I was a math whiz who stunk at English, so of course I wanted to be a writer more than anything in the world. I performed impromptu plays for my grandmother's sewing circle but forced my little sister to ask for ketchup at McDonald's.
Alethea Kontis
My mother had bought a sewing machine for me. When I went away to college, she gave me a sewing machine, a typewriter and a suitcase, and my mother made $17 a week working as a maid 12 hours a day, and she did that for me.
Alice Walker
While designing, sewing and cutting patterns for clients, my mother was always telling me to make sure the upper part of the body was balanced with the lower part, an A-line skirt to minimize hips or shoulder pads if a client was smaller on top. I was training my eye to create balance.
Anastasia Soare
I used to spend my nights oversewing dresses for a local dressmaker in order to pay for my school equipment.
Azzedine Alaia
It used to be twelve people crowded around a sewing table; now it's ten.
Ben Shahn
When I moved out of my mom's house at 18 I was almost as sad to leave her sewing machine behind as anything else.
Beth Ditto
You know how people love to glamorize poverty? There's nothing glamorous about it. But it did make me really creative. Those days, I was literally taking t-shirts in the day and sewing them back together to make dresses for the night.
A good use for me is to let me go away with my sewing machine and come back with some really new stuff.
Betsey Johnson
Growing up around Amish farmland, I enjoyed the opportunity to witness firsthand their love of family, of the domestic arts - sewing, quilting, cooking, baking - as well as seeing them live out their tradition of faith in such a unique way.
Beverly Lewis
I remember an old Singer sewing machine at home that belonged to my grandmother. It had a pedal. My mom taught me how to use it when I was 12 years old. I used to find it so intriguing, how a flat piece of material could be made into an object that had so many uses.
Bibhu Mohapatra
I have written most of my melodies walking and I feel it is definitely one of the most helpful ways of sewing all of the different things in your life together and seeing the whole picture.
Bjork
My husband went through a phase of giving me vacuum cleaners, sewing machines and Mixmasters. It's ironic. He is encouraging me to develop a hobby, I think.
Cate Blanchett
The scar on my eye is a result of the doctor's sewing up my face. It was 450 stitches and plastic surgery.
Charlie Puth
When I was little, and whenever I had to wear a dress while my mother took up the hem or made any alterations, she told me to keep a thread from the dress in my mouth while she was sewing, and that would keep me from getting stuck by the needle.
Charlotte Rae
Back when I was helping put the swing into the swinging '60s, I used to hang out with Cathy McGowan. We'd be doing 'Ready Steady Go!' on T.V., and Biba used to make our dresses. We'd be in the flat in Cromwell Road on Friday night, just before the live show, and they'd still be sewing.
Cilla Black
My mother is very good at sewing and makes wonderful quilts.
Coy Bowles
A pattern is a guide or a model. Patterns are used in sewing and knitting, in wood and metalworking, and in a wide variety of other productive pursuits, activities, and jobs. Patterns help to avoid waste and unwanted deviations and facilitate uniformity that is appropriate and beneficial.
David A. Bednar
If we didn't want to upset anyone, we would make films about sewing, but even that could be dangerous. But I think finally, in a film, it is how the balance is and the feelings are. But I think there has to be those contrasts and strong things within a film for the total experience.
David Lynch
My mother hid the struggle from us children. She complained about her salary, and she had a tough time. Although she became a headmistress, she still had to do a lot of sewing. The more I think about her, the more remarkable I realise she was. And she understood straight away when I said that I wanted to write.
Derek Walcott
I have to say, I grew up with fashion because my mother was a seamstress, and she had an atelier. She would cut the first pattern, and then she had people working for her. So I grew up in an atelier, watching people all around me sewing. I was fascinated.
Donatella Versace
Once I was finally liberated from my Kansas background, the first thing I did was get a sewing machine, because it's 1972, and I have to look like Mick Jagger and David Bowie every single second. Taffeta jumpsuits.
My family has always made clothes. Growing up I can remember sewing machines being everywhere.
I have a great admiration and tenderness for Azzedine Alaia. I haven't seen him in a while, but I guess he must be still sewing some dresses at night.
The most casual examination will reveal the fact that all the jokes about the horrible results of masculine cooking and sewing are written by men. It is all part of a great scheme of sex propaganda.
I didn't have cable television growing up; there were only six channels you could watch then. The only really good channel was channel 10, and they would play 'The Nanny Called Fran' every night for years. I've seen every episode 100 times. I would get my Grandma to make me leopard skin dresses on her sewing machine.
I have a sewing machine that I adore, and I spend a lot of time sitting in front of it when I'm not working. And any excuse to paint or draw or do something artistic with my hands really gets me going. Definitely aspiring.
Comparing science and religion isn't like comparing apples and oranges - it's more like apples and sewing machines.
My mother was kept very busy with her sewing; sometimes she would have another woman helping her.
A lot happened in Vancouver. It was my first Western experience. I learned English, which is my second language. I became very acquainted with Western culture. I had my first sewing machine when I was 9. I trained in fashion illustration when I was in school.
I had a great grandmother who believed in so many strange superstitions. She used to tell the future from the things that catch on to the hem of your skirt when you've been sewing, and different colored threads would mean different things... Of course, all that influenced me quite a lot as a child.
My sewing skills are terrible!
My mother loved fashion. She was a beauty and had enough sewing skills that she could re-create the looks in magazines. She also was enormously charismatic.
My brother liked sewing and sculpting and making things, and my sister sewed and painted and cooked and baked. She's a professional baker now and makes the most gorgeous sculpture-like cakes. She's the queen of wedding cakes in the Lake Tahoe area.
When a man's suit fits, when the construction is beautiful, when the sewing and fabrics are there... in the end, you'll look the best in it.
When you grow up starving, you cannot point with pride to a book you've just spent six hours reading. Picking cotton, sewing flour bags into clothes - those were the skills my father grew up appreciating.
As an adult and a parent, when I'm not acting, I'm not acting. I'm being a parent, and I'm on the school run, and I'm sewing labels onto socks. That's what I'm doing.
My parents got me a sewing machine for Christmas during my senior year of high school. I made three pieces of clothing and had a fashion show at the end of the year, where we had to wear the clothes that we made. I took it to a whole new level; I made all my friends clothes.
When I was a child I loved my dolls and I was practically born with a needle in my hand. I really had an aptitude for sewing - my mother taught me. I even learned to embroider when I was very young and I made the most fantastic dresses for my dolls. So I thought I could be a designer.
My mother did like to make clothes, and in I think the worst picture I've ever seen of myself - I must have been eight or nine - she'd dressed me in a matching t-shirt and Bermuda shorts ensemble which I think looked like somebody had thrown up all over it. I was so glad when that sewing machine stopped working, I have to say.
I've worked in construction, in a factory sewing clothes. I also sold flowers and doughnuts - just odd jobs to try to make 10 pesos, which is equivalent to 20 cents.
The coach put me in goal, and back then, we were playing on bone-hard ground: red ash; we even trained on black ash, which was worse. That's not easy for a goalkeeper. My mother was always taking out her sewing kit for the countless holes in my training pants. For a long time, I had to buy my own gear.
One has to look out for engineers - they begin with sewing machines and end up with the atomic bomb.
I preferred sewing to bossing little children.
From about eight years old I was always making things on the sewing machine. Friends would see me making dresses and costumes, and I'd use difficult fabrics such as Lycra and elastic. But you know, my dad was creative and my brother is inventive too.
I'm always tinkering with something - suddenly I'll think I can work with wood, but then I'll realize I can't, so I go back to sewing.
Robotics has already made significant inroads in electronics assembly, with sewing trades - traditionally many countries' first entry point to the global trading system - likely to come next.
My grandmother raised five children during the Depression by herself. At 50, she threw her sewing machine into the back of a pickup truck and drove from North Dakota to California. She was a real survivor, so that's my stock. That's how I want my kids to be too.
My regular life today is reading books, making dolls houses, sewing dolls with my daughter and barbequing.
All the embroidery is made in my father's workshop in India... and all the cutting and sewing is done in my studio.
All the asylum clothing is made by the patients, but sewing does not employ one's mind. After several months' confinement the thoughts of the busy world grow faint, and all the poor prisoners can do is to sit and ponder over their hopeless fate.
