We don't value craftsmanship anymore! All we value is ruthless efficiency, and I say we deny our own humanity that way! Without appreciation for grace and beauty, there's no pleasure in creating things and no pleasure in having them! Our lives are made drearier, rather than richer! How can a person take pride in his work when skill and care are considered luxuries! We're not machines! We have a human need for craftsmanship!

Bill Watterson, There's Treasure Everywhere

Greetings Dear Ones!

Forgive me but Prudence has been on a total Rip lately… and for once, I am having trouble disagreeing with her. She is incensed by some of the comments she has been hearing about “immigrants” making a living as seamstresses. I told her she could have some space in this week’s blog to vent her spleen. (She also wants to have a go at Fashion designers, teenagers with no work ethic, and people who eat too much garlic before entering the fitting room but I insisted that this entry has to have a smaller word count than War and Peace…) I remind her that it is always best to “teach through delight” but she would rather give Certain People lines of Beatitudes to write in cursive until their hands ache.

Basically, a customer came into the shop, heard one of the other seamstresses mention that she was going to retire soon, and protested “But you CAN’T retire! This is the only place I can go and deal with people who, you know,” she winked conspiratorially, “Speak English.” That’s nonsense. All the local seamstresses—not that there are many—speak English. What she means is “are White.”

“We’re getting on in years…it’s hard to thread the needles, I want to enjoy my Silver years sitting in front election debates while I still can see the screen,” said my friend, laughing.

“Nonsense,” retorted the customer. “Lady So-and-so in the town nearby was still going well into her eighties. My mother went to her until she died. Only death or blindness should cause you to retire.”

“Don’t tempt me!” cried my friend, “I’ll take a seam-ripper to my eyeballs right now!” We all laughed, but the facts are sobering.

It’s true that Americans are not doing as much of their own sewing any more. It’s true that “foreigners” are taking over the trade. And whose fault is this? Who got rid of Home Ec. in the 1980’s? Was it a Communist plot? No, my darlings, we did this to ourselves.

The Irony (you know, as opposed to the Wrinkly) of the feminist movement which pushed to eradicate Home Economics classes because it objected to the notion of dead-end High School classes “for girls,” where future wife-lings sat hand-stitching little aprons in a home-made-pudding-from-scratch stupor, deprived both genders of valuable skills. Instead of saying this was “not for girls,” they should have made it mandatory for boys as well. No doubt, ‘the Powers that Was’ decided that children could learn these things at home from their mothers, like previous generations, while failing realizing that their now-liberated mothers would be running the Company Boardrooms instead of teaching them to make bone broth or cross-stitch. (Don’t get me wrong—I’m ALL FOR women in Boardrooms! I’m just not for people buying disposable clothing or depending on Drive-thru windows for nourishment.) Home Ec. was “redundant” and competed with the growing need for new technology in Computer science. During the Cold War, schools and universities began defunding Home Ec., in favor of increasing budgets for Math, Science and Technology departments. Additionally, the explosion of convenience foods on the market made cooking from scratch seem irrelevant. Students could learn the numbers side of “economics” in other classes not necessarily devoted to a concept of “home.” Had they only known…

As it turns out, Sewing is more Math and Engineering than anything else. (God help me!) Data on the critical and distinctive skills necessary for Tailors, dressmakers, & sewers from the Bureau of Labor Statistics show that tailors, dressmakers, & sewers need many skills, but most especially: Active Listening, Time Management, and Critical Thinking. The revealed comparative advantage (RCA) shows that Tailors, dressmakers, & sewers need more than the average amount of Operations Analysis, Management of Material Resources, and Operation and Control. That sounds about right. It also sounds like the basis of a S.T.E.M. class to me! (STEM= Science Technology Engineering Math)

The purpose of school is purportedly “to provide children with skills and knowledge that will benefit them and the community,” yes, and to give their mothers (and fathers) free babysitting while they are busy running the Boardrooms. Children often perform better when their tasks have perceived Relevance—when they can appreciate how the skills and knowledge they learn in their academic courses have real life value. We all eat. We all wear clothing. Neither of these shows any signs of stopping. Why not teach our children how to cook and sew?

We all invest heavily in making our children smarter—there is no end to the number of products, gimmicks, books, and computer games designed to make them excel. Why not bring back Home Ec. classes? The Waldorfians have the right idea—all children should learn to knit! Not because we want more mismatched socks in the world, although that would be lovely, but because it turns out knitting and handwork provide a host of neurological and wellbeing benefits to people of all ages. Handwork, like sewing and knitting, provides an essential learning medium—not to mention the irresistible temptation for classmates to poke each other with sharpened sticks. Sewing requires creativity, which improves the brain's ability to grow new brain cells (though not necessarily those that remember where you put the car keys). As mental deterioration is a result of lost connection between neurons, sewing actually promotes mental growth. (Never mind the Ginko and Ginseng! Fetch your thimble and thread!)

Virtually nothing in the commercial world is trying to make children Kinder, despite all the trendy anti-bullying campaigns in schools. Yet there is overwhelming evidence to suggest that the people who are most successful in this world are those that work well with others. The charming, the gracious, the generous, the hard working—these, with their higher EQs and the emotional maturity that creates compassion, forgiveness, tolerance, acceptance—these are the ones living lives of Contentment, Productivity, and Prosperity. Teaching virtues for their own sakes is laudable (Ok, Prudence, easy does it), but they are also profitable! Why are we not teaching these virtues? Where are Patience, Resilience, and self-sacrifice being taught? Who gives a damn what a person’s test scores are if she cannot have or be a friend? If he cannot understand and solve problems through collaboration and communication? I am convinced we learn these things first and best by Making and Failing. This is an important aspect of learning any trade or craft. This is why apprenticeships last seven years. That’s a lot of mistakes! What happens to people who want to Make Things but they are given messages that “No, it’s not safe to try that. You might not be good at it. It’s not safe to make a mistake. Follow the herd, little one, that’s it, right in the chute towards your local big-box.” Our capitalism prompts us to Buy rather than Make what we want. What if What We Truly Want is only available through our own imaginations? At what point in our lives do we make that decision to consciously abstain from being Ourselves by denying the intersection of our skills and Desires for the sake of Convenience? It’s one thing to lack the desire. But to lack the skills? Shame on us. Our children need these skills.

The truth is we are facing a trades crisis in this country in everything from finish carpentry to iron work and stone-masonry. Nowadays, when we say “artisan crafted” we think Beer. According to 2017 estimates from the U.S. Bureau of Labor and Statistics, the number of tailors, dressmakers and custom sewers, excluding self-employed workers, in the United States declined 35% to 20,440 between 2007 and 2017. While our national workforce is projected to grow 7.4% in the next ten years, tailors, dressmakers, and seamstresses face a decline of 10.9% over the same period. Most Tailors and seamstresses who retire are not being replaced at an equal rate. Many learned their skills from older generations in their families, or like me—“by guess and by golly,” not formal schooling. If we do not teach ourselves how to sew our own buttons on, and pay ourselves well for doing it, then we inevitably leave a niche market open to enterprising and skilled people willing to labor for the crumbs at the bottom tier of our service industries. And trust me, it’s Crumbs: Those who tailor for clothing stores earn an average hourly wage of $14.38. Seamstresses who work in the motion picture and video industry are the most highly compensated for their occupation at $19.76 per hour. Those who work at a dry cleaner or for laundry services earn average wages of $11.85 per hour. (By contrast, hourly pay at McDonald's Restaurants Ltd. ranges from an average of $9.76 to $13.78 an hour.) We are paying menial wages for highly skilled and technical work. In America, we demand this work, yet we do not Value it. We would never want our children to do it. We let other people’s children around the globe do it, while we groom ours for perpetual “education” and therapists’ couches because their creative spirits are thwarted. Other countries, such as Pakistan, Turkey, India, El Salvador, Italy, Syria, Portugal and Argentina are teaching their children better than we are how to do work with their hands. There, the art of tailoring is learned at a very young age, as it should be, to become highly skilled. We should Welcome these people from other lands and be immensely grateful for their knowledge and efforts until we get our act together and Make America Make again.

And we Must make America make again, or face a grim future: Have you not seen the Science Fiction movies or T.V. shows where technologically advanced People Of The Future parade about in geometric leotards, as if they are all on their way to gravity-free ballet class? It’s because our seamstresses will all be Dead by then and we will have to rely on computer-generated Xerox copies of spandex to clothe our nakedness. God knows what we will eat. No wonder they are all slim.

The facts are plain. The Average age of a seamstress today is 50. Eighty percent of them are women. The average female salary is $26 an hour, the average male salary is $40, especially if they have beards and Italian accents—you know, the “Rag-a-toui Mafia.” Far from honoring and elevating and empowering “Women” and work, the past four decades of our educational system has churned out a gender-neutral spectrum of increasingly helpless consumers at the mercy of their own fly-buttons and whole generations of children are growing up without realizing the Utter Joy of installing bust pads in a gown and finding out they point the right way! (There is nothing sweeter!) I love looking at people as if each one is his/her own work of Art. It grieves me to see that by limiting Domestic Arts in schools, we are giving them fewer options and fewer colors with which to create their own magical and dynamic lives.

Making two-dimensional cloth fit three dimensional bodies can be savage work indeed. It’s undeniable. Some days we are dehydrated from the sheer amount of Glitter in the shop. Some days we are tempted to name vexing customers after animals, vegetables, or exotic cheeses. Some days are enough to tempt me to run with scissors. But for all its crotch crud, chub rub, and the hot shit we accidentally ironed before we realized someone had crapped his pants, it’s not a bad way to earn a crust. I’m happy to share my crumbs.

I know if you read this blog regularly, you are a Maker, a Doer, and a Believer—or are drawn to such things. So this rant is not for you personally. The season of gift-giving is coming up. Please consider giving a gift you make yourself—whatever that might be. If not, support a local artist. And don’t cough up a hairball at the cost of a hand-woven Alpaca scarf that took a local weaver 30 hours of her one precious life to make. It’s worth it! If you know a craft—share it with someone else! Teach! Give of your Spirit rather than bank account. Help grow those brains around you! And goodness knows, as a nation, we need to grow our brains quite a lot before we must endure yet another election cycle—if for nothing else than to be able to determine when those we admire are talking Rot.

Be Well, my Darlings! Make Up! Make Over! Make Out and Make On! Thank you for your Good Work!

Yours aye,

Nancy