Sewing...Next Generation Style

Recently I began an heroic teaching adventure when I decided to take on a very eager 5 (and a half) year old sewing student. My teaching abilities have been flexed to the max in an attempt to match her enthusiasm and desire with her very real limitations and age appropriate abilities. Most often I teach grown ups, but being a Mama myself, I also teach my own children (hopefully something) every day. Teaching is a fascinating constantly changing landscape. Whether I am working with five year olds or fifty year olds, the constant need to re-direct and reassure, to shift gears at the slightest frustration yet continue to allow for the important sense of control is paramount. Some days it seems that my primary purpose is to give my students the permission to make mistakes, to experiment, to explore. There is such pressure in our society to achieve and strive for perfection, rather than exploration and experimentation for arts sake, or for life's sake.

My daughter is (almost) ten and has been sewing for several years now, not without struggle, tears and frustration. Mothers teaching Daughters is a universal story of trial and tears, struggle and patience. I hear the tale almost daily at my shop of Grandmothers & Great Grandmothers almost "magical" sewing abilities, followed up by second wave Mothers whose disdain for sewing was acute, followed by their own daughters who are inept novices at the arts of home economics; yet yearn for the lost knowledge of their formothers, particularly when they become Mothers themselves.

I identify with this generational tug-of-war with "women's work". My own Mother was an amazing seamstress who took on the task of creating her sister's entire wedding ensemble (gown, bridesmaid's dresses, groom-men's cumber buns & bow ties) every night at the kitchen table for weeks and weeks on end. Needless to say she no longer sews and is completely bemused by my chosen profession. She did not teach me to sew; nor did she learn from her Mother, my Nana, herself an inspired designer with exquisite skills who kept her nine children clothed by her efficient use of her Singer treadle.

While working with the next generation, teaching my own daughter and her friends the art of bobbin winding, I wonder if I will ever possess the skill and craft(wo)manship of my Nana. I wish I had paid more attention when I was a child sitting at her knee, oblivious to the vast knowledge and decades of practice in her fingertips. Will Daughters everywhere continue to reinvent the wheel rather than to learn, actually listen and learn from the wisdom of our Mothers?