McCall Pattern Company - Pattern behavior: the seamy side of fashion

I absolutely cannot, under any circumstances, sew. I just cant. When I was three years old my moms sewing cabinet got knocked over and crashed onto me, sewing machine included. That was my first brush with sewing and I was not impressed. Subsequent attempts to engage with the threadly arts would prove equally disastrous. My mom and my grandma, bless them, went to great lengths to get me to enjoy something, anything, related to sewing. None of it took.

My mom brought me and my brother to fabric stores and encouraged us to pick out patterns and fabrics that we liked. It was fun for a while, but we got bored and would beg to leave. She pored over the catalogs and pattern drawers for what felt like hours. Eventually we learned that yarn skeins made good makeshift footballs, so we practiced our running patterns through the aisles, pretending to be Kordell Stewart and Jerome Bettis. He was Slash and I was The Bus.

Inspired by my yarn antics, my mom signed me up for a knitting club. It was held on Wednesday nights and led by the Chaplains wife. The other girls were delighted to make complex winter hats and multicolored washcloths. I made one cat scarf and called it quits.

The following summer, my grandma pulled me out of a literal woodpile to get my colors done. I reluctantly sat on the edge of her bed while she plopped fabric swatches onto my shoulders to see what season paired best with my complexion. She announced that I was a summer and politely suggested I wear something other than my dads military undershirts. I asked if I could go back outside.

So. Despite a solid effort from Mom and Grums, I simply wasnt interested in sewing. I preferred to spend my time pretending to be a horse, or building forts out of scrap wood, or collecting live nightcrawlers from the backyard and feeding them to Barbles, my pet catfish. Girls who liked sewing were weak and boring. And I refused to be one of them.

Twenty years later, I got an email from my mom asking me to help her find an old sewing pattern. Like a good millennial, I took to Google and ran a quick image search. Hundredshundredsof vintage sewing patterns flooded my computer screen, and I was instantly transported to the plastic chairs of fabric stores and running the zig-zag plays of yarn football.

Some of the images were from my mothers childhood (an era Ive coined polyesteryear), some were from my grandmas youth, and many were from much earlier. Vintage patterns for men, women, and children dating back to the 1920s had been scanned and used as images in blogs or placed for saleall right there online. The drawings were certainly of a time; demonstrating outdated social ideals of gender or race or class structure. I was both delighted and horrified by what was considered acceptable even thirty years ago. The juxtaposition of the vintage images with modern dialogue generated a strong message of social growth and change. I captioned a few of the images and sent them to a handful of friends who agreed and encouraged me to keep going.

Perhaps most importantly, the packets presented themselves in a new light. The women posed on the covers no longer seemed vapid, demure, or girly. I suddenly saw past the traditional notions of femininitynotions I spent a lifetime rejectingand saw my foremothers as they truly were. These women were powerful. These women were complicated. These women had something to say.

So here I am, writing a book about sewing. Here I am researching a subject I once abhorred; burying myself in the patterns I couldnt escape as a kid. I am finally connecting to the world my mom and grandma share; the world they wanted to share with me since I was born. And I am glad to share in it. In my own woodpile, cat scarf, horsechild way.

Please enjoy.

Natalie Kossar

A cat-sized scarf, designed to be worn by cats.

TO MOM & GRAM & GRAMMIE & GRUMS

And to the women before us who went unheard