02-21-2019
My daughter is learning Hebrew in school right now. She has often shared with me the joys experienced while using her very limited Hebrew vocabulary to engage in discussion and tell stories during class.
One day, she came home and told me: “In today’s Hebrew class, the teacher asked a question: ‘If you tell your mother that you have no clothes to wear, what will your mother’s reply be?’”
I wondered loud: “What were the answers?”
“The answers of all of my classmates, except me, were: ‘my mother would say let’s go shopping for new clothes’. My answer was: ‘my mother will say: ‘let me make a few new clothes for you”.”
The context for my daughter’s answer is as follows:
At the beginning of this year, my daughter said that her winter outfits contain long skirts but no short skirts and that she needs a few short skirts for the winter.
One Sunday, we shopped at a few places in downtown Boston, but she didn’t like the fabrics or the styles of the short skirts in the stores. Because she was very disappointed so then I told her: “You pick some fabric and I will make a few short skirts for you.”
The first try is always the hardest one. My daughter choose a thick dark colored outer fabric and I picked a very thin and smooth light color inner fabric. I used a medium-sized needle to make the thick top skirt first and I didn’t switch the needle to a smaller size when I started making the very thin and very smooth underskirt. As a result, the sewing machine could not hook the top thread with the threads underneath and I had to redo the underskirt many times, which was a hassle.
Everything is hard in the beginning. I started to make the first skirt in January and finished it in February. My daughter commented with regards to the underskirt: “The inside of skirt looks very rough.”
Because the underskirt was redone a few times, the light colored underskirt still has many random dark color stitches which gives a careless appearance. Looking at the shabby-looking underskirt, I understood the wisdom of the idiom “Good work requires good equipment (工欲善其事,必先利其器)”. Luckily, the outer skirt was very neat and tidy, and the customer didn’t refuse the product.
I called an old Chinese saying: “The surface of horseshit is always as shiny as polished leather (马屎皮面光).” and laughed at myself silently.
In the middle of February, following my daughter’s request for a dark color, double-layered, knee-length skirt, I made three skirts for her. She liked them all and I was very happy.
Because of these three skirts, my daughter had a different answer for her Hebrew class, a surprising little episode.
In Summer 2019, I made a dark rich corduroy short skirt for Greta, my daughter’s teacher and friend, a real Belgium beauty. That skirt brought out a story of our friendship.
Prince Frosty, the best assistant.
