Margene was a master seamstress. She made clothing for herself and her daughters. She made a shirt for her husband once, but decided they could afford to buy men’s clothing. So the husband and son wore all store-bought clothes.
Margene made her kitchen curtains, recovered chair cushions, pieced worn out clothing into quilts. Most of this stitching, like the girls’ dresses, was done on the sewing machine. It was faster, more efficient for the necessities of life, but Margene needed handwork to keep her busy after the supper dishes were done.
She did a little knitting and crocheting, but her real love was pulling a threaded needle through cloth. That rhythm soothed her soul. Embroidery met this need. She could buy a transfer kit with a design on it, iron that ink onto her own fabric, and stitch away. Or she could even buy a design already stamped on table linens or dish towels and get right to business. The local five-and-dime sold cotton embroidery floss by the bushel, and even had some of the designs she liked.
This tablecloth was one Margene started, but never finished. She was in the midst of it when she got the news that her son was killed in a car accident. She tried, but could never bring herself to thread the needle for that project again. After a long while, she did do other embroidery projects, but every time she picked this one up, her hands trembled, and her eyes filled with tears. If she couldn’t see the design, how could she stitch it?
All the above is imaginative. I don’t know anything about this project except I bought the unfinished tablecloth after looking at it in a favorite antique mall booth for months, maybe years. At $17, it’s beyond what I normally spend on linens to cut apart and reuse, but the soft colors, the nice stitching, the possibilities, kept beckoning to me.
Here is the tag the vendor included with the piece. Her linens are clean and pressed, and packaged to stay that way while on display. I could see through the cellophane that there were traces of the stamped design that had not yet been stitched. I could read between the lines of the tag that the vendor thought someone would buy the piece and finish the embroidery.
I could do that. I would enjoy doing that. I might actually do that. But it’s likely that I will include it in a quilt project with the design left as “Margene” stopped. An open-ended story – so many possibilities.
The portrait is a discarded photo I found in a bin at another store. I thought this lady had a story or two to tell. Turns out, she had a tablecloth.
Since I’m sharing this again in honor of International Women’s Day, if you are a new reader, you might want to read about some of the real women who’ve influenced me:
Spinster Sisters is the story of two of my ancestors whose stories impacted my life from the day of my birth.
Quilting Sisters introduces you to two women who still influence me today. A site search for “Joyce” or “Hilda” will yield more stories of these women.
