Wait....What?!: Patterns, Memories, and Dust

Yesterday I went through all the pattern boxes to determine which ones need to go and which ones I want to keep. I came across this one. It is the pattern we used for our Pep Rally uniforms my Junior year in high school. We made the red one although in black and gold. That was 40 years ago.

I am not sure why I have kept it all these years because I never made it again. There was never really any reason to get rid of it.

Another interesting aspect was the cost of the pattern. $1.00 Now just plain old patterns are $12.95 or so. Of course they seem to be on 50% off sale all the time though.

I don't think I will ever lose my love and interest of sewing although I don't do nearly as much as I used to do. I made many of the girls clothes when they were growing up. It was/is harder to do boy clothes.

When "jams" were the rage for boys I made Jared a pair. He loved them but then when someone made fun of him at school because the jams were so long he stopped wearing them for a while. I asked him why he was wearing jeans in sweaty Louisiana heat and so he told me about it. I suggested that he look at the shrimpy kids who were making fun of him. It wasn't so much that the jams were so long, it was that he was so tall that they had to be long to be correct. And even more importantly those kids were little shrimps. After that Jared wore his jams.

I still remember the sewing class I took in 9th grade that started my garment construction adventures. In high school I sewed many of my own clothes. I have had sewing projects turn out really weird, kind of like the Bill Cosby show where the daughter sewed a shirt for Theo and it was ALL wrong. Through the years I have come to the conclusion that I should sew basic garments and straight lines instead of really fancy stuff. I've made blessing outfits for grandchildren. They turned out well.

Here are some other patterns I found. I could never have convinced Bob to wear these clothes. There were two things that I made for him. 1) a red down parka. He wore it for years. 2) a tan leisure suit. Yep he wore it. I wish I still had the pattern and I wish I could find a picture of him wearing it.

I made this dress for Leslie. We were shopping one day and she found a dress that she liked. I commented that I had made one just like it when I was a teenager. She asked me why I didn't keep it. Well..... I had no idea it would come back into style.