First Person: How a love for sewing and learning brought my family closer

Before Pinterest and Etsy, I was inspired by 9-year-old Betsy, who spent the week before Christmas making presents when a blizzard forced her to stay inside.

Reading “Snowbound with Betsy,” by Carolyn Haywood, when I was 9 myself, I couldn’t think of a more idyllic way to spend a week. Since then, I’ve spent countless hours cross-stitching, scrapbooking, embroidering — even decoupaging and making candles. But the most constant craft in my life (besides writing) has been sewing.

My love for sewing began with my mom, Anna Meckstroth, who grew up in Cuba. Her mom received packages filled with beautiful clothes from a friend in Illinois, and those packages made Mom yearn to emigrate to the U.S.

When Mom was 12, she rode a horse to the nearest town, La Gloria, where she purchased her first piece of fabric. Then, using a treadle sewing machine powered by a foot pedal, Mom’s sister Dorothy helped her mom make her first dress. They used starch made out of yucca and an iron heated on hot coals to smooth and press it.

Mom’s greatest reason for wanting to come to the U.S., though, was to get an education. In Cuba, she had only attended school for two years, one of which was at the Eliza Bowman School, an elite boarding school established by the Women's Missionary Council in Cuba for girls and young women. Using another girl’s uniform as a pattern, she sewed her own, and to help with tuition, she washed dishes, served meals, and swept hallways.

I’ve often reflected on the humility and hunger for education that were necessary for a teenage girl to perform such menial tasks for her peers.

In 1950, when Mom had the opportunity to come to West Palm Beach, she was 19. Once here, she cooked, cleaned, and did laundry for her sponsors and their four boarders.

Because Mom’s my mother's English was limited, and public schools didn't then have classes for English speakers of other languages, she was placed in the third grade.

After Mom learned to speak fluently, she was moved to Palm Beach High School, now Dreyfoos School of the Arts. When she graduated in 1955, she was nearly 25.

The next year she married my father at First United Methodist Church (now the Harriet Himmel Theater of Rosemary Square). Mom made her own wedding dress, bridesmaids’ dresses, and the flower girl’s dress.

The details of those dresses are immortalized in a July 8, 1956, wedding announcement in The Palm Beach Post: “Miss Aubyn Ann Johnson, in a ballerina length gown of white nylon over white taffeta with pink embroidered motif, a bandeau of white net petals and tiny rosebuds...was maid of honor. The bridesmaids ... were dressed like the maid of honor...Kitty Kay Anthony [Polly’s daughter] in pink organdy was the flower girl ... the bride wore a gown of Chantilly lace and net, fashioned with a basque waist and full skirt. Her illusion veil was attached to a headpiece of pearls and crystal.”

Shortly after their wedding, my parents moved to Louisville, Ohio.

By 1962, my two brothers, Clyde and Steve, and I had been born. To help make ends meet, my hairdresser mom shopped at thrift stores for the big skirts that were fashionable in the 1960s and then used that fabric to sew clothes.

In 1967, when I was 7, we moved to West Palm Beach, and in 1972, when I was 12, I took a sewing class at the Singer Sewing Center at The Palm Beach Mall, now the site of Palm Beach Outlets.

Ironically, Mom and I — who often pushed each other’s buttons — were united by sewing. We became partners in crime, spending hours perusing the 2-inch-thick McCalls, Butterick, Simplicity, and Vogue pattern books at Rag Shop and Cloth World and selecting fabrics. Mom wanted me to have what she had gone without.