Sunday 6 May 2018

"Those colours don't go together"

I heard someone I know saying.
She was standing there at a rack in the doorway of a clothing shop in the local shopping centre with a friend. The two of them were looking at a garment.
      "Yes they do," her friend said.
      "No, they don't. It's the lighting."
They saw me and pounced.
      "What do you think Cat?"
      "I don't wear pink," I said trying to wriggle out of replying.
It diverted them.
       "No, you don't. Why? It would suit you."
       "No, it wouldn't."
They were back at it.
        "Why don't you wear pink?"
        "I don't like pink on me," I said.
My maternal grandmother insisted that, "Little girls wear pink."
I did not like my maternal grandmother. I am not sure if anyone did. She was not a nice person. 
When I was a kitten she would make clothes for me because my mother had, unusually in those days, returned to full time teaching. She made clothes for my siblings too. 
They were adequately made but they were not made with the same skill or love of my paternal grandmother. "Nana", as we called her, would get  cheap "remnants" from the "bargain basement" of a big store in the city.  There used to be great piles of them spread across several tables. They would be sorted into "lengths" so that, if you knew approximately how much you needed, you could search on a particular table. Cotton would be mixed in with wool and the widths would vary but someone must have thought the system worked. The quality of the remnants varied but she considered them to be "good enough". I know part of it was the amount of money available to clothe us but I remember the day that I was with her and my mother and they were looking at pieces. My mother held up a piece of blue and white striped fabric and said, "This should do."
My grandmother said, "No. Little girls should wear pink."
She went on searching for something pink even though I said I liked the blue piece. (I would have agreed to dark brown or black or dull grey to avoid pink.) 
I was never sufficiently "grateful" for those garments.
    "Give Nana a kiss. She made it just for you."
"Grandma", my paternal grandmother, on the other hand would take me to the drapery not far from where they lived. She would look at the remnants there if there happened to be any and she would look at the bolts of fabric. She would explain to me that what she was going to make for me or my siblings could be made out of certain things. Which one did we like the most? Even my brother was allowed to choose  his own shirt material if Grandma was making it. (Grandpa, a tailor, made all my brother's trousers.)  
      "How else are they going to learn?" my paternal grandmother would say.
She showed me how patterns were drafted, how the pieces had to be laid out on the fabric - and why. As she was sewing things together on her old treadle machine she would explain why the seams were made in certain ways. 
Nana did none of those things. She had, to us children, a magical sewing machine powered by electricity. Looking back I realise that she did far less sewing than Grandma but she would have considered her machine to be far superior. 
I was taught a good deal about dressmaking by Grandma and I was also taught something else. She chose colours with care. It wasn't something she had ever been taught because she had a mere three years of schooling before being put to work on the farm.  She had an innate sense of colour. 
    "Look at this," she would tell me handing me a piece of tweed from my grandfather's tailoring business, "How many colours can you see in that?"
At school I was taught that "blue and green don't go together" but Grandma said, "Nonsense. It's how you put them together that matters."
Yes, there was blue and green in that tweed. 
Did the colours go together in that garment I was being shown? Instinctively I didn't like the garment. It looked flimsy and shapeless to me. It was not well made. The price was outrageous  for what it was but perhaps someone would like it.
Fortunately I didn't have to utter a further opinion. One of them took another garment from the rack and asked the other, 
     "What do you think of this one?"
I escaped.

 

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Don't they know you hate buying clothes Cat? Ros