Jodi Hills

So this is who I am – a writer that paints, a painter that writes…

Tag Archives: sewing


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Ivy-ing as best I can.

I began mothering a set of lifelike plastic dolls from Ben Franklin at around the same time Florence Henderson familied her six on Friday night’s Brady Bunch. It was clear to me, as I lined up each baby in front of the tv set, smelled their heads, tucked in their blankets, that the only thing I was missing was a polyester pants suit like Mrs. Brady. Thus began my first lesson in patience.

I hope I asked, but most likely I demanded a trip to Herberger’s basement. “I’m not sure they make them for little girls,” my mom said. I swept my arm across my plastic family to say that surely I was no longer a little girl. “Maybe Agnes could sew something for you,” she replied. Agnes was a seamstress — and by that I mean she was my grandma’s friend who sewed things periodically in her kitchen/workstation, for women who couldn’t afford luxury, but still had a taste for it.

My enthusiasm was quickly quelled by our first visit to Woolworth’s in search of a pattern. My arms hung at my side. My head tilted back. Tongue out, grasping for air. Grasping for a choice to be made among the Butterick. She only had to give me a look. It was enough to say, “You wanted this. Straighten up.” So I did, but not without a few impatient floor kicks of my bumper tennis shoes.

I had no real sense of time. I could only mark it, episode by episode. The series of painstaking events made me wonder if I would even have a pants suit by the end of the Brady Bunch season. We moved from pattern to bolt. Bolt after bolt. Searching for fabric. Then I got measured. And measured again. Each trip out to Agnes’s farm seemed to take up another week. But then the day magically arrived. In front of the kitchen-stained mirror that leaned up against the wall, she smoothed out the navy fabric across my chubby waist, and I was more Carol Brady than Florence Henderson had ever been.

I don’t know what it cost. I couldn’t tear my eyes away from the mirror as my mother pulled out the dollar bills from her purse. Surely it was more than we had, but what I was taught, what my mother always showed me, was that it was not more than I was worth. What a gift. She’s still giving it to me.

I think of now, and it had never been Florence. On the days I need a little lift, I still play fashion show. And standing in front of the mirror, I smooth out the fabric on my waist, standing tall, straight, hoping, praying, not to outdo, but by some chance come close to Ivy-ing as best I can.

Portrait of mother.
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A spool of thread.

Look at her! I thought. She must be some sort of genius. Rattling off words like bias, baste and bobbin. I hadn’t been spelling that long, but I sounded out the new words and wrote them down in the Big Chief notebook that I carried with me everywhere for occassions such as this. 

My grandma wasn’t tall, but she stood toe to toe with the man in charge at the Husqvarna sewing machine store on Broadway. I could see his shoulders relax when she began talking about her serger. I didn’t know what it was, but he seemed impressed with her knowledge, and enjoyed the exchange of a worthy seamstress. I was always happy to be with Grandma Elsie, but this was maybe the first time I felt something different. I pulled on her polyester pants to get her attention. She put her hand on mine to let me know she needed to finish her order. A part she needed for the perfect stich. The tiny bell rang again on the door as walked through to go to the car. “What’s the word for when you feel really good about someone, like when they are really good at what they do and you are happy to be with them, like when your heart feels full for them?”  I asked her, sliding closer on the leather bench front seat of the car. “You mean proud?” “Yes!” I said, and wrote it down in my notebook. 

I hope she saw that it was her name beside it, but I’m not sure she did. She opened the bag of toasted marshmallows that she got at Jerry’s Jack and Jill and handed one to me. I smiled at her, longer than usual for a marshmallow, and I think she knew. 

Maybe I’m still doing that. Trying to find the words to tell about all the people in my life who have made a difference. Tell of the extraordinary things they have given to me and to this world. I can’t be sure that they see it, but my heart smiles long, and for some reason, I think they know. 

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Pillow, the verb. 

It doesn’t come naturally to me. Not like painting. Or writing. I usually have to get out the manual each time I wind the bobbin. It always makes me laugh because it certainly isn’t written in my grandmother’s voice. After each instruction they are quick to warn that the rules must be followed explicitly or you could ruin the machine. With almost any direction, my grandma was more of a shrugging shoulder “oh, you’ll figure it out” kind of leader. 

Not needing to sew every day, I follow the guidelines and the bobbin spins empty. Then I close the book, trace the thread, pump the pedal, tug at the bobbin, pulling it up just a centimeter or so, and it begins to collect thread. It just needed a little Elsie-ing. I smile at her picture that doesn’t guard the machine, but welcomes me, and I continue the conversation, making a much needed (if you know, you know) bed pillow out of an old mini-skirt. 

I show you the picture of the pillow now. But what you really need to see is not in the image. More than a pillow, what I really needed yesterday was a break from a slight worry. It’s silly, I know, but I can get caught in a cycle of repeating thoughts that just gain momentum. I suppose we all can. But I know myself. 

It was my grandfather who first told me to focus on something else. And my grandma, with never the luxury of needing something else to focus on, shrugged her shoulders in smiling agreement. 

Tagged by them both yesterday, I stitched my way back into all the pleasant that surrounds me. The soft comfort of love that pillows me daily — that welcomes me home. 

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The thread that holds.

It was my grandma Elsie who made quilts. We have them scattered throughout our home. Each one a hug waiting to be entered. (None of them wait long.) 

My mother loved to sew. But she was more about fashion. Because it came as a surprise, (and also upon my bed in our Jefferson Street apartment), I remember exactly the time she decided to try her hand at making a quilt. I didn’t ask why. I knew pretty early on that life was a series of attempts to connect. So I joyfully slept on the side of my high school bed that was not covered in squares, resting under the watchful hands of both my mother and grandmother.

I have that quilt as well, here in France. It may be smaller in size, but it retains an equal amount of magic — this ability to draw me in, hold me, comfortably. But perhaps even more magically, it sets me free to try the things that aren’t necessarily in my skill set. To keep reaching out when connections fail. To keep believing this might be the thread that holds. 

That’s a lot to expect, you might say, of a heart’s thread, but as I step from inside a quilt’s embrace, I know, it’s not too much to ask. 

We are as strong as our connections. 

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Buttericked.

The differences were many between my grandma and my mother. Grandma Elsie was much more of a Ben Franklin to my mother’s Woolworth’s. Grandma Elsie was penny candy and Crazy Days!  Grab bags and colorful aisles. Rules were loose and chance abundant. As a young girl, this was delicious, this fluorescent lit certainty — but not for every day. 

Perhaps it wasn’t as flashy, but I loved a Saturday morning at Woolworth’s with my mother. We went just as it opened. While most of my schoolmates rested on elbows before the television, fueling themselves with cartoons and Captain Crunch, I sat at the table in the back of Woolworth’s, thumbing through the Butterick sewing patterns. The ladies pictured on the front of the patterns were so glamorous. They not only showed you what the dress would look like, but what they would do while wearing it. 

My mother loved to sew. And she was good at it. Time didn’t allow her to pay a great deal of attention. Most of our Saturday mornings were spent at the laundromat, or the grocery store. But on those occasions when she placed the dream above the duty, we sat for hours inventing the lives we would live in pure Butterick style. 

I didn’t know for years that you could actually buy the patterns. I thought it was more of a library. They were expensive. So we pocketed the ideas. The dreams. And mostly, the time together. 

I can easily and often be overcome with Ben Franklin brain. The fast paced, bright colored, crazy day, sugariness of it all. It’s then my heart sits me down. Slowly. And says, let’s not be so sure for a while. Let’s just sit here and thumb through the dream a bit. It’s in this peaceful uncertainty that I can feel it — my mother’s lotioned hand, grasping mine. The glorious time slows to a Butterick pace. And I just breathe. In perfect pattern. 

“Not all of her dreams came true, but she was never sorry she had them.”

“Not all of her dreams came true, but she was never sorry she had them.”