Historians of fashion seem to agree that by the time I was born, in 1969, the sun was already setting on the Golden Age of Sewing, but there were few signs of this decline where I was growing up, in South Bend, Indiana. My mother, like so many mothers, owned a sewing machine and knew how to use it. How had this come to be? I asked her recently. She gave a verbal shrug, over the phone from Houston, where she lives now. “If you read the directions and followed the pattern, it would come out all right,” she recalled. She didn’t even remember, perhaps because they were as ordinary to her as grocery shopping, our trips to the fabric store.
Oh, the fabric store. Even now, decades later, when…
