Yesterday was a perfect day. For the past twenty-four years I have been creating and selling fine handmade trinkets, little bits of this and that to nourish your soul, embellish your home and simply to make you smile. Once upon a time, further back toward the middle of those twenty-four years, I used to spend the first months of each year designing fanciful new doodads and gewgaws. Tucked up in front of a blazing fire with my sketchbook, needles, threads and stacks upon stacks of fabric, I would design, create and perfect fanciful cloth dreams. While the winter winds blew and Mother Nature sprinkled the world with icy “glitter”, I would stay at home and work away on anything my heart desired.
Time moves on and things change, as they always do. I no longer have the luxury of wiling away all of my winter days working on new designs. What I have now are a few perfect days each year that recreate the gift of past times. Yesterday was one of those days.
I spent the day making samples for my Izannah class instruction book. It was wonderful to have an “all Izannah” day. In the morning I rummaged through my attic to find cotton and wool stuffing. I could tell it was going to be a stellar day when I managed to burrow through my stash of antique fabrics and lay my hands on all three of the fabrics I needed to find in the very first box! Then I sat down at one of my favorite sewing machines, my mid-1940’s Singer Featherweight and sewed body parts together for several hours. I would have liked to use my Great-Grandmother Lovelady’s Singer treadle machine, but my sewing room was too icy cold and the treadle isn’t anyone’s idea of portable. 🙂
I took a short break to make a big pot of French Onion soup for lunch, and because I was having such a charmed day, my husband Brian cut up all of the onions for me. Just so I wouldn’t cry.
In the afternoon and evening, I moved to my front parlor. There I built a warm, toasty fire in my Shaker box stove and pulled my Sheraton sewing table right in front of it to work on. I love my sewing table, not just because it has all sorts of wonderful places to hold my hand sewing tools, or because I can stash my current project away inside it’s fabric pleated “pouch” when I need to make the room look presentable, but because I like to think about all of the other women who have sat beside it and plied their needles during the past 200 years. It gives me comfort to know that while some things change, others remain forever constant.
When I was much, much younger I didn’t have the patience for hand sewing. It was something that I hurried through just to finish a project. Now, intricate hand sewing is my very favorite part of anything I make. I find fashioning tiny, perfect fingers and thumbs, like I did yesterday, to be a treat. I didn’t even mind too much 🙂 when I had to tweak my Izannah’s boot pattern for the sixth time and make yet another in a long line of sample feet.
Everyone needs a perfect day now and again. I hope that you find one of your own soon, the type of day that brings no bigger stresses and strains than having to battle it out with your cat over who gets the chair next to the fire!
Izannah Walker Journal 