JD, Gouache and watercolor on board
Every material detail of this spool of green thread speaks of another era. The color and texture of the spun strands, tightly wound, suggest a time when fabrics like silk and satin had a role in the wardrobe of what were known as “young ladies” attending cotillion dances. The die-cut paper label is printed in two colors, the relief technique visible in the deep impressions, its intact seal punctured when it was shoved onto the spindle of a sewing machine. The wooden spool was made at a time when an industrial lathe churned out these objects along an endless assembly line to supply the “notions” industry connected to sewing.[1] Wood for the spools was cheap, available, disposable and plastics not yet ubiquitous. The thread encodes a moment in fashion history, but also, my own.
From sewing box to sewing box, transferred across time and space, the twisted fibers coiled on the small spool have retained their lustrous sheen. Sewing was a major occupation in my childhood and well into my twenties. Making doll clothes, and then my own, was a point of pride, an economic advantage, and a creative outlet. My mother dubbed many of the creations I produced in my teens and twenties “sewing experiments” on account of their unique and often unusual shapes. Some were more successful than others. But this green thread recalls a painful failure made of precious velveteen squandered on an ill-fitting and poorly conceived garment.
I was a teenager, in that hideous many-year limbo between coming to self-awareness and achieving some capacity for self-determination, stuck in family life in accord with any metaphor you might imagine—fly in amber, tiger in tar, cow in quicksand, moth in a spider’s web. The sheer agony of feeling trapped overwhelmed everything in spite of what might be characterized as a situation of relative privilege. I experienced adolescence as a pathology whose only cure was escape through fiction, fantasy, and the hope that the pole star of adulthood would eventually guide me away from the family confines.
As the teen years progressed, the onset of winter and approaching holidays loomed each year with increased anxiety about how to appear at crucial family events where, like many others, I found sullen silence the only mode of behavior I could countenance. I was an awkward, bookish adolescent, without grace, confidence, or beauty, but I knew how to sew—sort-of, and so tried to compensate for my shortcomings by masking them in costumes. However, my ambitions for design often outstripped my actual abilities.
These were the days of paper patterns, bought from a catalogue in the department store. You looked through the pages of fashion sketches, at wonderfully wrought fantasy “frocks” in pen and ink outline filled with color wash that had no resemblance to actual garments. The final results of production rarely matched the items depicted on the printed pattern envelopes. Bodies did not exist in these portrayals, only designs. Arms were slim and empty, legs attenuated to narrow ankles, heels high except for the ballet flats worn with Capri pants or other “cute casual” outfits featuring plaids and checked fabrics. Waists were tiny, busts modest but high and pointed thanks to the engineering of undergarments designed to cantilever flesh aloft in defiance of gravity. I was at the self-conscious age where making most of my body disappear into invisibility was the goal, but my emerging curves had their own way with whatever I wore. Only a burlap sack could have done the job of concealment adequately, I believed.
The patterns themselves were remarkable items, printed on thin tissue folded flat into a compact envelope. This was brought to you by a clerk who searched for it in a file by inventory number. Amazing to consider that industry—patterns in every size for every garment in every fabric department of every store. The art of laying the pieces on fabric and following instructions for assembly sometimes required more expertise than the step-by-step lessons printed in the instruction sheet supplied. But it was the customizations I added to my garments that created new levels of complexity—and hazard.
In the case of the green velvet dress, I had begun with some basic pattern that supplied the “princess” line of the body and bodice, but I had opted to include wide bell-shaped sleeves and to cut the neckline wide and low to reveal my collarbones and neck. Alas, the scissors snipped too deeply and the result was a décolleté I was not prepared to wear. Ours was a thrifty household, by necessity, and the extravagance of having surreptitiously charged several yards of green velveteen to my mother’s department store account was something I was dreading to confess. But the redemption was to be a stunning outfit for our family Thanksgiving that would produce gasps at the skill and accomplishment of the work—and the transformation of my hideous duckling self into the female of some other species. The dress was cut so wide that it slipped from my shoulders and I had to create a fix for the error by attaching an extra band of cloth with a very awkward seam. The addition buckled, the line of the dress was ruined, and the entire creation collapsed with the finality of a fallen soufflé. Still, I had put it on, hoping against hope that the daring effect of the whole would overwhelm the minor flaws of a hideously botched neckline.
Unredeemable, the dress was still my outfit of choice. I had determined I would wear it and in part because of a pact with my then-best-friend. Our fantasy lives were shot through with clichés of romance and adulthood for which we were always the heroines, and a green velvet dress played a mythic role she had encouraged me to take on. Though she wasn’t there, she was the real audience for the outfit. But she didn’t share the humiliation I experienced as I came into the small dining room of our house, crowded with family, and confronted the appalled look on my mother’s face. In a matter of seconds the full scale of my actions—the unconfessed store charges, the secret production, the awkward production badly designed and poorly executed–became apparent. I had violated every rule in the unspoken agreement that existed between my mother and myself. The dress and the event were unsalvageable. I think I even took it off, to spare us the persistence of damning evidence throughout the meal. Some things cannot be fixed. Some lapses in judgement cannot be repaired.
Decades later, the sharp hot shame remains. This year, as the holidays come to an end, I feel the undertow of melancholy that accompanies them in the way they mark the milestones of other past events. These time spans are difficult to calculate. Part of me is still standing in that dining room immobilized, frozen in place by the immediate revelation of what I have done. Stuck in time, a freeze frame of my psyche remains untouched by any passage of years. The metrics of standard timekeeping do not match the emotional dimensions of experience. The seasonal melancholy is a form of review, like tax preparation in this season, that provides an accounting, the balance sheet of where one is in relation to one’s life. Running a deficit in some columns, profit in others, but overall, with age, registering a sense of loss for all that will not come again. As to the long-gone adolescence, its passing was an unqualified relief, but the pains of those years remain as deeply embedded in memory as the silver needle in the strands of thread.
[1] Originally, the term “notions” was used to refer to the small objects–beads, pocket knives, trinkets–sailors had on ships and traded for indigenous items. Because this was an American habit, the phrase “Yankee notions” was coined to describe them and then, according to various sources, applied to home-grown inventions. Spooled thread, like wound yarn, has a much longer history in the long-standing practices of spinning fibers. The suggestive association with the idea “getting a notion” is always present when I hear the word. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Notions_(sewing)
Sad that friends seem missing. My buddies made adolescence survivable. My best friend in first year of high school is still my best friend. We spent many happy summers fishing in the Eastern Sierras.