“As soon as I get my ducks in a row, one of the damn things wanders off!” –pretty much all of us

Greetings Dear Ones!

The constructing has begun! The new shop is taking shape. We have a good plan for the dressing room and I am helping to build a hemming platform and a cutting table, while the real carpenter does all the hard stuff. I work on things I can do, or so I think, as I drive GRK screws through soft pine boards only to discover that I have not hit the intended board on the other side and the screws now connect to nothing. I am possibly the worst assistant this man has ever had but we laugh a lot. I wonder if he is going to charge me extra because I am “helping.” When you come to visit and wonder why the facing on the bottom step looks like it was shot up with a Gatling gun—that was me.

When we take painter’s blue tape and section off the floor into areas of access and egress for the customers, it makes me think of how I construct temporary chutes out of hog panels to manage my sheep when they need shearing or medical attention. I have to anticipate where they need to go and where any possible escape routes might be. Likewise, in this studio space, I want to make sure people are not going to wander aimlessly, with no where to put their clothes and possessions except on the working surfaces or machinery. They need “their space” clearly defined and made convenient for them. We had several clients in the old shop who would make a bee-line for the boss’s desk and put their handbags and car keys right there in the midst of her paperwork! (We certainly could have used some livestock panels on occasion.) Some people think nothing of plopping their coats right over a working sewing machine, or even a working seamstress.

In my spare time, I am reading all I can about clothing and fashion design. A well-written but truly horrifying book I cannot put down is Elizabeth Cline’s Overdressed: The Shockingly High Cost of Cheap Fashion. It is making me feel about clothing the way Fast Food Nation made me feel about French fries. She is bringing my focus and awareness to things I have been so immersed in as a seamstress, I have only vaguely noticed yet impact absolutely everything about my work. In the last thirty years, steeply declining costs have made clothing virtually disposable, with economic and environmental impacts that cannot be ignored. Most of the cheap, man-made fabrics produced today are either cellulose-based and cannot withstand long-term, repeated washings, or petroleum-based plastic-ishness that will never rot when it hits the landfill, or some revolting mix of the two. There are sobering costs to pay for items that are out of fashion or unwearable three weeks after we purchase them, not to mention the economic hit we take at losing the domestic textile industry we created in the first place. High Fashion used to be designed in Europe, made in America, and copied by the home sewer. Now it is designed anywhere, produced in nations where labor is exploited, and at home, “nobody sews anymore.”

I am thinking a lot about what it means to look “trendy” and the ironically high price we are paying to look, well, pretty much like everyone else. Thanks to over-seas mass production minimum orders in the hundreds of thousands, our ability to look “unique” is dwindling unless we commit to expensive cutting edge couture, custom tailoring or locally made fashion (yay! That’s Me!), or up-cycling vintage clothing from back in the day when clothes were actually well-made from good cloth, probably 1940’s and before… And…believe it or not, all of this makes me think of Ducks.

If one chooses to make a living in the fashion industry, (and trust me, NO ONE is more surprised than I am to find ME making a living even remotely connected with the fashion industry!) it’s extremely helpful to have been raised with ducks. If you think rubber ducks are funny, you should definitely try live ones. Growing up, our one-acre pond was home to an ever-evolving flock of anonymous ducks. Mostly, they were flightless Pecan ducks—white with yellow beaks, black eyes, orange feet. Typical ducks. I never knew any of them personally. One spring, a lady at church gave my father a new duckling to add to our flock. Her grandchildren had been given it for Easter and they were bored with it now. The joys of watching it swim in a Barbie swimming pool and eat cornflakes had worn off before they had even digested their jellybeans.

It was an odd duck. Instead of having bright eyes that looked like black beads, hers were a milky blue. Her beak was hot pink. Severely malnourished, she had no down on a body the color of dingy scrambled eggs. For the next few weeks, my sister carried her in her coat to keep her warm. The little duck hooked her neck over my sister’s shoulder to hang on, trilling a constant cooing sound. She never learned to quack. We called her “Mello.”

In time, Mello’s flight feathers grew in and, unlike our other ducks, she actually learned to fly. Unfortunately, she only flew UP. Never down. We were forever rescuing her out of trees and from rooftops. Once, she landed on a sleeping horse in a nearby pasture and together they looked like Pegasus for a blazing moment before the terrified creature stampeded through the nearest fence. She didn’t exactly take to water, um, like a duck, either. When winter came, she got frozen alive in the pond. I broke her out of the ice and carried her to the house. The sight of my father, who came of age in the 1950’s, thawing out her frozen rear end on our kitchen table with a blow-drier gave me a whole new impression of what a “Duck’s Ass” hairdo really meant. She survived and devoted the rest of her long, colorful life to hatching golf balls.

She is the only duck I remember from my childhood. She stood out only partly because she was a different breed—probably a Muscovy. Still, she looked pretty much like any duck. What made her truly an Individual, was not on the outside at all. It was her Personality and the way she connected to people. It was her quirky habit of untying your shoelaces as part of her morning greeting. It was the way she would ride around on my sister’s shoulder or head, lecturing her sternly in little burbling trills. (Yes, it was clear that it was a lecture of some sort. We could just tell.) It was the way golf balls made her broody. (The duck, that is, not my sister.) When presented with a golf ball, immediately she would begin tucking it under her body with her beak. Then she would sit right where she was, on the golf ball, and peck anyone who dared attempt to take it. Once, in a burst of ambition, she climbed atop some tennis balls but soon rejected them. She was Opinionated, Passionate, Sweet and Funny and totally Unique.

She had a rough start in life, to be sure, and it made her a little weird—as rough starts make us all a little weird. But that weirdness is also what made her Knowable and Loveable. I think about that as I read books about fashion and the piles of clothing in landfills. I remember her fondly as I try to help women preen themselves into something Uniquely Noticeable. I’m not for one minute suggesting we should all sit on golf balls. But Being Who We Are, quirks, rough starts and all, takes us a lot further towards being Memorable than dressing like a bunch of Dodos from a big-box retail chain. We don’t need more Quantity in this world—but Quality will always have a home. Find your Love, your version of a Passion or a golf ball, and huddle it close to you and protect it with your life. Your one, precious, Unique Life. If you don’t learn to sew, you might soon be forced to dress like everyone else, but for Heaven’s Sakes, BE YOU, no matter what your plumage looks like. Fly UP, my Dearies. Fly Up!

I love you SEW much!!

Yours aye,

Nancy