Happiness in Stitching - My Talented Mother: Sepia Saturday

This week’s Sepia Saturday prompt photograph features a group of women in America admiring a patchwork quilt  - their own work perhaps.  I knew immediately what  I would write about – my talented mother I have her  to thank for introducing me to a wonderful world of colour in crafts. 

 

Below is a part of the patchwork quilt she made fora  double bed, when she was in her 80’s. 

Mum  - Kathleen Danson was born in 1908 in  the small town of Poulton-le-Fylde, near Blackpool, daughter of William Danson and Alice English. At the age of 14, she was apprenticed to be a tailoress. For her going  into a fabric shop was like going into a jeweller's.   She was a creator in patchwork, crochet, collage, knitting, embroidery, smocking,  dolls & toy making,  with dabbles into  rug making, millinery, lampshade making and china painting.  If she sat down, she was rarely without a needle in her hand - epitomised in the motto that sums her up - "Happiness in Stitching".

 

My mother   set up her own dress-making business from home before she was married, working on an old treadle Singer sewing machine, as the house did not get electricity until the 1950s. I only came across this business card, after sorting out papers following her death in 1999.

Mum  continued with this this small home enterprise after her marriage and throughout my childhood,  working initially  in the spare bedroom which was icy cold in winter and hot and stuffy in summer.  I used to love getting the  old Simplicity pattern books and cutting out figures for make believe schools etc. 

As a child, I was a "dolly girl" and my dolls were the best dressed in the street.  But I have one huge regret.  Mum went into hospital for a major operation  at the time of the Queen's  Coronation in 1953.   She made me a very special doll, dressed as the Queen with a long fur trimmed purple velvet train and embroidered beaded dress. I so wish now I had kept it as a family heirloom, but of course by the time I became a teenager, dolls went overboard and there is not even a photograph.  

My own daughter had a collection of Cindy dolls - the British version of Barbie, I think - with a lovely wardrobe of clothes again made by  my mother.  Mum was in her mid 70's  and with fading eyesight, yet the small scale stitching on the clothes is so impressive

My mother was a typical  1950s and 60s homemaker.   She was always making something  - cushions changed their covers regularly, new patchwork quilts appeared on the beds and new curtains at the windows, worn sheets were turned,sides to centres,  old bath towels were cut, and trimmed into hand towels, old dresses were turned into aprons, and tray cloths and tablecloths were embroidered.  She was a regular contributor at village fetes and sales of work  and was called upon to help with the dresses for the village gala.

 

Below - my brother winning a prize in a fancy dress competition as a Yeoman of the Guard (Beefeater). It was a testimony to my mother's creative skills - adapted from a red suit of hers, my 1950's waspy belt and my father's war medals. I cannot imagine how my brother ever agreed to wear tights dyed red, and rosette garters.


Below - my brother winning a prize in a fancy dress competition as a Yeoman of the Guard (Beefeater).  It  was a testimony to my mother's creative  skills - adapted from a red suit of hers, my 1950's waspy belt and my father's war medals.  I  cannot imagine how my brother ever agreed to wear tights dyed red,  and rosette garters.

 

Staining Gala near Blackpool,  c.1952 - I am kneeling on the far left.  

 These dresses were in apple green satin with silver cardboard headdresses and I remember other years wearing peach satin and yellow taffeta. For me, the dress was always destined to be my party dress for the year.

More of my mother's creations:

    

 

An Alice in Wonderland collage, stitched  for my daughter, 1973.   

 

A peg doll, with pipe cleaner arms

One of many embroidered tray cloths

 I shared my mother's  interest in crafts,  but I cannot say her talent.  I have memories of sitting on the draining board in our old fashioned kitchen and being taught how to knit  a dishcloth from string.    I then graduated to a pixie hood and scarf.   In my teens I was knitting for myself  jumpers for school and weekend wear, and in the early glow of being engaged,  knitted my husband several jumpers to brighten up his rather drab wardrobe.

I was hopeless at embroidery and gave up on my tortuous efforts to sew lazy daisy stitch, satin stitch, stem stitch and French knots on increasingly crumpled material - a reminder on what it must have been like for very young girls to persevere at stitching their samplers centuries ago.

Much later in life, I discovered  cross stitch which had much greater appeal - it was simple, yet so effective in the way  the designs used colour.  I was an avid subscriber to magazines, and sewed away at cards, bookmarks, Christmas decorations. And more ambitious pictures that decorate my walls today.  

I always remember as a child reading a book about a little girl who was ill in bed, lying beneath a patchwork quilt, and her mother kept her amused by telling stories of the pieces of material used  and where they had come from e.g. her old summer dress, her granny's apron etc.  Itwas my mother who taught me in my teens how to sew patchwork - by hand in the English traditional “Grandmother's Floral Garden Pattern” using hexagons, beginning with pincushions and eventually reaching the heights  of a single bedcover. 

My effort in peach and green was designed to be a double bed cover, but it was such slow progress, I downgraded it into a throw instead, and it was one of the first projects I was determined to  finish when I retired.

 It  is using colour that characterises my pleasure in following in a small way through cross stitch, wool crochet and patchwork - the crafts passed on by my mother.   Thank you!   

 

 

 

Adapted  and updated  from a blog profile first posted  in  2012.

 

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Sepia Saturday gives bloggers an opportunity

to share their family history through photographs.

 

 

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