The Seamstress and The Billionaire

Thread by Thread: The sewing machine

The first thing Callie did after registering was make a list.

She did this at the kitchen table on a Tuesday evening with a cup of chamomile tea and her sketchbook open beside her. The list was practical and unromantic and it was the only way she knew how to move forward without letting the size of what she was attempting swallow her whole. Materials. Timeline. Tools. Budget. She wrote it all down in her small neat handwriting and then she looked at the budget column for a long time without writing anything in it because the number she had available and the number she needed were not having a conversation that made sense.

The competition rules were clear. All garments had to be constructed primarily from materials sourced through Holt Farms. Participants could collect their allotted fabric allocation from the Holt Farms supply depot on Route 12 beginning October eighteenth. Each participant received the same amount. Two yards of cotton, one yard of treated leather and a half yard of wool blend. What you did with it was entirely up to you.

What the rules did not provide was thread, lining fabric, interfacing, boning, closures or any of the secondary materials that the difference between a dress and a real garment lived in. Those came out of your own pocket. Callie priced everything she needed at Henderson's dry goods on Main Street on a Wednesday afternoon after her shift at the Whitfield house and came home with a figure written on the back of a receipt that made her sit on the porch steps for a few minutes before going inside.

Sixty three dollars and forty cents.

She had forty one dollars in her personal savings after her share of the household expenses for the month.

She did not tell Earl. She did not tell Nana June. She went back to The Dusty Spur that Thursday and Friday and Saturday and picked up an extra shift on Sunday afternoon even though Boss Pete made a point of acting like he was doing her a personal favor by allowing it.

"You're lucky I'm a generous man, Harmon," he said, not looking up from the register.

"Incredibly lucky," Callie said, tying her apron.

By Sunday evening she had the sixty three dollars and forty cents plus a little more and she went to Henderson's first thing Monday morning before her shift at the Whitfield house and bought everything on her list. She carried the bag home on the bus with it sitting on her lap and her hand resting on top of it the whole ride like she was guarding something irreplaceable, which in every way that mattered she was.

She picked up her fabric allocation from the Holt Farms depot on the eighteenth. The cotton was a clean natural cream, tightly woven and substantial in a way that made her chest do something when she ran it through her fingers. The leather was thin and supple, already treated to a soft matte finish. The wool blend was the color of warm oatmeal. She brought it all home wrapped carefully in the brown paper they gave her and laid it out on the kitchen table that evening and just looked at it for a while.

Nana June came and stood in the doorway.

"That's good fabric," she said.

"Yes it is," Callie said.

"Don't mess it up."

"Thank you, Nana. Very helpful."

Nana June went back to her program.

The construction began on October twentieth, a Thursday, which gave Callie forty one days until the November thirtieth deadline. She mapped it out carefully. Cutting would take two days if she was precise and did not rush. The bodice construction would take at least a week because the boning had to be hand stitched and the seam lines she had designed required a level of accuracy that her sewing machine could only take her so far on before the work became entirely manual. The skirt panels had to be cut on the grain just right or the movement she was designing for would not happen. The leather collar was the piece that kept her up at night in the planning stage because leather did not forgive mistakes. You could not unpick a leather seam without leaving a mark and she only had one yard of it.

She worked every night from nine o'clock until sometimes one or two in the morning at the kitchen table after the rest of the house had gone to sleep. She set up her sewing machine on the far end of the table near the window and arranged her materials on the left side and her tools on the right and kept her sketchbook open in front of her so she could check her lines against her design as she went.

The first week went well. The cutting was clean and she felt good about it. The bodice pieces came together with a precision that surprised even her and she held the partially constructed front panel up to the kitchen light on the fourth night and felt something that was not quite pride but lived in the same neighborhood.

Then on the morning of October twenty eighth, ten days into construction, the sewing machine stopped working.

She was in the middle of stitching the side seams of the bodice at eleven forty five at night when the machine made a sound it had never made before. A high grinding noise that lasted two seconds and then stopped. She released the foot pedal immediately. She checked the needle. She checked the bobbin. She rethreaded the entire machine from scratch the way she always did when something felt off. She pressed the pedal again.

The grinding noise came back and then the machine seized completely.

Callie sat very still for a moment.

The sewing machine was not hers. It was Rosie Harmon's. It was twenty two years old and it had been repaired twice in its life, once by a man in town who fixed small appliances out of his garage and once by Earl who had watched a tutorial on the library computer and spent an entire weekend on it. It had always worked. It was the one piece of equipment in the Harmon house that Callie had trusted completely and without question.

She pressed the pedal one more time. Nothing.

She put her hands flat on the table and breathed.

It was a Tuesday night and she had work at the Whitfield house at seven thirty in the morning and a shift at The Dusty Spur at eight in the evening and twenty days of construction left and a sewing machine that would not turn on.

She did not cry. She wanted to and she did not.

She covered the garment carefully with a clean pillowcase so it would not gather dust, turned off the kitchen light and went to bed. She stared at the ceiling for a long time before she slept.