Several years ago, I was coordinating a girls' club in a church we were attending. We ordered uniforms and sashes for the girls. When they arrived, the skirts needed to be hemmed and the club emblem patch needed to be sewn on the sash. I was surprised to find that many of the girls and their mothers did not have basic sewing skills to accomplish this, so I spent a couple of weeks hemming skirts and sewing on badges.
Subsequent to that event, I incorporated sewing skills into the curriculum already established for the church club and taught the girls some of the basics.
Then, in the past several years, I've become aware of a similar lack of basic homemaking skills in many young ladies and young mothers all around me.
So in an attempt to be a part of the solution, I started conducting sewing classes in my home, demonstrating and teaching young ladies basic skills they can use when they start their own homes.
One day, it suddenly occurred to me that this idea didn't have to be confined to my home or my area, but could be organized as a club to get young ladies together to socialize and to learn some very important life skills.
Since we were developing skills to prepare things for many of the girls' hope chests, we decided to call the club The Hope Chest Society.
My first classes included my own daughter and her friends, and I taught handsewing, knitting and crocheting. The following year, I taught machine sewing. The year after that, I had a class for mothers and their daughters, some as young as 5 and 6.
I have now put together a 31-page book for Tailormade, a group for young men to learn the basics of clothing care, how to iron a shirt and pants, how to mend their clothes, and recipes for several easy meals to cook so they don't rely on fast food.
I am very passionate about teaching these skills not only to this generation, but I'm counting on my students to pass these skills on to the next generation.
