"A time to rend, and a time to sew."  I have not been an expert at very many things in my life.  I have been better than average in a few, and totally incompetent in others.  But one thing I have been an expert at is sewing.  A few weeks ago, Becky did an estate sale for a seamstress who had died.  She told the workers, "We'll put mom in charge of the sewing room."  Which they did.  I know fabric.

When I was about 9 or 10 years old, my mom was in the middle of making me a velvet dress. She and her two sisters were always making me and my cousins dresses out of feed sacks, or out of old dresses they had torn apart--rended--to repurpose.  So getting something made of new cloth, and velvet at that, was special.  But when she tried it on me to adjust the fitting, I told her the dress was ugly because it was brown.  She didn't scold me.  She just folded the dress up, laid the pattern on top of it--along with the thread she had been using and said, "When you are old enough to know what you like and don't like, you are old enough to sew for yourself."  And that was the last thing she ever made for me.

There wasn't money for store bought dresses, so I had to live with the result of the rude insult I had made of my mother's work.  And it didn't take long for me to realize that I had made a big mistake.  My mouth had gotten me into a world of hurt.  From then on, if I wanted clothes, I had to make them for myself.  Out of whatever I could find to make them out of.  I learned what it meant to "rend" old garments and figure out how to redo the fabric.  And ultimately, I learned to sew.  And being the perfectionist that I am, I became an expert at it.

I can run my fingers down a stack of cloth, or a rack of dresses, and identify the content of the fabric by the way it feels to the touch.  I can fit a garment to your body so that it looks like you paid a zillion dollars for it.  I am an expert seamstress because my mom didn't overreact to my rudeness.  She just quit sewing for me.  I don't blame her--why sew for a kid who doesn't appreciate it.  Some of the best lessons we learn in life, are that our actions have unintended results.  There are consequences.

I taught math for 20 years on a college campus.  I sing, I play piano and marimba.  I write. I garden.  All of which I would say I might be a little better than average at doing--but not expert by a long shot.  But I am an expert seamstress.  I learned the hard way.  I don't recommend it.