A Twenty One Cubic Foot Freezer And Four Yards Of Plaid

Before I start this story I need to tell you about my mother. She was not perfect, but so close to it in her sewing and baking she was a hard act to follow. She, in some ways had the same "I can do it better and cheaper attitude" as my mother-in-law used to. They would go to the department store shopping and absolutely pick apart the workmanship of the manufacturer of the clothing that the store had on their racks. I have heard Marie and my mother both say things like, "If I couldn't match plaids better than that I certainly wouldn't put it on my racks to sell." Not an exact quote of my mother's but really really close.

I'm the one with brown hair!

Mom used to love to wear plaids. In the Seventies plaids were very popular. Remember the men's leisure suits? Who could forget them. Women also wore a lot of plaid slacks and vests also.
My kids' dad and my two oldest children and I lived on a ten acre acreage with the perfect story book house from the outside. It was white with red lacy looking border that resembled a ginger bread house. The inside was fun also. The formal dining
room had an adjoining small room that housed our huge chest freezer. It took up the majority of one of the walls. There was a window that faced the north. Under that window was my sewing machine cabinet. To the left of that was a closet. As you circled that little room were baskets of materials, patterns and a sundry of much needed stuff for my hobby of sewing. I called it a hobby not a calling. I was not of the same school as my mother. The underside of my garment did NOT have to look just as good as the outside did. I really would like the proverbial nickel for every time she told me that when she looked at my handwork as a child.
In the seventies I was department manager of eleven departments of Sears Roebuck in Sioux Falls, South Dakota. In two of those departments were yard goods as well as notions; a seamstress's dream. A manager's nightmare. Those notions walked out the door as fast as a woman's purse could snap shut!
One day I decided that I would make myself a plaid pantsuit. It just couldn't be that difficult. My mother made several of them. I knew the rule about matching plaids. I even had watched my mother do it in our home. I also knew that I would have to add extra yardage according to the size of the plaid explicitly for the matching procedure.
The problem was I had no where else to do the layout of the material, pattern, instruction sheets, pins, pincushion, scissors, and my hands than on top of that 21 cubic foot  chest freezer. Well, if you can't imagine, I will tell you that the top of a nice clean freezer is slippery! It is also narrow. I quickly found that I indeed had a short fuse when it came to matching plaids.
I can hear you seamstresses in my head saying, "Why didn't she use her dining room table?" I will tell you why. Because I didn't want to mess with having material and all the "stuff" strewn all over the place. I wanted it all in one little room. No muss no fuss.
Well, I made the pant suit. The plaids were matched fairly well. I never did wear that outfit when I visited my mother. I hated that outfit and really only wore it a very few times. Perhaps it really isn't so bad to buy ready to wear garments which do not have matched prints/plaids. In actuality who cares?  I still care. She taught me well. I can spot the errors a mile away. Plain colors work well in my wardrobe. No worries!
Another story someday about "worked buttonholes" and my mother and I via USPS.