It is beneficial to live in the present. This beautiful October day. These people beside me. These costumes in my lap. 

But a remembrance keeps resurfacing about my sewing teacher from middle school. 

Today I cranked out four maid dresses. Gray with white cuffs, and a bow at the throat. The students have cheerfully whipped up aprons with lace around the edges, and frilly head bands to complete the crisp look. Some girls will carry trays, others dusters.

It is not because I am particularly amazing that I can chop eight sleeves, four bodices, and four full skirts inside of an hour. The seam binding in just the right shade was waiting for me in the cupboards from sewing teachers before me. The pattern was not precisely what I wanted, but having as many dresses in my past as I do it was a cinch to modify the design. 

The thing is, it is that very history that informs my current project. There was not the merest need to read the directions. Having bent over hundreds of Simplicity and McCalls newsprint pages with illustrated steps, there was no uncertainty about how to set a sleeve. Eight in fact.

Which fills me with gratitude. You see I did not know in 1970 that I would be tasked with creating the costumes for Annie in 2018. What I made then was important too, though I am not really sure if my mother actually loved the brown wool cape I gave her for Christmas. I don't recall her wearing it. But in the process of sewing plaid skirts, and flannel pajamas I learned how to spread yardage across the table and end up with a garment worth wearing. Several, in fact.

 

As it happens I want the maids to look and feel smart, as they dance across Daddy Warbuck's four staircases. Hence the relief to have a long relationship with pins and thread and buttons. 

It turns out that at least some of the ordinary directions that we follow line by line show up thirty years later when we really need them.