Things to Make and Mend Read Online Free

at the edges of his mouth.
    ‘I hate this song,’ he opined, leaning one arm casually against a silvery pillar.
    Colin Rafferty. It was Sally he wanted. Sally, not Rowena. She was so shocked she could hardly breathe.

Quarter Cross
    In a couple of days Sally Tuttle will be giving a talk in Edinburgh, entitled (rather pompously, she fears now) ‘The Secret Art of Embroidery’. But what to say, when talking about embroidery stitches? About moss stitch and Pekin knot? And how to say it? How to seem? How to be ? Embroidery has always been something she just does , and the idea of talking about it frightens her.
    Preparation is all, she reminds herself. Like a properly pinned-down dress pattern, all the tailor’s tacks in place.
    She is not a particularly tidy person but she does keep her workroom neat. She has a pine shelving unit containing all the things she needs. It is labelled, ordered, organised. There has to be a little area in everyone’s life that is organised. On the top shelf she has two baskets of cotton reels and three of embroidery threads, stranded cottons, wools, tapisserie silks. On the bottom shelf she has her old hand-operated sewing machine, her new foot-operated sewing machine, her goffering iron and her patterns. In the middle she keeps a small red filing-cabinet which has six drawers. These drawers contain, in descending order: 
    Needles and needle cases
    Pins and pincushions
    Buttons, poppers, fastenings
    Sequins and ribbons
    Canvases and squares of felt
    Scissors, unpickers and pinking shears
    In other areas of her life she is not tidy. She often leaves washing-up until the next day, and does not reprimand her daughterfor leaving dirty plates and schoolbooks lying around the living-room floor. Embroidery, though, needlework, requires neatness. Cleanliness. Respect. Her trays and drawers at work are neat too. If they became a mess – a knot of threads, loose buttons, hooks and eyes – she feels she might as well call it a day.
    *
    Her elderly mother comes to visit her at In Stitches occasionally, stoically, often bringing something to eat – an individual muffin wrapped in cellophane, a slice of carrot cake. ‘Something to keep you going, darling,’ she says, glancing around the shop. It is not the career she hoped for her.
    Sometimes after school her daughter Pearl comes to see her too but seems to have no comprehension of what her job involves: the careful measuring and pinning, the necessary ironing, the patient tacking and hemming. Careful work, Sally finds herself thinking, is lost on her daughter’s generation. Then she remembers Miss Button’s admonishments and sessions with the Kwik-unpick. She remembers how careless she was at Pearl’s age.
    ‘Good day at school, sweetheart?’
    ‘Hmm,’ Pearl replies, looking down and pressing the tiny silver buttons on her mobile phone. The buttons are so small that she has to use her fingernail.
    ‘Did you …?’
    ‘Yeah, hang on, Mum,’ Pearl says, bringing the phone up to her ear.
    *
    Since Sally left school, disastrously, at the age of fifteen-and-a-half, her career has been a series of nine-to-five jobs.
    The first job she ever had was as a waitress in a café called The Country Kitchen. There was a uniform: a brown nylon dress with short puffed sleeves, a white, ineffectively small apron and, most mortifying of all, a nylon mob cap. She was supposed to look like a country wench; a pretty serving girl. Looking back,she thinks perhaps she did look pretty: she certainly got leers and comments from the middle-aged men who came into the café at lunchtimes. Or perhaps it was just that she was young. Youth was all that was necessary to attract middle-aged men. Hello there, Maid Marion, they used to say. Or: It’s Nell Gwynne. Or: I’ll have a bowl of porridge, Goldilocks.
    They were supposed to serve wholesome things. Wholesome, late-Seventies style. Lumpy lentil soup. Big dry brown rolls. Hard-boiled eggs and tomatoes cut into water