Making A Dress

Sometimes life takes us by surprise and so it was yesterday when I found myself with my daughter Katie, in a rainy Barnard Castle, looking for a dress pattern, zip, and cotton thread, to make a dress! The last dress I made was at least forty years ago.

It started with a curtain, well to be accurate with a nose around the charity shops, in an attempt to keep dry. And before that an expedition to the Bowes Museum in search of inspiration for the second year of Katie’s MA at the Royal College of Art. (We loved the porcelain and the two headed calf – but more of that in later blogs.)

To get back to the curtain – it was the wonderful cream chintz that inspired us – and penniless students can’t be choosers! Could I show her how to make a dress? Was that possible? Well, I am never one to spurn a creative challenge and didn’t I grow up surrounded with yards of material, the sound of the treadle and a mother with a mouth full of pins? Yes you guessed it, my mother was a dressmaker and as far back as I can remember she made clothes for other people; sometimes jackets and suits (she trained with a tailor), sometimes wedding dresses and occasionally chic little numbers crafted from Vogue patterns.

She was exceptionally good at needlework and I was not, hence it was always easier to give her my needlework homework and get top marks.

It was never my thing – it’s too precise and I am not known for my precision or my neatness, but Katie is, and that’s what swung me. I thought we would make a good team. I thought I could show her how it was done whilst letting her cut, stitch and press, and I was right.

We made the dress in less than two days and it looks the business. We  had fun doing it and surprised ourselves by how well it turned out. I was surprised too by how much I’d learned from my mother all those years ago and how much I remembered. 

But the biggest surprise and the most unexpected outcome, was the way in which making this dress with my daughter Katie, brought my mother, her grandmother, flooding back into the room to sit beside us.