This is crazy! My last post was 7 and 1/2 years ago. I am so committed!
So much happened in those years. We moved to a new house, started a new job (twice, might as well call me a milenial), Covid, two kids graduated high school, a black man became President, a big, fat, pig baby-man became President, an old man is now President. (Well, that's nothing new.) And in all that time I had the opportunity to make some amazing costumes and dresses. I'll share some of those later.
Anyway, my passion (besides laughing) has always been sewing. It has brought me joy, sorrow, creativity, frustration and happiness. In my 25 years or so sewing, I've been able to create beautiful dresses, costumes worthy of thousands of dollar (seriously, I got paid $1800 for one), cute bags, travel totes, and had the pleasure of a the punctured foot, multiple burns and pin stabs and even scissor cuts to my own fingers. When I say I'm good, I mean I'm good, but not very careful.
But I got to thinking, who was the first person to pick up something resembling a needle and thread it with something resembling thread and then probably make a costume similar to this:
The world was a dark place in the beginning. And then man (probably woman) created
fire. Not so much as created but
discovered. Suddenly, the world had
light and it was a brighter place. And
that’s when people started needing clothes, duh.
Sewing has been around forever. Longer than you? My kids ask? Um, yes.
We’re talking about 20,000 years or more. Necessity has always been the mother of
invention so when it became necessary to cover our hairless bodies, women got
to work. Yes, men can sew too but lets
be honest, in the ancient patriarichal world, this would have been “women’s work”.
I picture a cold, cavewoman climbing
inside a recently gutted animal and wrapping its skin around her. Then it fell off and she had to figure out
how to not only keep it from rotting and stinking but also, on the body. So, she picked up a piece of bone and
scrapped all the flesh off the inside and then found a tendon from the scraps
and wrapped the world’s first belt around her.
But that couldn’t have been pretty so being wildly creative and
intelligent, she figured out if you take a little in here, put a dart there and
hem it up nice, it could be quite fashionable.
Until summer when fur was too much. So Goldilocks tried other materials. Furs were too hot, leather was too
heavy, leaves didn’t last long and grasses got stuck in weird places.
But one day some bored Egyptian gathered a bunch of seedless
flax stalks and placed them in the running water of a nearby stream. Why? I don’t know, to make a boat. But the sun got hot and she just left them
there when mommy called her home. Days
later she returns to the stream. Extra
bored this time, she starts fiddling with the stalks, bending, twisting, tying. Eventually she went running home with the
first ever placemat.
Now that people had a way to make a longer-lasting, lighter
weight fabric, they just wrapped that fabric around themselves and secured it
with stalks. Until someone stabbed their
finger with a fishbone and realized that if it could go through flesh, why not
flax fabric. Ta da! Sewing was born.
No one has ever accused me of being an Historian.
