An unexpected comfort

 Throughout the last ten years my mother has given me her patterns.  I love these patterns not just because they are from the 60’s and 70’s but because they tell a story.  She sewed for herself and her young children. She was creative and often tweaked things to make them even more stylish.  I don’t really remember much of what she made as I was born well into my parents marriage that well, to be blunt, kind of was falling apart at the seams (oi, a pun).

These patterns are a reminder of a happier time for her, a time when I think she felt most like herself.  Even as a child I looked through these patterns and marveled that my mother chose them.  My older siblings had silk little slippers and crisp cotton playsuits. She was a doting young mother and wife and homemaker. Every picture from those years  shows a sparkle in her eye and a baby on her hip. 

Then a storm of stress and challenge and concern arrived and kind of swept that security she thrived on away.  Selfishly I grew up resenting that storm and what it did to our family.  It is something I still struggle with as an adult…as a wife and mother.  Family and home are the two most important things in my heart.

When I make something from my mother’s pattern box it brings me closer to her.  The tissue is cut and neatly folded in the envelopes.  I run my hands over the pieces and imagine that hers were the last hands to do the same. 

I made this nightgown last week (view 2 on the pattern above—Simp 7096) and each time I get ready for bed and see it hanging in the bathroom it comforts me like a mother’s hug.  We live far apart and those mother’s hugs are too few.

This pattern is for sale here in size 12.  I am a size 6-8  and made the size 12 pattern and it fits fine. 

PS Thanks for being my therapist.