I played on the floor next to your chair, the different colored threads accumulating with tiny balls of dust and small bits of fabric. My own pile of scraps and fabric scissors (never, ever cut paper with your fabric scissors!) in front of me, my first memories of feeling the blades slicing clean through the woven threads. There was that bit of deep purple velvet, sewn into some discarded hood. The fabric the softest thing I'd ever felt – I'd brush the nap over my face, my lips, my arms.

I begged for months, wanting to sit myself at the sewing machine and guide the fabric under the foot, to feel the power of the pedal under my toes. I asked you about every button on the machine, how to thread a needle and more times than you liked, "Can I help?" The summer before second grade you said it was time, and I learned to pin the tissue paper pattern to the fabric, line up the grain with the blue line down the middle of the pattern piece and mind the selvage. The completed orange plaid sundress and matching headscarf made us both proud. "Yes, she made it herself!" you would tell admirers at the post office, the library and the grocery store.

Fifth grade peer pressure brought my need for the "right" clothes. You bought a double needle for your machine, figured out how to make the stitching line up just like the jeans in the mall and made me a pair of overalls. We fought over my trying to explain to you that they were not 'just like A. Smiles' without a triangle patch with a double ice cream cone on the bib pocket. When I came home from school the next day, the overalls had an A. Smile patch properly stitched on. You'd bought a damaged thrift store item and reclaimed the patch so I could be a part of the crowd. More proud than embarrassed, I wore those overalls and told everyone you'd bought them for me at the mall in San Diego, which is why no one had a pair exactly like them from the store in town.

When I abruptly announced my engagement in college and you said you were too busy to sew my wedding dress that hurt even more than when you told me you did not like my fiancé. In defiance I bought a sewing machine and started making my own dress. You never knew this but I cried when I'd ask the neighbors or my roommates to help fit it, wishing it was your fingers pushing the pins through and you telling me that no one had ever worn a dress just like this one.

That machine I bought in defiance is the same one I now use to make friends' Burning Man costumes and Folsom Street Fair attire, the one I use to teach my kids to sew pajama pants, the same machine I'll pull out tonight to repair a hem on my dress for tomorrow's meeting. I think of you every time I sit down and thread the machine – our trips to the fabric store, the little life lessons, the artistry of sewing, the gift of self-reliance, the love of making, and through these memories I remain gratefully tied to you.

Stitched Together