Amplify: How sewing connects me to a generational tradition

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Irene Galea is a business reporter with The Globe and Mail.

The floor: covered in fabric scraps. My grandmother: distraught. The blouse in question: hopelessly asymmetrical.

“You’re going to have to unpick the entire seam,” she said, head in her hands.

“I’ll just cut the other side off,” I said, in a sewing-induced fervour.

Of course, cutting the other side off was not the answer.

For my grandmother, a seasoned seamstress with lined wool coats, bridesmaid’s dresses and full sets of curtains to her name, my amateur attempts at sewing an Edwardian-inspired shirt last summer were exasperating. I was unwilling, in my enthusiasm, to oblige the long-held tenets of couture, which dictated going in with a plan and maintaining ample seam allowances. Instead, I showed up to her house with the fabric already cut, and sat myself down at the sewing machine with great zeal but little training in the essential elements of fine fashion creation.

Two days later, I emerged from the fog with an orange high-necked top that was, I thought, quite wearable. On this latter point, my grandmother quite disagreed – but she admired my zeal.

“I loved your attitude,” she later told me. “Now you just need some basics.”

Basics deployed by women in Ukraine recently, sewing body armour for civilians to defend their country.

Basics that served people around the world in 2020, when masks suddenly became a sold-out necessity.

A century ago, Canadian women gathered to sew garments for our own soldiers. Sewing, this fundamental skill largely unchanged for nearly 60,000 years, links us to people – especially, women – around the world. It’s a thread through time. When things go south, we sew.

I can understand why some young women would resent the craft, historically considered “women’s work,” both in the workplace and at home as unpaid domestic labour. There is no doubt: women have faced ethical atrocities in the production of garments for the global market. Where this still exists today, we must stand against it. But sewing remains culturally meaningful – from the traditional clothing of Indigenous peoples in Canada and worldwide, and as a means of self-expression for many. There is value, I think, in continuing the tradition of our predecessors while acknowledging that sewing has, in the past, been narrowly gendered.

I reflected on all this the other night while hunched over a ripped skirt last week, squinting in the dim lamp light, with my great-grandmother’s sewing kit open on my desk. It’s packed with bobbins wound in yellow and white and blue, and needles of every size – she must have been skilled. Another of my great grandmothers, ran a seamstress business in New York after the Second World War. Like many others, her daughter – my maternal grandmother – grew up in the “mend and make do” generation that followed.

For my grandmother’s generation, sewing was a way of life. You didn’t buy a new garment: You bought the fabric, and all the scraps would be turned into a doormat. Her coats would come from larger coats, cut down to fit. I think this approach – born of the lack resources available at the time – is one of the reasons my grandmother is so resourceful. “If everything was cut off, I can make bread, I can fix shoes and I can sew,” she told me recently. “I can invent or convert anything.” It’s a capability I admire and try to replicate.

My mother, too, is creative and capable with bits and pieces of old elastic. And I’m no couturier, but I can hem pants, repair rips and craft simple garments when time and patience allows.

Yet today, fast fashion has made buying clothes off the rack so cheap that it is often costlier to craft clothing by hand. Global supply chains, exploited workers and ubiquitous advertising have made for fashion trends that change so often that hand-sewing couldn’t possibly keep up.

Gen Z, my generation, gets a bad reputation when it comes to basic skills like sewing. One questionable British study from 2012 claimed in typical headline clickbait form that “young adults are useless at basic tasks,” finding that seven out of 10 respondents said they didn’t know how to sew on a button, and 70 per cent would buy a replacement or go to the tailor if an item of clothing was ripped rather than fix it themselves.

Whether or not these numbers are accurate, I don’t know. But I believe that sewing will remain a crucial skill to wield. Not only does it save money and time, it’s a creative outlet.

When I was seven or eight, I cut the feet and waist off a pair of my mom’s pantyhose and sewed the remaining leg bits to my tank top as “sleeves.” It looked, in retrospect, dreadful. My tolerant parents let me wear it around Disney World for a week straight.

Expressing myself through this art form has always given me a deep sense of accomplishment. Knowing that others in my family – and around the world – have done the same makes the feeling even more potent.

What else we’re thinking about:

I’m no stranger to quick mug cakes, but the other day I came across “the 100 hour brownie” – a recipe for a dessert that takes, in all, four days to make. It comes from YouTube creator Alvin Zhou, who makes videos of his artful foodie exploits. Delectable recipes aside, the videos are unexpectedly cinematic. If you have a spare 10 minutes, take a look at his recipes for 100-hour tiramisu, 150-hour chocolate cake and 72-hour beef Wellington.

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