The Sewing Circle - it changes lives...

The five unemployed women went to the local priest in desperation. Their husbands were unemployed due to retrenchment from the mines. They had young children needing both rearing and education, and they had no money for housing, food, schooling or schoolclothes. The women did not wish to join the ranks of women who, over the years, were forced to earn money to feed their hungry families in the only way possible to women without education or other support. The priest contacted Lumiere Charity with an appeal from these ladies for our immediate help.

I requested assistance in Dublin, Ireland, and the generosity of members of the public enabled Lumiere to donate overlocker sewing machines, scissors, materials and patterns to the priest for the ladies. A further generous Irish donation enabled the priest to purchase scissors, measuring tape, thimbles, cottons, tracing wheel, pins, pin cushions, hand sewing needles and machine needles, ribbons, buttons, stitch unpickers, iron, ironing board, dressmaker's chalk, rulers and other necessities for a new sewing circle. Having had two wonderful Austrian nuns at school who taught me to sew, a fashionable Dutch grandmother who had been a master tailor and a dedicated mother who had sewn our clothing at home for a number of years as I watched, I had the know-how to advise the new sewing group what to do.

We started them off sewing sheets, duvets and pillow slips. These are very easy to both cut and sew. The more the sewing circle sewed, the more proficient they became. With sewing, indeed, practice makes perfect. The ladies sewed from their shacks, having access to a point for electricity. Within two years, I went back to visit the self-employed sewing circle. The priest proudly showed me a lovely house, which one of the women could now afford to rent. As I crossed the front porch to enter the door, a smartly dressed child ran out of the front door, a satchel on her back, on her way to extra classes after school. The whirring sound of machines filled the air. Three ladies were sewing intently at their machines in the room they had made into a workshop. Another lady was busy packing the linen carefully into boxes which had their logo hand stamped on it. The sewing circle had expanded to ten, their owners sewing every day during their self-appointed business hours in various houses near each other in the neighbourhood.

The women told me they now had a thriving business which was in the process of expanding to different provinces. In the spirit of Lumiere, they were now teaching other unemployed women how to sew.  They were hoping to shortly purchase a second-hand sewing machine for one of them to assist her to begin her own self-employment business from her shack. The members of the sewing circle also told me that churches had approached them to start sewing altar-server clothing for them. They wished to know how to do this, as they could not find a pattern.

I spent the afternoon showing them a sewing tip my grandmother and mother had taught me. Take an item of clothing (the priest had brought along a new altar-server's outfit) - unpick it carefully with a stitch unpicker. Iron the resultant pieces flat. The unpicked clothing form a natural pattern. Then lay the material to be cut out carefully on a flat table.  Place the unpicked clothing pieces pattern economically on the material so as not to waste material, and pin them.  Then cut out the material pieces, and sew them. Iron the seams flat, and also the hems as you go along.  (Don't forget to zigzag or overlock the edges of the cut seams for flawless tailoring). Alternately, place the unpicked pieces on dressmakers pattern paper or graph paper, and trace a pattern from that for use. This saves the pattern made from the unpicked clothing for use for another time. If there is no access to dressmakers pattern paper or graph paper, brown paper works very well.

I have since heard that the sewing circle is a large business now, making linen and church clothing to order. Once a project is completed, Lumiere Charity rejoices in the accomplishments, hard work and generosity of donation which have made the project possible. Then we move on to other needs. We have discovered that sewing circles are a wonderful way to create self-employment. Any society needs clothing on a regular basis, from infant size to the older generation. Also, clothing wears out and needs to be replaced. So if you are doing charity work and wish to enable a group to become self-sufficient, consider starting a sewing circle. It changes lives ...