Dear Lord,

We dedicate this work to you.

We ask you to bless our hands and use them as your own, even as they ache from heavy scissors and sting from needles and pins.

May our presence at work today be a blessing on others and ourselves, though disagreeable customers may fret or nag, and leave our tiny dressing room with choking clouds of perfume, coffee breath, or last night’s bean burrito.

Teach us to forgive those who give us half a day to redesign an entire wedding dress that they knew four months ago did not fit.

Grant us your patience, Lord, when people grumble at how much we charge and blithely inform us that their dead grandmother used to do it for nothing.

We surrender to you our striving to make both sleeves come out even, asking only that the bobbin not run out two inches from the end of the seam.

Save us, we pray, from the drudgery of dungarees that need to be hemmed a quarter of an inch and deliver us from the evils of hemming the same damn leg twice and neglecting to do the other one.

Protect us from the Dance Mothers, Mothers of the Brides, or any other imposing female who needs to give us the full, entire, exhaustive, repetitive history of the provenance of her daughter’s gown.

May we measure as many times as it takes but cut only once. May we trust our eyes, not our ears, when someone insists he still has the 29 inch waist he had twenty years ago. May we hem and taper, taper and hem, until every young, male, bald ankle reveals its glory to the world yet may we encourage anyone over fifty to stick to cuffs.

Thank you for your faith in us that such a glorious mission—that men no more may roam your creation with broken zippers and missing buttons, nor any woman wear jeans that refuse to accommodate her entire ass—has been placed in our hands. We are humbly grateful for our many blessings. Amen