On Monday night I took my best friend Jennifer with me to the Martha Stewart Weddings party to celebrate the wrap-up of bridal market week. Among other cool things, they had a Smilebooth to take pictures of the guests. More a miniature photographer-less photo studio than an actual photo booth, it consisted of what looked like a tall skinny ATM opposite a backdrop of silver tinsel. There was a container of gold glitter; guests were supposed to take a handful of it and throw it in the air, letting it shower down on them mid-shot. But as you can see, I didn’t throw the glitter early enough. I never knew when it was actually going to take the photo so I ended up looking kind of silly but maybe that’s the point – and the fun of it.
And yes, that’s a corset I made; it goes with one of my wedding gowns. But more about that later…
I can remember being just tall enough to be eye-to-eye with the needle, so I would have been three or four years old — and my sister six or seven. For some utterly bizarre reason, she was trying to sew a Zip-loc bag shut. (Yeah, I don’t know why either!) Obviously, she had no idea what she was doing.
Somehow I happened upon this scene and was immediately drawn to the action — or lack of action. She was awkwardly perched on the very edge of her chair. She had one leg completely extended so that she could just barely reach the pedal by flexing her foot and straining her toes. The needle was moving up and down. But since the presser foot was up, the Zip-loc bag wasn’t going anywhere. I decided that she needed my help…
Instinctively, I knew that the bag needed to be traveling under the needle, so I put out my hand to steer it for her. Suddenly we were sewing a straight line, and I felt like a hero! Then she upped the pressure on the foot pedal. The increase in speed caught both of us off guard, and my finger joined the Zip-loc bag on its trip under the needle. My sister had just sewed right overMY FINGER!! She freaked out and ran away; I just stood there alone, paralyzed with shock.
As if I hadn’t been traumatized enough, a few moments later the light bulb in the floor lamp next to the sewing machine exploded with a huge crackling and zapping noise, covering me and everything around me with glass shards and plunging the room into darkness. And I happened to be one of those kids who was pathologically scared of the dark…
So the fact that I am here in New York, making a career out of my love of sewing is something of a miracle, and certainly no thanks to my sister!
A picture of me and my two sisters from roughly the same time this story happened. The sister on the left, playing a cardboard violin she made, is the one this story is about. Im on the right, holding Glenda, one of my Cabbage Patch Kids.
I used to always look at this picture and wonder what gifts came in those really big boxes. When I finally asked my mom a few years ago she said, "Those big boxes? Those were all fake gifts, just for looks, to show people where to put the real ones." I still like to imagine that the biggest box has the Bernina sewing machine in it!
My mom has this puke-green Bernina that she got as a wedding present from my dad’s parents in 1967. It was, according to my mom, “the top-of-the-line sewing machine back then!” She was right; it really was. It was a Bernina 730 Record! It had this collapsible, fold out stand with shiny tubular metal legs and two particle-board-covered-with-brown-wood-grain-laminate countertops. One countertop was on the bottom that the machine sat on, and the other was a bit higher and had a bunch of hinges at the back and underneath it. These hinges enabled it to fold down flat around the free arm of the sewing machine and make a nice, large sewing surface. To the right of the machine and tethered to it somehow, there was this thing — in the same lovely shade of oxidized avocado flesh as all the knobs and levers — that had pegs to store spools of thread and bobbins on the top. On the bottom there were three plastic trays which swung out on a hinge to reveal a myriad of what looked like (at best) surgical tools and (at worst) hunting traps for small animals. These were the specialty presser feet: a roll-hemmer, a button-holer, and an edge-stitcher, etc. Though they scared me when I was very young and didn’t know what they were, they became some of my best friends as I grew up.
Whenever I go home to visit my parents, I always take a trip into the laundry room, where the Old Green Bernina has a permanent perch atop a custom-built counter. (After renovating 15 years ago they threw out that awesome retro wood-grain stand, dang-it!) I open the little drawers to see if all the little specialty feet are still there. I check to see which hideous colors of thread are still wound around the bobbins and what old spools of thread — you know, the ones that are actually made of wood — are still in the sewing box. And I look for any scraps of fabric that I would remember from my childhood in the drawers under the counter.
Without that Old Green Bernina my life would have probably taken a whole different course… I’m very grateful for it.
Well, it’s the first day of July which means it’s exactly halfway through the year — a very significant day for me because I am kind of obsessed with balance and symmetry. It’s like center front on a dress, a straight shot down the middle delineating one half from the other. “CF” is the first line you draw on dotted paper when you draft a dress pattern, and it’s the first place you pin the muslin when you drape on a mannequin (unless you are making something seriously asymmetrical, but I don’t want to get too technical here, and/or spoil my analogy). So I have chosen today to start this blog — the “center front,” if you will, of 2010.
Ever since Martha Stewart Weddings featured my Petal Gown in its Winter 2010 issue, I have gotten emails and phone calls from people all over the world asking where can they get my gowns, and what stores carry my line. I always have to answer that my gowns are only available from my studio in New York, that I make everything by hand specifically to fit each client, that the process requires x number of fittings, and that everything is custom. But there’s so much more to it than that. And that’s what I’m hoping you’ll take away from reading my blog — Colette Komm and her dresses really are everything she seams…
Everything She Seams... 