In My Blood: The Woman Who Sewed Before Me

Sometimes you don’t realize where a part of you came from until years later.

Recently, I was talking with my aunt when I learned something about my grandmother that I somehow never knew: she was a costume designer.

My entire life, I had assumed sewing was simply a hobby for her.

I lost my grandmother when I was only six years old, so most of my memories of her come from the later years of her life. I remember her sewing. I remember the things she made for me. But at that age, I obviously didn’t understand the difference between someone who enjoyed sewing and someone who had built part of her life around creating clothing.

Finding out now that she had been a costume designer stopped me in my tracks.

Because suddenly, so much made sense.

More Than a Hobby

My grandmother made dance costumes, but her creativity went far beyond costumes. She made beautiful dresses and coats, and she did something else that feels surprisingly familiar to me today: she took existing clothing and fabric and turned it into something new.

Today, we call that upcycling.

For her, it was simply creating.

Fabric didn’t have to become waste just because a garment had reached the end of its original life. It could be taken apart, reimagined and transformed into something completely different.

The more my aunt told me about her, the more I realized just how similar our paths have been.

And the strange thing is, I didn’t follow in her footsteps intentionally.

I didn’t grow up thinking, My grandmother was a costume designer, so that’s what I want to do.

I barely had enough time with her to understand what she did.

Yet somehow, I found my way there anyway.

Finding My Way Back to Her

Sewing became part of my life, too.

I found my own passion for clothing, costume, alterations, design and transforming fabric into something that didn’t exist before. I developed my own style and eventually built a career and business around that passion.

All without realizing that another woman in my family had once felt that same pull toward a sewing machine and a piece of fabric.

There is something incredibly emotional about discovering that.

It makes me wonder how much of the people who came before us quietly lives inside of us.

Maybe it’s in the things our hands naturally know how to do.

Maybe it’s in the things we’re drawn to without understanding why.

Maybe it’s in the strange feeling of being completely at home while doing something we’ve never technically done before.

I don’t know if a love of sewing can actually be inherited. But I do know that finding out about my grandmother made my own journey feel connected to something much bigger than me.

The Woman I Wish I Could Talk To

Losing my grandmother when I was six was incredibly difficult.

From what I can remember, she was one of the most important people in my little world.

When you lose someone that young, you don’t just lose the person you knew. As you get older, you begin to realize you’ve also lost all of the conversations you never got the chance to have.

And now I have so many questions.

I would love to sit beside her and ask about the costumes she made.

I would love to know which garment she was most proud of.

I would love to hear about the things that went horribly wrong—because if sewing has taught me anything, it’s that there were definitely things that went horribly wrong.

I’d love to show her what I make now.

More than anything, I’d love to know what she would think about the fact that her granddaughter grew up and found her way to a sewing machine, too.

Maybe Some Threads Never Break

I’ve spent so much of my life creating clothing without knowing that I was continuing a story that started before me.

Our work isn’t identical. Our lives aren’t identical. We created in different eras and under very different circumstances.

But the thread is there.

Two women, generations apart, taking fabric and imagining what else it could become.

Two women making clothing, costumes and beautiful things with their hands.

Two women finding value in materials that could be transformed and given another life.

And one granddaughter who had no idea she was following a path her grandmother had already walked.

I wish I had been old enough to know this about her while she was alive.

I wish I could tell her that sewing became more than a hobby for me, too.

But maybe, in a strange way, every time I sit down to create something, I am telling her.

I used to think sewing was simply something I discovered and fell in love with.

Now I wonder if maybe I was finding my way back to something that had been waiting for me all along.

Some threads, it turns out, are a lot stronger than we realize.