YELLOW DRESS - flash fiction

YELLOW DRESS

The whirr of Mum’s Singer was a constant rhythm as I played on the rag rug, sorting her buttons, so naturally I chose Needlework at school.

We progressed agonisingly slowly from aprons to peg-bags to pencil-cases with concealed zips, but finally we were allowed to make a dress for the end-of-term social. I bought bright yellow cotton - although Miss Clutterbuck thought ‘young girls should wear pastels’.

In the evenings, to the heady rhythms of ‘Six-Five Special’, I sewed a shirt-waister with huge black buttons from Mum’s button-box, and at the social I glowed like a sunflower – a pastel wallflower no longer.

---------------------------------------------

This week's photo prompt for Friday Fictioneers plunged me into reminiscence and nostalgia, so thanks to Sandra Crook for the photo and Rochelle for hosting us so indefatiguably on her blog  https://rochellewisofffields.wordpress.com/

I shall be in Northern Ireland over the next few days with family, so please don't be offended if I am slow to respond to your comments. Oh, and I must extend a warm welcome to Perry who became my 100th 'follower' this week. :)

EDITING STITCHES

I do a bit of sewing now and then, but this is the strangest commission I've had in a long time. And the smallest.

Years ago I earned some very necessary housekeeping money by sewing all kinds if things, from zips into trousers (I don't do those any more, so don't ask) to fitted covers for sofas.
A well-known actress who lived near us in England had me make all the curtains and fitted bed-covers for her new London pad - she auditioned my skills on her sister's house first!

In more recent years I have made a silk mosquito net for a seven-foot-square bed in the Bahamas - purely from measurements taken by the owner, unfortunately, not on site like the London one.

In the past I made clothes for my children, altered things we found at jumble sales, and I still make the occasional summer dress for myself. Less handy friends bring me alterations and repairs, three years ago I made a Father Christmas outfit out of fur fabric (never again!) and the Singer I brought out from England is struggling.

But this job couldn't be done by machine. A local group had a new banner made last year in India, where it was a third of the price they had been quoted in England. It is an object of significance to them, and definitely a delight to the eye, but in one place the spelling was wrong.
Who better to put that right than a seamstress-turned-writer?

Have you spotted the difference yet?