My mom was a professional seamstress when we were growing up -- one of the few ways a woman could make money at home. She had learned to sew in Yugoslavia, from an itinerant seamstress who came to stay once a year, sewed all the clothes the family needed, and then went on to the next home. Mom set up her machine on the dining room table; she bought me a little toy machine (it made a chain stitch), and set it up on a low table next to her. I would make doll clothes or potholders while she worked. When I got to be 8 or 10, I helped her with her clients -- I did all the hemstitching, by hand. (I'm nearly 60, and I think I've probably sewn several miles of hems!) We spent hours and hours planning my school clothes every August, nabbing fabric bargains and remnants. When I went away to college, she made me a trunk full of little wool tea dresses: elegant, but hard to wear at a California university in the late 1960s. Mom and I got all our ideas about college life from movies set in the 1930s, so what did we know? I wore them: I didn't have anything else! And I was proud of them, so it turns out I cut a distinctively eccentric figure -- an advantage in those times. I missed sewing so much that she found a 1948 Singer and gave it to me at the end of my freshman year. I kept that machine until about 10 years ago, and I have never stopped sewing.