Yesterday I opened my mother’s sewing machine. The last time I did that was about fourteen months ago when, after painstakingly referring to the English/French 1980’s-something instruction book to navigate my way to operation, I found it was in need of repair. Something was out of alignment, needles breaking on the steel plate. I recall her saying during her final attempts at sewing that she couldn’t seem to work it anymore. I thought this was about her. Something not right in her brain. Turns out it was also the machine.

I had toyed with selling it—it’s a Janome—and the magnificent Horn sewing cabinet circa 1970. She had bought it almost twenty years ago expecting her beloved Elna to be on its last legs (but the Elna kept on for another dozen years). I had cleaned the cabinet, sorted through the many accoutrements of dressmaking—the patterns, reels of cotton, multi-sized needles, braids, ribbons, zips, tape measures. (It reminded me of the dozens of barley sugars and peppermints I had found in the pockets of her clothes before I disposed of them.) I had ordered and discarded, stream-lined and scrubbed, removing all evidence of her declining disarray. I had skimmed over the many memories of attire she had made including my thousands of dance costumes and virtually her entire wardrobe. She had suffered through stiff and puffy eighties debutante and bridesmaids dresses for multiple generations of Mount Gambier girls. A small photo album I found is testament to that. Then there was a history of my fashion decisions over the years—Simplicity slacks; McCalls catsuits; Vogue v-necks. There were beads from my friend’s Medieval wedding dress; sequins from my copy of Cyd Charisse’s Bandwagon bombshell; scraps of every type of stretch fabric possible to facilitate years of contemporary dance capers.

The repairer was snowed under. They are a dwindling profession in these days of ready-made cheap in China. It could take three months for him to get to it. The deposit was $50 but if it was unrepairable that could come off the cost of a new machine. I told him it was my mother’s and that she had died. I left the shop crying. I sat in the car crying. I went home and put the receipt in a drawer. Two months later when it came home repaired I packed it away in its cabinet and put a pot plant on the top.

Yesterday morning I had worn a new T-shirt. It was too long and too tight around the neck. I have a long history of ‘adapting’ T-shirts, that is, cutting out the neck band and shortening the length. When I lived alone this meant raw edges, living with Mum the past twelve years it meant carefully selvidged seams. Today I had opened the Horn cabinet in search of scissors. I was going to adapt this T-shirt. Her scissors were those large black-handled ones that make that wonderful sound as they cut through the fabric on a wooden surface (not unlike the sound of cutting bunches of silverbeet). She had padded one eye of the handle to protect her thumb; her adaptation against age. However, the scissors were blunt. I went in search of mine. I have a tiny tin with an “I love Lucy” image on the lid, a gift from a student years ago. I used to carry my CDs for teaching in it, now it holds my meagre sewing kit and several film canisters of sequins. After cutting the shirt I used her pins to hem the neck and bottom. I put the coloured heads of the pins in the direction of my body if I were using the sewing machine. I had inched my way to this point, a systematic postponement of intention. I moved the plant, lifted the lid, and pressed the pedal to raise the machine. I sat before it on the blue velvet chair I had purchased for this moment. The chair that had sat for several months in the corner, until now. I opened the instruction manual, located the moving parts, inserted the bobbin, and threaded the needle. I had identified the zig-zag pattern, navigated the width, selected the tension, minimised the speed. I lifted the foot and placed a scrap piece of the T-shirt fabric underneath. Lowered the needle. Pressed the foot pedal. A familiar whirr danced out a phrase of stitching. I lifted my foot and burst into tears.

The sound of the machine had created a three-dimensional image of her sitting here. I recalled the many times I had seen her in that position. Her back seen from the doorways of different homes I had lived in with her. I have a photo of her in the room in Mount Gambier, turned in startled interruption. Today I am startled. I see myself captured in her body and reminded of her disappearance.

When I had to fill out the details for her death certificate I wrote “Dressmaker” for occupation. She never referred to herself as that. Too self-effacing and too bound in small town matrimony to give her life a title other than housewife. In death I memorialised her as individual, as community worker, as artisan. She held a record to equal mine, her many stitches rivalling my number of dance steps. In fact, her creations cradled my body through them. She held me on stage. She was there at every performance, and physically present at a huge number of them. When we attended my dancing school reunion in 2010 she was remembered by most of those present as the maker of their costumes as well.

So, yesterday, I cried. Then I returned to my seat before her instrument and set the dance in motion. After several minutes I began to relax my body into a rhythm, my shoulders softened, and my hands began to ebb and flow with the progress of the hem. Like handwriting, I allowed my body to curl around the act of sewing, to nestle into its arpeggios. I zoomed in on the counterpoint of needle vertical incision and fabric horizontal glide. A cinematic pull between foreground and background, proximity and distance, memory and immediacy. I recalled the sensations of using the second-hand Singer she had given me for my 21^st birthday. On it I mostly stitched in direct lines, no pattern, no pleats or darts. Simple square tops that I hand-painted with cartoons and sold to my college friends to support myself through my dance studies. I had stopped sewing when I began video editing. I realise now that it is a similar endeavour, a meditative immersion into the detail of creating. An embodied artwork. I realise how much of an artist she was and how much I have inherited from her. She sewed for me, I danced for her. Forever entwined.

I’ve left the Horn cabinet open, just the home-made fabric covering on the machine, the chair poised before it. The room has a presence now, along with the costumes and props, it has truly become ‘Wardrobe.’ Maybe I will open that box of patterns, see if I can read the music of those scores, move into the three-dimensional act of dressmaking. A commitment to keeping her craft alive, a living memorial.

I can also mend that costume now, the final show rip that I thought might signal the end of Cabin Fever’s run. Maybe I am moving forward again, a threshold crossed after 473 days of walking in circles. And maybe soon the counting will move quietly into the background or focus on the forward motion instead.