The sewing room
Since childhood I've collected and pored over street maps and residential floor plans. This was a source of embarrassment for me; two of many odd hobbies and bookish interests, these confirmed my status as dorky misfit. Grown up me knows better: I've always been what is kindly called an "old soul," with a deep exploratory instinct and a fascination with objects and artifacts that help make sense of the confounding world around me.
Like a map, a good floor plan represents place. It activates my imagination; it's a highly structured portal (for my structure-craving brain) into another set of lives. I can envision the rhythms and patterns of the house, just as I can imagine the social life of the city, by interpreting lines on paper. In the darker days of my childhood I could envision my own life small life in these places, but better and brighter.
The old victorian-era ones have long been my favorites. They please my eye with their many nooks and crannies, unexpected angles and shapes, and ample stair halls that are the true center of what I imagined to be a lively and convivial home. Tucked away on the second floor of the more generously proportioned of those homes is often a small windowed space labeled "sewing room." There was no doubt need for stitching and mending in the busy Victorian home. Yet I believe these small hideaways might also have served as a sort of lady-cave, a personal getaway for women in an era when residential spaces were structured and segregated along gendered lines and the the home was organized to meet the needs of men first and foremost. The sewing room was, perhaps, her retort to all those smoky studies and billiard rooms.
For a short time my family lived in an apartment converted from the parlor floor of an old house that had many of the qualities and details, if not the grandeur, of the houses I loved of that period. The apartment had a back porch, a bay window, high ceilings, and gleaming hardwood floors and moldings. Typical of the time, the large and bright kitchen was flanked by two pantries. The service (or butler's) pantry had been converted to a bathroom, while the kitchen pantry (for food storage) was still there. My mother converted that small, windowed space into her sewing room. She stuffed its shelves with fabrics, patterns, and button tins. The space was large enough for just one person to sit with her back to the activity of a busy family home and work in solitude; it was cozy and perfect.
My mother's first marriage suddenly disintegrated during our days in this old house. I imagine that this sewing room became a refuge for her, yet another private space for a woman whose life was involuntarily turned upside-down and reorganized to suit a man's needs.
Dramatic family disruptions prompt dramatic change of circumstance and so we moved on from that apartment. Happier days prevailed, as they invariably do when we allow them to do. We lived in many apartments and houses after that, but it wasn't until California and an empty-nest house with bedrooms to spare that my mother once again had her sewing room. For about twenty years she's reclaimed a bedroom for a space that meets her needs first and foremost. This room evolved into a profound expression of the imagination and craft of this creative woman.
We live a continent apart now, but when i'm back home I love peeking into her sewing room and seeing her at work. She'll be sitting behind her sewing table, glasses on, machine humming away productively. She'll have music on (usually the 70s-era disco junk that she loves and which my dad and I make a scene of loathing), or - if it's late morning - a talk show playing on a small TV in the corner. The room itself is unrecognizable as a bedroom. There is no bed, of course. The closet has been stripped of its doors, long since removed so she can see and easily access the huge array of fabrics, ribbons, and other supplies that are the creative ingredients she keeps well stocked. In the corner there's a big cushy chair, and that's where I'll sit for a few minutes while she sews. We'll chat about our afternoon plans, or what we're having for dinner, or the latest family drama. Or she'll just listen, working but really listening, while I talk about my own struggles in work, relationships, and life. The everyday and the profound - "could you defrost some pork chops" and "you'll find someone new to love" - we've worked out a lot over the years now that the sewing room has room for two.
As an adult seeking my own creative life I've become fascinated with the details of this room. She keeps smaller things - buttons, needles, and other "notions," I suppose - in a big old metal shelving unit that her father kept in his own workshop in his garage (a space that was his own retort, I would imagine, to a home organized around the needs of his wife and three daughters!). Like all spaces where creative work is done, every surface has been put to productive use over the years. A while back she added a sort of island in the center of the room - really just some short bookshelves topped with a plank of wood - to provide an additional work surface and storage. There's an ironing board permanently standing in one corner, with an iron always ready to go; my suitcase-rumpled clothes provide a handy excuse to stop up in her room for a morning chat when I'm visiting.
In more recent years she's added bulletin boards and display shelves to the wall behind where she sits. They're filled with mementos mundane and meaningful. Here's a page from a scratch pad listing creative goals for the year; there's a vintage Chanel perfume bottle and a pair of beautifully curved antique shears. I'm touched that she's made room for me there, too; many of the cards I've written to her over our many years apart are tucked in among the bric-a-brac. Unlike her little sewing pantry she now sits facing the rest of the house, but most days there's nobody there; just like the old pantry the busy family life is right behind her. Our extended family is spread across two continents but we stay in close contact, and most days when we call this room is where we find her.
I've never known what to call her room. Mum just calls it her sewing room, like she always has. But it's so much more than that. She built a business here, hand-sewing beautiful children's garments from vintage patterns that she sold to a clientele around the world. She's done the hard work of financial accounting, strategic planning, and growth and trend forecasting while sitting at those tables. She's been a hero in this room. When a pandemic threatened her family and community she converted her entire operation overnight from fancy dresses and shoes to face masks. She worked tirelessly with the materials she had available and what meager supplies she could find to create a pattern and sew hundreds of them by hand, ensuring everyone who needed protection could have it at little or no cost. She's sewn quilts as gifts for new parents, a source of practical comfort for the precious child and weary parents alike. She's done these things for us, her family, and for our friends, and for people she hardly knew who needed something, and for total strangers. She's provided the fruits of her creative labor to anyone for whom her skills could provide something beautiful and practical.
So I can't call it a sewing room. It's a workshop. It's an atelier. It's a studio. It's the space where my mother, who has always put the needs of the family and community around her before her own, finally built a creative business that was fully for her (and she still found time to take care of the rest of us along the way!). It is an expression of her creative heart, every object and color a reflection of her inspirations, her achievements, and the work she still wants to do in her remaining days. It is a seat of counsel from which she's talked me through my toughest days. It's a museum to the living legend that my mother is to me (as mothers are to us). This room is inspiration to me to pursue my own creative work, to accumulate only objects that are useful or beautiful, to remember these are often one and the same. This room is my mother telling me to find my own creative heart, to be open to where this world and my imagination might take me, and to never forget that better days prevail.
