“Four Generations of Sewers” by Annie Lois Pike, Snow Camp, Alamance County, in Carolina Co-operator, March 1936
As far as I know there was no sewing equipment outside of needle, thimble, scissors, and thread in my great-grandmother’s day, and my grandmother, Lydia Allen Dixon, had her first sewing machine in her early married life. It was a hand machine turned with a crank and made a loop stitch. This machine did service for several years for a family of 10 children, and later my grandmother bought a Domestic, which was one of the first machines introduced in the neighborhood. Grandmother was very fortunate in having two older sisters to teach her the methods of the day; one was really a tailor and the other was a milliner.
Styles and methods changed considerably from my grandmother’s early days to my mother’s and today it is necessary for mothers to go away from home and take a course in making clothes, learning how to cut by the chart. In my mother’s day the waists were cut with nine seams and were lined with staves or while bone put in each seam to stiffen and make the waist fit without a wrinkle. The raw seams were all pressed open and bound or turned in and whipped. The skirts were cut in six and nine gores, and linens and seams were finished like the waist. A nine-inch width of Crinoline was stitched between the skirt and lining below the knee, and the bottom was either bound or faced. It took eight or nine yards of material to make a good dress in those days, and the material cost from $1 to $2 per yard.
Mother and her partner could make only three or four dresses a week, sewing all day long and half of the night. They sewed by lamp light, too, and every seam had to be basted and pressed. For all this work only $3 to $5 per dress was the price received.
Dresses were all close fitting and the measurements had to be accurate. They were cut by chart and the tracing wheel was used for all seams. The lining was cut first and the dress cut by that.
There is a vast difference in my mother’s, Clara Dixon Pike’s, younger days and mine. Today we have every modern convenience in sewing equipment and patterns, and we have also the blessing of good lights to sew by. Home Economics is taught in the public schools and any girl may learn to make her clothes in one-fourth the time it took her mother to make hers, and for one-third the amount it cost.
Last summer I went to town to get a crepe dress and I found that a good one cost from $10 to $15. I then went to the mill store and bought material to make one. The cost was:
Four yards material, $1.99
Buttons, 10 cents
Thread, 10 cents
Pattern, 15 cents
Total, $2.34
The dress I made at $2.34 was just as good as those costing five to six times as much, and I liked it much better because it fitted me well and I could choose the style.
Looking back to my great-grandmother’s day and her limited equipment, I find it pays me to do my own sewing with all the modern advantages 1936 offers.
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