I found my mother’s old hand written recipe book the other day, looking for “Mildred’s sponge”
“Book” is generous. It was an A4 sort of accounts book going by the printed grids, but it had long ago lost it’s front cover I had commandeered it and started with enormous enthusiasm to turn it into to Mum’s treasured recipe holder— I cut out all the recipes torn from magazines and the papers that she had saved and pasted them in (flour and water, obviously — no glue sticks in our house) drawing thick red biro frames around each one like it was some kind of culinary masterpiece.
The indexing cut-outs were next level!
Very earnest.
Halfway through one of the pages I seem to have drifted from tidy precision into reckless doodling.
Embedded in the Dessert Section — are pencil sketches of clothes. My sketches. I think I was about 10 years old and as my Mother was a very good sewer I imagine I was creating what I wish she would make me. Sadly she couldn’t draft so unless Butterick or Simplicity had a pattern I was out of luck.
The recipes and the red biro abruptly lost importance and the clothes took over the page.
The drawings are dreadful. One sleeve appears to defy gravity, and Mum had obviously been costing out the fabric on the designs. As there are pencil additions on the side, It must have been 1967 or later as it’s in $.
Mum sewed many things; clothes to cushion covers and curtains, she took up, let out, shortened or lengthened everything. There was always fabric somewhere that could be used for something when needed. (though often not quite what I had in mind!)
So it makes sense that clothes would creep in.
What I love is that I didn’t start a “design book”. I simply hijacked the recipe book and combined two of my great loves, food and fashion.
There was no big vision. No childhood declaration that I would one day run a clothing label. Just a girl who got distracted mid-project and started drawing garments instead.
Looking at it now, it feels less like a beginning and more like evidence, and in my case just like the Mainland cheese ad says “ Good things take time”.