My Sewing History

When I was little, one of my favourite chores was keeping dry goods into bottles.  Sugar, flour, salt were packed into old newspapers.  The shopkeeper would take the amount needed from a large sack, huge tin or earthenware urn and wrap the goods with pieces of newspaper.  That gave me some reading material and a glimpse of a world outside of my village.

When I was ten, I saw a picture of a "twist" dress on one of those newspaper pieces.  It was a dress cut slim to the hips and then the bottom half would be gathered full. When you dance the "twist", the bottom half would flare up, exaggerating your movement. The folly of a pre teen :-) The picture conjured up such a pretty vision in my head. I showed it to my mother and asked her to make it for me.  She was livid!

Every year in the month of Ramadan, my father would buy a bolt of material for my mother to make clothes for us to celebrate Syawal.  For that year, my mother gave me whatever was left after making clothes for the three girls in the family.  "Since you are so clever, why don't you make your own dress".  Now, before that, I was never allowed to touch her good scissors and her sewing machine.  Being the foolish girl that I was, I took up the dare!

Even though I measured myself using whatever strings I could find, I did not cut the dress with enough ease.  I had to hike it up whenever I wanted to sit or squat!  I was undaunted. I cut up the dress and made a top.  Since I was allowed to use the sewing machine and the good scissors,  I hunted the cupboards for pieces of materials which were still strong.  I patchworked together skirts and tops.  Luckily, my sense of colour was pretty good.  My pieces turned out unusual but decent.  By the time I had to leave for boarding school, I could wrangle some clothes for myself.

In boarding school, I looked up books on sewing.  I learned all sorts of crafts from books.  Materials were a problem, there was no money for it.  I volunteered to make items for sale for school fundraisers even though I was not in the home science stream. There was absolutely nothing in it for me.  Just the sheer joy of learning.

Then, as luck would have it, I came across a used book bin, and for two ringgit, had myself a pattern drafting book.  It was a Japanese book, I could not understand a single word! But the diagrams were clear.  School holidays became filled with scrounging papers for drafting and unpicking old clothes that siblings had outgrown.  I was off on my sewing adventure.

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