Homemade Love

Story ID:	281
Written by:	Gail Lee Martin
Organization:	Kansas Authors Club
Story type:	Family History
Location:	Greenwood County Kansas USA
Year:	1936
Person:	my mother

Home Made Love
Mother used a lovely Singer foot-treadle sewing machine like the one I saw in oilfield lease house at the Butler County Historical Society Museum in El Dorado. The museum even had feed sacks on display to bring back memories. Mother made unusual styles we found pictured in magazines like Country Gentleman, Red Book and Good Housekeeping.

I remember when Mother first added a peplum to one of my dresses, it was in 1931 when I was seven years old. Mother also made my sister a dress with a big 'bertha collar'. In an old 1947 Country Gentleman magazine I found a pattern to make sundress that could change appearance by buttoning on a separate collar and a peplum.

Reunions or family get-togethers as we called them were wonderful times for my girl cousins to show off the newest dresses our Mothers had made. In 1935 we went to Woodward, Oklahoma to visit Mother's sister, Mae Yeager and her family.

Aunt Mae's youngest daughter, Twyla was about Melba's age and she had a dress made just like my sister, Melba was wearing with large shiny belt buckle. That was the year when my cousins, Evelyn and Lucile Vining lived with us for awhile. Mother made us matching princess style dresses. Lucile's was red & white check and mine was green & white. We five cousins had our picture taken in honor of the occasion all in look-alike styles.

When I was growing up from 1924 till I graduated from high school, Mother made all of our dresses. As Melba was four years older than me, I fell heir to some of her dresses. Many of my dresses were made from hand-me-downs from older cousins. We live about twenty miles from the closest town. It always seemed so far because the back roads were just dirt and almost impassable in winter and rainy times. This distance made a difference in family living and as a result Mother spent a lot of her hours dreaming up new ways to dress her three girls as attractive and cheaply as possible.

Sometimes Mother would make me a dress from someone’s larger dress. Often she would make a skirt & blouse in contrasting fabric from two different dresses. I'm sure there was an art in making something so fashionable and beautiful from recycling material from other clothes. If my long sleeved dress wore out at the elbows, Mother would make short puffed sleeves, creating a totally different look.

I remember how proud I was to wear a dress of mine that I had outgrown and Mother had let the hem down to be longer for me. She covered the unsightly seam line with a row of rickrack and to make it look better added two more rows, one on each side of the first one. Another time I recall she added ruffles of contrasting colors instead of the rickrack.

In the 1930s when feed & flour companies began using attractive print material for sacks to hold their product and Mother was in ‘seventh heaven’. This advertising gimmick certainly had results the ad people was looking for, as every-one was soon proudly wearing feed sack dresses. Mother baked all our bread so we bought more flour than we do now. Back then flour came in twenty-five, fifty & one hundred pound sacks. Mother's kitchen cabinet had a large flour storage area built in that held fifty pounds or more.

Mother not only made dresses, skirts and blouses but everyday and fancy aprons. She also made ours slips, panties as well as curtains, tea towels and pillow cases for our home.

A lot of time and much thought went into buying the flour and chicken feed. We girls loved to go with our parents to Eureka, the closest town from our rural oil-field home, to help choose the material we liked best. Then Mother had to be sure Daddy bought enough to make what we had in mind. When that turned out to be impossible, we traded sacks with our neighbors and relatives until we had the required yardage.

I remember my most favorite style was the gored dresses. Mother would sew together either twelve, sixteen, or twenty-four tapered lengths of material called gores for the skirt that was sewed to a form-fitting bodice with puff sleeves. Oh the thrill of swirling around and around in those dresses with the skirts flaring out like a fan. I especially liked my sister, Melba's dresses because they were floor length on me. I would waltz and dance around until she caught me. (And that is another story) The rest of the time I wore bib overalls like a true tomboy and was Daddy's 'tag-a-long'.

Thirteen years later on a trip to the Ozarks near Noel, Missouri, my youngest sister, Carol Jean, had her picture taken in a different version of the princess dress. That pattern had been advertised in September 1936 as a back to school dress that had stayed in fashion.

I enjoyed another style called 'broomstick skirts' that have suddenly came back in style. Sewing groups are having classes to learn how to make them. They were simple to make with a very full skirt gathered onto a waist-band that buttoned on one side. After the skirt was washed, it was wrapped around a broomstick, with the band tight and flat, so the fullness just hung loose to dry, so not much ironing was needed. We wore plain colored blouses or sweaters with those skirts. Another version is currently called a 'squaw skirt' but my Mother just gathered a large ruffle or flounce and sewed it on the shortened bottom of a broom-stick skirt making the skirt extra special.

I really don't remember buying many new clothes, except those long brown socks that I hated to wear. Of course we wore store bought shoes, my favorite shoes were of the Weather-Bird brand. I don't remember the shoes but the cute advertisements caught every kids eye, so naturally we thought we had to wear Weather-Bird shoes.

Kids were usually hard on shoes and I was no exception even though I went barefoot ever chance I could, I still wore holes in the soles. Daddy kept them in good repair by putting my worn shoe on his iron shoe last that had different size forms to resole or put on new heels. I liked to walk in soft dust with my new heels just to see the sharp imprint of GOOD YEAR with a winged shoe between the names. In a reprint of the 1930 Sears & Roebuck catalog I saw a cobbler's repair kit just like Daddy's.

We always had a Sears catalog around home and Mother also used it for a guide to the current fashions. Sears was really our wish book but I don't recall wishing for store bought dresses.