My mother taught me to sew at a young age. I was sewing seams on the sewing machine by the time that I was 8. In junior high I was making all of my own clothes. By high school I was sewing banquet dresses for my mother and even a wedding dress for my sister. I was good at crafting garments. I was not so good at picking the fabrics that go into one.
When I was 11 I went to Camp Fire Girl camp. Swimming, crafts, and horse back riding interested me, so I signed up. The camp brochure said that riding clothes were required for getting on the horses. My mom had confidence in my talents so she said that I could sew the necessary clothes. “Riding outfit” would be a misleading term for the pink floral concoction that I constructed. At the fabric store I reasoned that the main purpose of the riding clothes was to save my other clothes from hazards like dust, dirt and dung. Therefore, it didn’t matter what they looked like. I chose a simple pattern of poncho and elastic waist pants. I found a nice floral print in the four yards for a dollar bin. Striking a festive note, I added pink balled trim around the poncho edge and pants hems. My camp counselors were suitably impressed,
“Hey, you. Look out! You’re scaring the horses.”
Photos of me at that time reveal a complete lack of style. Sporting my headgear for my braces, I posed happily with my family on vacation. I guess I had a weakness for pink florals, because I was wearing a different wild flower print on that occasion. As a grown up, my best friend has had to struggle with keeping boys away from her young daughters. I can see that my mother had no reason for such worries.
In junior high, I began sewing for my mother as well as myself. My mom was a high school teacher and had to attend many dinners for her classes. She picked out the fabrics and I sewed all of her banquet dresses. We even created our own pattern when I made my sister’s wedding gown. My skillful construction of clothes led me to the conclusion that I would be a good fashion designer. My complete lack of taste and impaired sense of color, did not dissuade me. I discovered one of those old banquet dresses a few years ago. Evidently my poor fashion sense was an inherited trait.
I abandoned dreams of a fashion career in high school and opted for a more practical major of mechanical engineering. College, marriage and children occupied my time and there was little time for sewing. Laid off from Bell Helicopter in 1991, I became a stay-at-home mom and had more time for sewing. I took up quilting.
Quilting utilized my good construction skills and gave me an opportunity for creative expression. Unfortunately, bad taste was all I was able to express. I became infuriated one evening when I tried to assemble a simple scrap quilt. I chose to make it out of strips of different green fabrics. I had many green scraps to choose from. I tried myriad alternatives and failed to find a combination of five strips that looked good together. Blue green stood out of one fabric as I held it up to another. I put that down only to find the next piece was a yellow green that didn’t match the forest green. I didn’t have a good enough sense of color to select the few pieces that blended together. I only knew enough about color to see how horrible the combinations that I came up with were. It was an extremely simple quilt and I could have finished it in an hour, but I was so angry about the mismatched colors that I never sewed a stitch.
Then in 1997 five babies at Lexington Church of Christ were swaddled in beautiful quilts I constructed. How did that happen? I learned a trick. My quilting instructor revealed to the class one day a simple technique for matching fabrics. “Start with a print you like. Remember that fabric designers are very skilled at choosing colors. Take the print with you to the fabric store and pick out coordinating fabrics by choosing colors that are in that print.”
It worked! I made quilts for the babies at church and a wall hanging for the ladies’ craft exchange and a vest for my sister’s birthday and a queen sized quilt for the guest room. And they all matched. They all had coordinating colors.
Now I needed to find a way to dress attractively. My fabric trick didn’t seem to help me at the clothing store. Well, if I couldn’t change the way I wore colors, maybe I could change the way those colors were perceived. I needed to find a guy who had no sense of color. One who could find my twisted fashion sense attractive. Then I met Marty. He thinks I’m beautiful all the time, no matter what. I call it special brain damage. He calls it love. Problem solved.
