>> Susie Bright is an amateur dressmaker and a professional writer. She blogs at susiebright.com.
My mother told me that the nuns taught her how to sew. You know what that means, don’t you? Every garment must be as neat on its back as its front, each running stitch identical. All dresses are lined; every pleat is tailor-pressed. If you can’t make a proper French knot, you might find a ruler-toting nun placing one around your neck.
But my mom always laughed when she talked about her Catholic dressmaker days. When she made outfits for my dolls, she never got around to putting snaps on the backs. She remarked that my high school home economics teacher seemed like “an awful old frump,” and she finished my final project for me, while drinking a beer.
Before my mother died a couple of years ago, she opened up on a number of topics, including schoolgirl memories I’d never heard before. She grew up as “Betty Jo,” in a Depression-era, Irish-Catholic ghetto in St. Paul, Minn. The church was the center of social life. A nun was someone a young girl might’ve looked up to.
“Not all of the nuns were old, either,” Mom told me. Her sewing teacher, Sister Marie, was the youngest, and she adored — adored! — fashion. When Betty Jo couldn’t decide on a plaid skirt or a middy blouse, Sister Marie pushed those patterns aside, and pointed to a Vogue magazine cover: “What about this?” It was one of those sexy Lauren Bacall numbers.
“Sister told me she had some red silk she would give me, if I would make it.”
“She had four yards of red silk stashed in a convent?” I asked.
Mom rolled her eyes at me. Clearly I had no idea of the treasures secreted in nunneries.
“Did you have the pattern?”
“Oh no, we couldn’t afford that!” she said, exasperated with my stupid questions. “No, Sister Marie took my measurements, and drew a pattern from the photograph, just freehand, on old parish newspapers.”
“It was like Coco Chanel trapped in the Vatican!” I said. “She lived vicariously through you!”
“I never thought of it that way, Susie.” My mom
turned the pages of the photo album in her lap.
“What about these hot pants? Were those her idea, too?” I said, pointing at a black-and-white snapshot of my mom in a polka-dotted two-piece.“Oh yes! We called those short-shorts! Look at how crooked they are!”
“Is Sister Marie the one who taught you to embroider, too?” I asked. I’d brought pillowcases to Mom’s nursing-home bed that were in tatters, but they were the roses and bluebirds-of-happiness on white sheeting that my mom and I had sewed long ago, when I was little.
“Yes, she did,” my mom said. Her voice got whispery. Our conversations were brief in the last months of her life, and this had been a big one. “She taught me …”
She looked past me, as if Sister Marie was checking her from the inside out. “She taught me … how to stitch … a perfect French knot.” She turned her cheek to the pillow and closed her eyes, a little bluebird wing still visible under her chin. ×
Go to craftzine.com/03/bright to learn how to make Sister Marie’s Perfect French Knot.
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