What Your Ancestors' Photos Can Tell You About Sewing
What My Ancestors Taught Me About Sewing
My mother, Netta, taught me to sew on buttons and darn socks and save buttons. She taught me to consider sewing a home craft, not a well-paid career., but a necessity.
My mother and mother-in-law, Pearl, lived through World War II when clothes were rationed. Wedding dresses were made out of parachute silk. My mother's wedding outfit when she married my father was a sensible dark skirt suit which could be worn again afterwards.
Why not a white wedding dress? It was her second marriage, in the 1940s. Her first husband had been missing, presumed dead, in a plane over El Alamein, a year before the battle which was won by the British and Allies and a turning point, leading to the end of the long-drawn out war.
White was not very practical for a wartime bride in London. In the middle of my mother's wedding reception, an air raid siren went off. Everybody had to go down into the dark and dirty air raid selter underground.
Her mother, Hetty, was a milliner. She wore a huge hat in the photo of her as a bride on her wedding day in 1910.
I wonder if she made her own hat? I am sure she did!
She would not have trusted anybody else to do it right. She was that type. She was the oldest daughter, in charge of all her younger brothers and sisters. Jews, Asians, and historians, will understand the idea of the eldest daughter being in charge. The eldest daughter had younger siblings. Her mother was constantly pregnant. Later, in the eldest daughters's teens or twenties, she had a worn out, elderly widowed mother.
Clothes Through The Ages
In the late 1800s, Charlotte Bronte had only three dresses, her dark every day dress, her Sunday best dress, and her formal black dress for funerals. A wedding dress would be a fourth new dress - so exciting. A museum of costume shows you that poor people, most people, had practical, dark-coloured wedding dresses.
After my mother died I learned from my father more about his family of tailors and seamstresses.
I have owned several unused sewing machines. My paternal grandmother was a seamstress. She sewed buttonholes by hand.
A Master Tailor
My paternal grandfather was a tailor in London's East End. 'He wasn't just a tailor, he was a master tailor!" my father kept correcting me.
"What's the difference?" I asked.
My father declared proudly, "A Master Tailor.was one who employed, trained and supervised others to measure, fit, cut and sew. The master tailor would often do the measuring of the customer, advise on the fabric, and style - to flatter the figure. The master tailor would often cut the garment. An ordinary tailor would sew the pieces together. The seamstress, such as my mother, would hand-sew the buttonholes."
'And measure up the ladies. For their clothes."
"I suppose so."
This was a revelation. I had caught from my mother a view of the tailors as being inferior beings. Her family was cultured, musicians. Her brother played in the BBC radio orchestra.
To me a doctor or lawyer or professor was a cultured and well paid, highly trained professional, whilst a tailor was at the end of the line of skills.
Tailors and Cobblers Before WWI
Not so. When an acquaintance heard that my grandfather and grandfather were master tailors, she was impressed and abashed, excited. She enthused, "Your ancestors were master tailors. That's wonderful. My ancestors were just cobblers, making and mending shoes. Tailors were one above us. Tailors the smart, skilled, well-paid people. If a girl from my family had married a tailor, she'd have gone up in the world!"
Tailors in WWI
The tailors of the East End of London made uniforms in World War I. "Huge bales of cloth arrived. You worked from morning until night," said my father. He had been born in the middle of WWI. He said, "I remember the huge industrial sewing machines."
My mother's cousin and mother-in-law, Pearl, ran a dress shop. She altered clothes for customers.
Tip - How To Deal With Hanging Threads
She taught me how to deal with a hanging thread. You do not cut it, which leaves an end, and which might cause a ladder. Use a needle or crochet hook to pull a loose hanging thread through from the front side of the dress fabric to the back.
Happy sewing. Enjoy recycling, repairing, re-wearing your clothes. And enjoy looking at mine.
- 1820s in fashion
- 1830s in fashion
- 1840s in fashion
- 1850s in fashion
- 1860s in fashion
- 1870s in fashion
- 1880s in fashion
- 1890s in fashion
- 1900s in fashion
- 1910s in fashion
- 1920s in fashion
- 1930–1945 in fashion
- 1945–1960 in fashion
- 1960s in fashion
- 1970s in fashion
- 1980s in fashion
- 1990s in fashion
- 2000s in fashion
- 2010s in fashion
- 2020s in fashion
Angela Lansbury teacher of English (advanced and English as a Second Language or English as a Foreign Language, French and other languages, aspiring polyglot.
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