My grandmother loved to sew. She made fancy dresses, farm animal costumes for Halloween and lots of things in between. I remember sitting in her arm chair, or on one of her steps, practicing hand sewing on a tea towel, threading through the small eye of a needle or tying a knot in the thread. I haven’t sewn much since then, but over the past couple years, I’ve had blossoming thoughts of picking up this craft again. In the past few months, I’ve started to see the possibilities of a piece of cloth mixed with some stuffing, a different piece of cloth matched to another, or just imagined my fingers feeding these fabrics through the machine, maneuvering around the fast needle.
In honor of my grandmother, the 94-year-old wonder woman for whom I am named, Justin and I picked up an old sewing table at Circle Thrift, found the drawers on eBay, and some knobs at Anthropologie. Justin peeled off the veneer and refinished our find.
And to practice using a pattern, I made a stuffed cat and a bunny. I made a ton of mistakes with these projects, usually involving holes on the seams, but I learned a lot. I loved the magic of turning the animals inside out and filling them with stuffing; the magic of seeing flat pieces of cloth transformed into two small toys for our future kids.
