Threads
In a sunny week in 1911, the lease ran its course, and the shop was to be vacated. Jane didn’t have a business brain. She had a great eye and good taste, but ladies round Sankey Street wanted cheap straw hats, not an imaginative creations. She scooped up the last of her laces and trims and embroidery silks and pushed them into a large pillowcase, locked up and posted the key back through the letterbox.
In a few short months she wed the young man from the foundry and moved to St Helen’s to escape his mother’s wrath. All those babies….she had thought seamstressing was hard work but seven babies was a whole new world. Her young man was very clever and took up with the new electricity, fitting out coalmines from St Helen’s to Salford.
Church sales of work, babies’ frocks, brides and bridesmaids and party dresses and dolls dresses and trims around posies blossomed out of Jane’s pillowcase stash. But before the last skeins of silk floss and bundles of ribbon and lace were used up, war flared again. When she finally learned her eldest child was dead at sea at Anzio, Jane stopped making.
A flock of sharp-elbowed daughters cawed and flapped through Jane’s worldly goods. Discreetly grabbing, haggling and sifting through ornaments, brasses and furniture, they boxed up their portions and sent the rejects to the back-yard bonfire. Two sisters, both noted for their dressmaking passion, completed lengthy negotiations over Jane’s millinery scraps.
Sixty years after Jane shut her shop, her youngest granddaughter’s best outfit during a long hot summer was flared, faded denim jeans and a cheesecloth smock with a line of antique lace from her granny’s stash.
Seventy years after, a large teddy bear wearing a smock was propped on a chair in the room of a tiny new baby.
A century after, a woman wrote up her Grandmother Jane’s biography and loaded it onto an online database, with a photograph of a tiny lace scrap.
In a few short months she wed the young man from the foundry and moved to St Helen’s to escape his mother’s wrath. All those babies….she had thought seamstressing was hard work but seven babies was a whole new world. Her young man was very clever and took up with the new electricity, fitting out coalmines from St Helen’s to Salford.
Church sales of work, babies’ frocks, brides and bridesmaids and party dresses and dolls dresses and trims around posies blossomed out of Jane’s pillowcase stash. But before the last skeins of silk floss and bundles of ribbon and lace were used up, war flared again. When she finally learned her eldest child was dead at sea at Anzio, Jane stopped making.
A flock of sharp-elbowed daughters cawed and flapped through Jane’s worldly goods. Discreetly grabbing, haggling and sifting through ornaments, brasses and furniture, they boxed up their portions and sent the rejects to the back-yard bonfire. Two sisters, both noted for their dressmaking passion, completed lengthy negotiations over Jane’s millinery scraps.
Sixty years after Jane shut her shop, her youngest granddaughter’s best outfit during a long hot summer was flared, faded denim jeans and a cheesecloth smock with a line of antique lace from her granny’s stash.
Seventy years after, a large teddy bear wearing a smock was propped on a chair in the room of a tiny new baby.
A century after, a woman wrote up her Grandmother Jane’s biography and loaded it onto an online database, with a photograph of a tiny lace scrap.