Needles & Pins

Today

I don't usually bring drinks into the room where I do my sewing; instead my glass of water resides on the bookcase on the landing and I take a sip while I'm passing by. And tea is taken downstairs. What happened this morning is one of the reasons why. I was stitching away at the little handbag that I'm making for my great-niece, pulling out pins as I went. In an attempt to prevent the floor becoming totally covered in pins I pop them into my pin tin as I go. Except that, for reasons that are mysterious, I'd decided to put my glass in that location and was merrily popping pins into the water instead.

In My Day

I made the intimate acquaintance of Mamma's Singer Sewing machine when I was about eighteen. Dresses in those days rarely reached more than half-way down the thigh and generally took a mere three yards of fabric. I ran up many a dress.

One I remember clearly, it was in lime green georgette with an empire waistline and little black cube-shaped buttons on the bodice. The fabric was so sheer that I decided that I needed to make an under-dress to go with it. For this I bought the finest white lawn that I could find. Cut and pinned and sat down to stitch.

Perhaps Daddy felt sorry for me, working away in the other room so hard or maybe he'd made a pot of tea for the whole family and thought I'd like a cup. He tiptoed in (at any rate I didn't hear him) and placed the cup just on the other side of the sewing machine. With dedicated precision, I fed the entire under-dress into the cup of tea before I noticed what was happening. I had to wash the still-partly pinned garment, dry and iron it before I could continue.

Which is why drinks in the craft/sewing area have been banned ever since, until today.

At least I noticed what I'd done before attempting to take a drink or there might have been quite a different end to this story.