07/30/2006

Record-Eagle/Tyler Sipe
Laurie Anderson, right, created a replica of the baby dress worn by her grandmother. Anderson's mother, Nell Nash, left, found the dress in a dresser drawer after her mother died.

Northern People

What's in a dress? History and family connection

Granddaughter reproduces vintage gown

By MARTA HEPLER DRAHOS

mdrahos@record-eagle.com

TRAVERSE CITY — Laurie Anderson still can recall childhood visits at her grandmother's Long Lake home, where huge, chewy sugar cookies were always fresh out of the oven.

But it wasn't until Lucille Walker died in 1991 that Anderson got a glimpse of her grandmother as a little girl, through a chance discovery. While settling Walker's Traverse City estate, Anderson's mother came across an unfamiliar parcel in Walker's dresser drawer.

"I opened (the drawer) up and in with her lingerie there was this blue tissue," said Nell Nash, 78, who unwrapped the parcel to find a little girl's vintage lace dress. "We had no idea — did she have another child and we didn't know about it?"

The truth, revealed a few days later, was less mysterious but no less exciting. While going through Walker's garage, the family discovered a box of old photographs. In it was a portrait that showed Walker, then about 18 months, sitting on her grandfather's lap in the lace dress.

The find intrigued Anderson, owner of an Internet-based business called Southern Stitches Fine Heirloom Sewing and Custom-Made Embroideries. Instead of just preserving and displaying the early 1900s dress, she decided to reproduce it using cotton netting and her embroidery machine.

The result is a six-page spread in the May/June issue of the heirloom sewing magazine Sew Beautiful — and a modern heirloom Anderson, 46, hopes her granddaughter will someday wear.

A Flint native who lives in Columbia, Tenn., Anderson said she began sewing in high school when her brothers all married girls who could sew "and I couldn't." She got into heirloom sewing when her daughter was born and acquired her first embroidery machine in 1998.

"There's just something I like when I see an old, antique piece of clothing," she said, adding she often goes antiquing for old linens to get ideas for reproducing on the embroidery machine.

The heirloom dress took about 30 hours to reproduce, she said, from measuring the original and making her own pattern to creating the lace panels using her own embroidery design. She finished it off with a silk batiste slip and an embroidered scalloped hem, a cotton French lace neckline and satin bows on each sleeve. In keeping with the original, she used "beauty pins" to fasten it with instead of buttons.

"The hardest part was to be able to stitch on a panel and then be able to re-hoop and line up the (embroidery) pattern perfectly," she said, noting that she used embroidery software, templates and a light box to help in the process.

While she doesn't intend to sell it, she estimates the dress would cost between $500 and $1,000 to buy.

"It'd be like somebody buying a custom christening gown," she said.

Besides machine embroidery, Anderson does hand- and shadow-work embroidery, smocking, quilting, crocheting and knitting. She was commissioned twice by Sew Beautiful to design garments for children at St. Jude Children's Research Hospital. She's also founder of her town's chapter of Threads of Love, a volunteer organization that sews gowns, hats, blankets and other garments for hospitals caring for premature, stillborn and miscarried infants.

She also does heirloom sewing for clients and sells machine embroidery patterns on her Web site, www.southern-stitches.com, earning enough from the sale of one pattern alone to put her daughter through college. Anderson views the heirloom dress as both a tribute to her grandmother, who served on the queen's court of the old Blessing of the Blossoms festival and taught at a one-room schoolhouse on the corner of Secor and Silver Lake roads, and as a learning experience.

"I knew it was going to be hard," she said, "but I like a challenge."