I am a jack-of-all-trades when it comes to hand crafts. I know how to do lots of different things, like knitting and spinning and weaving and tatting, but I’m not really an expert at any of them. Especially sewing.
I’m a very amateur seamstress. But I watched a very brilliant seamstress work when I was a little girl. My mother knew far more about sewing than I really understood. I thought that her skills were everyday sewing. Now I look back, and remember comments by the neighbors, and realize she was way above normal, but sewing, and handcrafts in general, weren’t what she wanted to be known for.
And all that watching paid off. When I had a very sick child who had to be hydrated before hospital visits, I became an amateur user of the machine that monitors saline solution, the electronic infusion pump. In my amateur way, in a moment of desperation, I created a backpack for a seven-year-old to carry the saline solution and pump.
I cut the leg off a pair of jeans and sewed it into the back of the pack, remembering to leave a space at the bottom for the saline tubing to be threaded. The jeans leg was the perfect size for the saline. There was a small zippered compartment on the front of the backpack, so I made a slit between it and the main compartment. That allowed the portable electronic infusion pump to sit in the pocket with the tubing from the saline packet going through it and coming out of the pocket zipper. Then the tubing was attached to port coming out of my patient-child’s chest. I’m sure I had to be careful about how that was done, but I can’t remember the actual step. The pump was set correctly by someone else; I pushed a button and the kid was ready to hydrate on the go
My patient hated being in the hospital and was determined to stay at for as little time as possible. Hydration ahead of time cut at least four hours off the stay. And the hospital would send us home early if I could keep hydration going at home, after chemo. We couldn’t hand carry the infusion pump. So I got to work.
What I find interesting about this memory is how little I understood about the various bits of tubing that let a nurse do complex infusions. Basically, I understood one command on the pump. But I could still make something extremely useful around all the complex parts. I made it at 5 am one morning, when the pump was left on my porch without the official carrier, which was an over-the-shoulder pouch. My backpack was actually better since it went, you know, on the back.
I’ve been thinking about that long ago episode as I consider how to make vestments for a priest. They seem like unrelated topics. The common feature is that I have a odd belief that some things can just be done. Some things you — just do. You don’t have to do them as well as an expert would, in order to be quite useful. In this regard, I don’t have to meet up with the standards of this vestment maker —
https://www.wattsandco.com/blogs/news/watts-in-our-workroom
Or these guys —
https://www.stmarthasguild.com/
I’m not going to be embroidering with gold thread, nor am I going to work with difficult fabric. But, I am going to make my own chasuble pattern, and use it on lovely liturgical brocade that isn’t too slithery, to make a simple but elegant vestment. I hope!
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