I was born in Bishop, California in 1943, a time when most women sewed for their families. I was the third child in a family of eleven children which was comprised of his, hers, ours, and somebody else's. Both of my grandmothers loved to sew, my maternal grandmother did some embroidery work as well. My mother and my step-mother were excellent seamstresses. My mother crocheted and embroidered, my step-mother knitted. This was an early training ground for me and I loved it.
Sometimes as a young child, I would come home from school and find my mother at her sewing machine. I would sit on her bed and watch her for hours as she constructed clothing for us to wear. Rarely a word exchanged between us during those times but I remember thinking that someday I was going to learn to sew. My time finally came and I eventually learned to sew and knit. I spent as much time as I could in my teenage years practicing these arts. I eventually became the proud heir to my paternal grandmother's 1925 Singer treadle sewing machine, a machine that I had used as a pre-teen, which now sits in an honorable place in my living room holding my flat screen television.
