THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Friday, October 27, 1995 TAG: 9510260207
SECTION: VIRGINIA BEACH BEACON PAGE: 07 EDITION: FINAL
COLUMN: Over Easy
SOURCE: Jo-Ann Clegg
LENGTH: Medium: 81 lines
As a mother, I fall somewhere in the middle of that long downhill line that connects June Cleaver with Roseanne.
Like June, I cooked, drove and nurtured with the best of the supermom generation. Like Roseanne, I did not always live up to expectations. Especially the one that decreed that I should I be able to take up needle and thread to keep my family in clothes.
When I sat down at the sewing machine, terrible things happened.
Take the polyester tie I tried making for Bill back when such things were in fashion. My first mistake was in thinking it would be a simple project. Second was in choosing a fabric that had the texture of overcooked banana pudding bonded to tire rubber.
Before giving up I had run the machine needle through my index finger, jammed the feed mechanism and burned up the motor.
We were living in Northern Virginia then. The nearest authorized repair shop was at Tyson's Corner, the first of the D.C. area's upscale suburban shopping malls.
With a large bandage on my finger I carried the machine into the mall, past some of the finest shops in the metropolitan area. A half yard of blood-stained Polynesian print polyester streamed behind. The scent of burned plastic and metal followed me as I went.
Inside the shop, employees and customers crowded around to see how much damage one inept seamstress could do. The repair bill equaled what I had paid for the machine three years earlier.
It may have been the most dramatic, but it was not the worst of my sewing disasters. That one occurred at Halloween 1963.
When I found out that my oldest son was going to play the part of Wee Willie Winkie in a class play, I researched what was needed.
According to our illustrated copy of ``Mother Goose'' the proscribed uniform for Willie was a red and white night shirt with a cap to match.
Since there was nothing like that to be had anywhere in town my only recourse was to make the costume myself. And, since I was going to all that trouble, I convinced my son that he should wear it for Halloween as well.
It was not an easy sell. ``I want to be Huckleberry Hound,'' he told me. ``No,'' I responded. ``Yogi Bear?'' he asked hopefully. ``Wee Willie!'' I said, definitively.
And so it was that I got a pattern, three yards of material and a bag full of notions and went to work.
Needing three yards of material for a nightshirt for a kid who was only a yard and a quarter tall should have been my first clue as to what lay ahead.
Two and a half of those yards went into the sleeves.
If you sew, you know what I'm talking about. If you don't, I'll try to explain. The cap of each sleeve - the rounded part which has to fit into the top of the armhole - had about 36 running inches of material which had to be gathered up to fit the four inches at the top of the opening.
No matter how carefully I tried to gather the material, it wouldn't work. When I pulled tight enough to get it to fit, the gathering threads broke. When I didn't, the cap filled the whole armhole and spilled down into the side seams.
I cursed, I ripped out, I started over and quickly got to the cursing stage again. At one in the morning of my third evening of work I dashed off a furious letter to the pattern company.
``Are you out of your ever-lovin' minds?'' I asked them. ``This pattern cannot be made,'' I concluded, some four pages later. Just to make sure that the letter got to the right place, I sent it in care of a very close friend who was a fledgling designer with the company.
I never heard from her or the pattern company again.
Eventually I bribed a neighbor who had been a home ec teacher to finish the costume. It cost me four afternoons of baby-sitting her four kids, including a set of toddling twins.
It was worth every miserable hour of it.
My son wore the night shirt willingly enough for the school play. But when it came to Halloween he proceeded sullenly through the neighborhood mouthing a disclaimer as he went.
``I wanted to be Huckleberry Hound,'' he told each person who answered his trick or treat ring, ``but my mom made me wear this dumb thing that she made.'' by CNB