Shame and My Sewing
Today I have a rather raw and personal set of reflections to share. I’m spending February working through memories of shame about my body. Interestingly, this has also brought up some memories of shame about my sewing for myself. I suspect this shame is part of the reason that I let sewing slip away from me as a hobby for over ten years. (I will say these are stories of people behaving very badly toward me and could be triggering for others with similar experiences.)
For context, when I was a teenager, we attended a deeply conservative evangelical Christian church. Sometime in high school, I sewed myself a Daisy Kingdom dress. Do you remember when those were all the rage? As far as I know there are no photos of me in this dress. But I remember it had a square neckline and big patch pockets on the skirt and I made it with a border print in some kind of aqua floral. I just spent way too long combing through over a thousand Daisy Kingdom patterns on Etsy, but the closest I could find was the two patterns shown at right. Anyway, I worked very hard on this dress and wore it to church one Sunday. A rather misguided young man wrote a note and surreptitiously dropped it in my big pockets. I didn’t discover it until I got home. The note read something like “Nice dress. Too bad you didn’t finish it. I can still see your collarbones.” I was so embarrassed. Nothing like being a teenager passive-aggressively shamed by another teenager. A strike against sewing for myself. I remember that I never really wore the dress after that because I had been embarrassed so deeply by those words.
A few years later, I sewed a lovely 1930s pattern up for myself. I used a retro-style print covered in 1930s/1940s paper dolls. It was a quilter’s cotton, which was a novice mistake, but I loved the dress anyway. I actually found a low-quality picture of me wearing this dress, as seen at right. I wore this dress in college. One day, I was working in the English department and a professor walked by and commented on the dress. I said I had sewn it. He said, “You know what would make that dress more interesting? If you cut all the paper dolls out.” For a still very conservative girl, this was weird and (again) embarrassing. I put the dress away, and I don’t think I ever wore it after that. I couldn’t shake how deeply creepy his comment was and it haunted the dress for me.
These are two distinctly hurtful memories burned into my brain, but there are no doubt plenty of more subtle ones. I attracted notice for wearing things that didn’t match prevailing trends. Sometimes that made me proud. Sometimes it made me very self-conscious and ashamed. Over time it wore down my desire to sew for myself. Looking back at my young self, I want to say, “Girl, there is NOTHING wrong with you or the creative work of your hands! There is everything wrong with them and their belief that they have a right to judge your clothing.” I don’t think I would have believed myself though. It’s taken decades in between to realize how out of line they were and how totally fine I was.
I don’t have a point to these ramblings. I guess I’m just ready to let that shame go. I’m ready to embrace sewing what I want because I want it and forget the world that feels the need to judge me according to arbitrary cultural standards or make weird pseudo-sexual comments. I started my young adulthood wanting to dress for myself. But I tamed myself for the eyes around me. No more.
