Sewing Gene?

Is there such a thing as a sewing gene?  Well, I think my family has one.  My grandmother was a fantastic seamstress.  She taught herself to sew on her own mother’s treadle sewing machine when she was about five years old.  She was actually supposed to be taking care of her 3-year-old brother while her mother worked in the fields.  Well, she watched Virgil.  She made him sit under the sewing machine and push the treadle with his hands while she sat on her knees in a chair to sew.  She could also see through the window and knew if my great grandmother was on her way home.  She would quickly clean up her sewing stuff and thought her mother never knew!

As she got older, she learned to make her own patterns.  There was never any extra money to buy ready-made patterns so this was necessity not creativity.  Although as her sewing advanced, so did her creativity.  When she was 75 years old, she made my wedding dress without a pattern.  She had a newspaper drawing of the dress I liked and that was all she needed.  She could do the same thing with crocheting, quilting – you name it – Granny could replicate it!

Between my daughter and me, there are 60+ years of sewing experience.  I used to panic when I would buy a pattern and piece of fabric for Amanda.  She would start altering the pattern as she cut it out!  I could barely afford to buy the one piece of fabric.  I certainly couldn’t afford to replace it if she messed it up.  But, she never did! 

One thing Granny taught me a long time ago was that there was no excuse for the inside of a finished item to not look as good as the outside, whether it was sewing or embroidery.  This week I pulled a pattern out of my cache to make a changing pad cover for a custom nursery.  Out of habit, I skimmed through the instructions and when I saw the underside of the final product, I thought, “Yuk!  That is the ugliest thing I have ever seen.”  It was so bad, I even showed it to my husband who can’t tell a French seam from a serged edge.  So, you know what?  I put on my thinking cap, tapped into my sewing DNA and got busy.  And I think I came up with a very good alternative.  We’ll see what my customer thinks when she gets it.  I’ll let you know!