Mason Jar Monday #3 In Stitches

Some bristle at historic vignettes of women clustered about the perimeter of a quilting frame, enjoying gossip and the companionship of a "bee" while men alone are trusted to push the plow.
Not me.

Others scoff at days past when school girls learned domestic trade in "Home Ec" classes, leaving male counterparts to wrangle with and create bigger, braver things from table saws. Not me!

I'm glad my own grandmothers weren't out in the field, targets of a charging bull, or that I wasn't given a chance to saw off my own fingers. Had those gory events occurred, I wouldn't be here now, sewing away, anxious to pass this gentle skill to the four lovely young ladies I call granddaughters.

I think you can be satisfied that women are no longer bred for the purpose of keeping men in hand sewn britches and home made stew, yet still covet, for ourselves, the territory of learning to thread and pull a needle at the knee of an attentive grandmother. That is where I learned to sew and that is where my granddaughters will too. Some tasks simply are proprietary to women, and men have no business snooping around, attempting to probe the secrets of our sewing baskets! We carefully tuck them away between use because they hold not only what we need to create beauty right now, but also the expectation that someday our own will reach deep inside the same place to carry forward our legacy to a next generation.

I don't have a sewing basket that evokes nostalgic memory of me sitting fireside, mending an army of family socks. Wish I did. But don't. My stuff spills inside and out of cardboard shoe boxes, plastic bins and rusting tins. Here a needle, there a thread, everywhere a scissors and not a plan inside my head!













My gift to my granddaughters is a promise. In two parts. From pretty patches placed within, I will teach each one to sew. We'll fashion doll quilts first, finding threads and notions my own mother held and often used. The timeless jars belonged to their great-great grandmothers, originally filled with fruit of backyard plots during the first of five generations I have known and loved. While we stitch, first one row, then two, then three....I will do my best to make each grand-lady come alive once more. My granddaughters will know from where they came and by whom they arrived.





I will elicit a promise in return. Tell and do, someday, the same, describing vintage jars with hand stitched nesting birds along with vivid tales of ladies past who bequeathed to them the gentle art of sewing......
















Click here for Mason Jar Monday #1 and here for #2