue-paper pattern pieces nicely folded in this envelope in case I wanted to re-use them to sew me some more of that with the Kenmore sewing machine that was my college graduation gift.

You gotta understand America was different then. Piles of cheap gaudy-bawdy synthetic clothes sewn in Asia that you wore for one season and chucked: Oh, no. You cared for clothes. If certain clothing items were not available, or you never found an affordable/desirable item on repeated trips to several stores, logic led you finally to buy a pattern and fabric and some notions and custom-sew the item yourself as all girls learned to do at age 12 in Home Economics class. We  didn't yet hate Spanish-speaking people either.

But OMG, the size chart is the most stunning thing. As a populace we are a lot broader and dumpier than we used to be, and ready-to-wear manufacturers have adjusted clothing sizes accordingly (called "vanity sizing") and although today I wear clothes labeled "small" or "extra small," size 4 or 6, and folks call me "model thin," by the standards of 30 years ago I'd be size 14-16.

Wash Your Hair Once a Week

I keep this old home-economics book, from a box of  secondhand books somebody gave us when I was a kid, because it seriously changed my life, telling me for the first time how to sit, dress, look, choose and coordinate colors and clothing styles (what?) and amazingly, said (this was 1957): "The normal scalp may be shampooed every one or two weeks. A weekly shampoo is necessary if the air is heavy with smoke and dust, or if the hair is light in color."

Shampoo every two weeks? I once went four days and my hair smelled like the camel/rhino enclosure at the zoo. What kind of world was it that this book contained? A world of either/ors, I guess:

In the culture of 50 years later, now our hair is clean but typically our posture much more resembles the dreamer/beatnik/free spirit's on the right. In fact we like her better; the controlled one is a "brownie" or "teacher's pet" or "sucking up" and certainly the boys would say she's a "high-maintenance" chick. The girl on the right -- she might let the boys get to second base, or even third.

Maybe when I was 9 and first read through this book I knew the answer to the question just above, but as an adult I understand, completely, the girl on the right.

Oh No; You Must Care For Me

Thought I'd run up some curtains on my Kenmore sewing machine, at purchase guaranteed for 25 years. "Good Lord," I thought, when I asked for and received this as my college-graduation gift, "It's guaranteed until 2003," and by then we'd all be piloting flying saucers. "I might go hungry," I told my parents then, "but with this I'll never go naked." And I never have, although I quit sewing dresses, pants and skirts around 1999, when clothes got so cheap that fabric and notions cost more, and my sewing skills honed in junior high school rusted out. Few things are as piercingly clear as when someone eyes your outfit and says, "Did you make that?" I use this wonderfully-made, solid-state, 23-pound machine rarely and take it totally for granted.

Curtains, however, I can still run up with confidence. Thirty-six years after the purchase and the five free lessons at an urban Sears store, I chose black fleece to insulate my single-pane windows when the cold is deep--as it will be someday soon.
I set to work. Straight seams are no problem. But the needle clanked and stuck, and the thread snarled, amassed on the underside and broke, and the machine whined and resisted and I finally consulted the instruction book, a fascinating object in its own right.

My mechanical masterpiece was asking me to clean and oil it and recalibrate the thread and bobbin tensions, using the tools that came with it. Instead of a blue screen and non-response it spoke and told me in its language, now almost a lost language, that it needed TLC. Just a little. Now it runs sleekly.

People Under 30 Don't Know What This Is

Back before Wal-Mart, kids, if you wanted cheaps**t clothes you had to make them yourself. This is a sewing box. (A what box?) In this plastic box I bought at a Tupperware party in college I keep my sewing tools and notions: spools, bobbins, presser feet, pinking shears, seam rippers, tailor's chalk,stray buttons (in the metal Curad bandage can -- band-aids used to come in metal cans, y'all) and even a couple of patterns for simple skirts and pants.

Home Ec class taught me so well how to sew that today it's all muscle memory. On my mom's machine I sewed short-shorts, miniskirts, hip-huggers, halter tops and prom dresses--all the stylish things she wouldn't buy me. Because cheaps**t imported clothing was invented soon after I got my own machine [pictured below] it has been used mostly to make curtains and pillowcases and for mending.

This solid-state cast-iron finely-engineered Kenmore with a 25-year guarantee which ran out in 2002, with me oiling it now and then, is good as new. At college graduation--I didn't have a job lined up yet; them was hard times--I thanked my parents for this college-graduation gift, saying, "I might go hungry. But I'll never go naked." Along with this ultramodern zig-zag-capable machine that made its own buttonholes -- a marvel that women gathered round to see, they really did! -- came lessons in how to use it, at the Sears store in midtown Milwaukee on 35th Street. I walked there from 13th Street. Thought nothing of it. Not only did we SEW back then. We walked. An' it was uphill both ways.