At Easter 2020 I got out my 36 year old sewing machine and sat it on our dining table. It hadn’t been away very far, but it was less used than in the past. For the next few weeks, with the background of stressed hospital staff on TV and radio, I manically sewed NHS scrubs out of old sheets, plus bags to store them in, from old pillowcases. Our doorstep became a place for pick up and collections, and just as the death rate from Covid19 started falling, some proper fabric turned up. Then I made masks, and started making morsbags out of leftover duvet covers, and just as non-essential shops reopened, the sewing machine stopped working (nothing fatal the staff at World of Sewing said).
Poor sewing machine, away in hospital after all these years, suffering from the effects of Coronavirus like so many others.
The sewing machine came into my life on my 18th birthday. By then I had nearly finished my BTEC diploma in Fashion Design, and was about to start what should have been a Higher National Diploma, except Margaret Thatcher withdrew that privilege, and exactly the same work earned me a Diploma in Fashion from Canterbury College of Art or such nonsense. No match for the power horses of college industrial machines, but my Jones machine did more fancy stitches than my Mother’s 1950s Singer machine (that lived in its own table).
My machine made me clothes to wear to parties, weddings and nightclubs, as myself and my friends grew up, moved around. It came with me from Canterbury to Tonbridge and then Tunbridge Wells, where it made my wedding dress, my bridesmaids dresses, and a waistcoat for my now husband. It then became my work, joined by an overlocker, as I made clothes, bags and hats from recycled fabric for a local shop. This included making some maternity clothes for me, and new curtains for our next rented house. I know from photos it carried on making outfits for friend’s weddings, until at some point it just became easier to go and buy something in BhS each time; it made some more curtains, then they came from Argos.
We made my daughter a pink velvet dress, nativity clothes for eldest son as he started school, outfits for a school opera – lots of sunshine tabards – then a dress for World Book day, Pirates of Caribbean outfit for school Christmas, party clothes for a daughter, until she became the age to borrow the machine and cut into my precious fabric collection to make cushion covers and bags. The scrap bag was raided to make a patchwork waistcoat for my husband to wear in his new band, jazzy fabric made shopping bags when we realised how bad plastic was, and all the time I thought I should make something for myself again, sometime.
Then in March 2020 we were thrown into lockdown, and I finally made the shapeless jacket I had imagined when gifted some jersey fabric 16 years ago. There remained that sense of wonder as a flat piece of fabric is cut, pinned, sewn, to become – maybe not quite what your mind imagined……
Carolyn Gray, July 2020
The Imaginarium 