by Ruth Suehle
“Better you than me.” That was my mother’s way of saying, “Are you insane?” And it’s what she said to me three years ago when she saw me magnifying a 300-pixel-high image of Keira Knightley’s Pirates of the Caribbean coat to make a recreation of the embroidery on it.
I traced those embroidery shapes on Elizabeth Swann’s Pirate King coat from a tiny, unofficial photo and blew the design up unreasonably large based on what I’d started with. I printed pages of the pixellated pattern, and my mother helped me tape them back together so that I could trace it onto the pieces of the coat. She thought I was crazy the whole time. But she helped.
And that was how my utterly non-geeky mom fostered my complete geekiness.
She never saw any of the Pirates movies. The last (and for all I know, only) movie she saw was Follow That Bird because I wanted to see it when I was seven. She didn’t watch much on TV either, other than Jeopardy!, Wheel of Fortune, and The Weather Channel.
But she followed my detailed shaping instructions to the letter when I asked her to make me a Star Trek uniform one Halloween in high school. She helped me sculpt a Jabberwock out of clay for English class. Together we made Mole-i LaForge, a plushie mole with a VISOR and comm badge in honor of Mole Day.
She made the first period-style dress I wore to a Scottish Highland games. The first time I wore it, I met a nice guy. Two years later, my mom made him a kilt. Five years later, she and I made my wedding dress when I married him.
Which brings us back to that Pirate King costume. It was my first major costuming undertaking, a hobby that really took off for me when my husband and I started going to Dragon*Con in 2003. The embroidery I mentioned wasn’t strictly embroidery. I hand-stitched piping in intricate swirls to recreate the design–a technique I learned while making my wedding dress.
The first thing I did after that costume won Best Use of Materials in the costume contest was call my mom to tell her. After all, it was decades of learning from her hands that really won it.
Then almost a year later, just a month before the next Dragon*Con, she died of colon cancer. I initially thought I wouldn’t bother making a costume that year. How could I, with so little time, and when every time I sat at a sewing machine, I cried knowing I couldn’t call her to talk about it like I always had before?
But I did. It seemed like the best way to keep her with me. It was the hardest thing I’ve ever made, and not just because it was an eighteenth century gown with the associated underpinnings–one of the Clockworks’ gowns from “The Girl in the Fireplace” episode of Doctor Who. Seventeen days before the con, I posted this on my blog:
It probably goes without saying that it wasn’t just the embroidery machine that I needed time to work out.
I finished the hand stitching for the gown in the car on the way to Atlanta. The mask was pretty bad, and I didn’t have the right wig. But I learned a lot, and there was as much of my mom in that costume as there was me.
Today I cut out my daughter’s steampunk Halloween costume on my mother’s cutting table with my grandmother’s scissors–because of course, my mother learned all of this from her own mother. My hands are getting older, and they’re starting to look like the hands I remember watching as a child. Hands that snipped threads and trimmed seams.
My mother never saw a single episode of Doctor Who. I’m not sure my grandmother even knew what Star Trek was. But every time I make a new costume, for me or for my kids, a little honorary geek credit goes to them.
