June 13, 2017 (Tuesday)
Today is National Sewing Machine Day. Here is a picture of a machine similar to the one my grandmother had. I was about 5 years old and enjoyed sitting on the floor and pushing the pedal with my hands. Invariably, she would call from the other room, “Don’t play with the machine.” So I quit playing with it..for a while.
The picture below shows Wanda and her first sewing machine, which she already knew how to use expertly. This picture was made a month or two after our wedding. It cost about $200 and we paid for it in monthly payments for two years.
Wanda made all of her own dresses, etc. and as the children came along she kept both boys and girls supplied with great clothes. I still have huge chests filled with patterns she used. Along with her knowledge of cooking with basics, she saved our family thousands of dollars through the years.
When Debbie was at Baylor, she felt self-conscious about her homemade clothes and asked her mother if she could possibly have some ready-made dresses from stores. While weighing the issue in her mind, her friends found out that her mother was making her dresses and they all began begging her to get her mother to make clothes for them. That put a different light on the situation for Debbie, because the girls really liked her clothes and complimented her a lot on her appearance.
When we celebrated our 30th anniversary with the Rockport church, the wonderful folks there gave Wanda a very expensive machine called a “surger.” By that time, she had gone through two or three regular sewing machines. She sewed a lot.
There were no sewing machines in Bible Days, but Proverbs 31:19, in its description of a wonderful woman, says, “In her hand she holds the distaff and grasps the spindle with her finger.” Those were the early days of very basic mechanization. The sewing machine was invented in 1790, 227 years ago.
I never learned how to use Wanda’s machine, but one of my jobs while in the seminary was in a feed store and granary, where I filled special paper 50-pound bags with chicken feed and sewed them shut with a sewing machine suspended on a cable from the rafters. Come to think of it, I could include “sewing” in my resumé.