Heirloom Sewing: Making is Meaning
What makes an heirloom?
I do most of the machine sewing with a 1949 Singer Featherweight 221. It has a small cult following in 2021, but 72 years ago it was a sensible choice. My grandmother bought it during her first two weeks in the United States, she was 20 years old, newly married, pregnant, in New York City.
My grandmother, an expert quilter, instilled the love of handwork in me. In my formative tweens, she took me to Harrod’s. Under the eye of the security guards, she turned designer clothing inside out to reveal the hidden fine finishes.
She was from a different world, where nearly everything was expected to be kept. Today, amongst abundance, there is value in the absence of objects.
I still use the first Gingher scissors I owned, they are little 4inch embroidery snips and a teenage gift. While there is sentiment in these items, it is their quality, utility, and beauty that give them relevance in daily life in flux.
Keeping these objects elevated them. Using them allows for a kind of time travel. Have you worn a coat of a friend? And felt a magic in your movements paralleling theirs? A wedding dress?
The object becomes witness. I may forget how exactly my grandmother would snip her threads using this machine, but it pulled against the guards in the same way I do it now.
In a similar vein, the time-traveling potential of antique materials excite me, especially the dead stock silk thread.
I imagine it has been in stasis, like Snow White, perfectly preserved, and eternally waiting— or Schrodinger’s cat, it is both wasted and cherished.
I enjoy imaging what the antique thread only just missed out on becoming (a 1930’s liquid satin gown? a 40’s day dress?)
There is romance in a second chance.
So much antique thread is used by time, the old dyes, sunlight and humidity-fluctuations degrade the silk until it breaks on the spool. Mites and dust can ruin it. Some thread though, some thread is as strong, fresh and bright as it was out of the factory 50+ years ago. The antique thread can be impossibly thin and gleaming in colors that are no longer widely produced (soft coral pinks, vibrant chartreuse…). It has a been a long journey finding a consistent source of this unicorn of thread, so it is with reverence that I pull from the finite, ever shrinking supply of gossamer.
—But it winks from the seams.