Legacy Writing 365:246

Last week when Lindsey and I were going through her Aunt Gwen’s sewing box, among the first things we admired and checked out were Aunt Gwen’s pinking shears. They were stainless steel, nice and heavy, and imprinted with the word “ELK.” I checked that out, and ELK was a Japanese manufacturer who supplied cutlery and scissors to the Griffon Cutlery Corp. in New York. Their earliest pinking shears retailed for sixty-nine cents! You can still find used and mint vintage pairs online for a range of prices.

After my mother died, I couldn’t find her pinking shears. I don’t know if they just got so dull that she threw them out or they were misplaced. I bought a pair of my own when I began doing the Runway Monday stuff. Over time, I’ve also found that I needed to upgrade my scissors. I recently took them out and sharpened and cleaned the ones that are used a lot, and some of them have a little history–of course!

1. The Scotch® Titanium scissors were a gift from Scotch® after one of the Junes that I participated in 30 Days of Creativity. These scissors are probably some of the best I’ve ever used, whether on fabric, paper, or photographs. Going forward, if I need scissors, I’m checking out the Scotch® line first.
2. I have no idea who manufactured these scissors. I bought them when I first began doing Runway Monday. I like them, but when I realized I was going to be sewing a lot more than I’d expected and invested in a better pair of fabric-only scissors, these became my backup thread and pattern cutters.
3. These are my current number-one sewing scissors from Singer. Nice and heavy in the hand, but precise on all weights of fabric, these scissors make me feel so bad for my mother because she never splurged on a good pair of scissors. I have several pairs of her scissors and a couple of pairs of my own not pictured here that are tucked in various places where okay-not-great scissors might come in handy (like the garage). Nobody gets to use these Singer scissors but me, and if I see them in anyone else’s hands, I will gently trade them for either numbers 1 or 2.
4. These are the pinking shears I mentioned buying after Runway Monday started. They are great to keep small pieces of fabric (doll clothes!) from fraying, but these are not the best. Eventually I’ll probably invest in a better pair.
5. When I was in fourth and fifth grade, my father was teaching in the ROTC department at a South Carolina college. Sometimes on summer nights, he’d go back to work, and he occasionally took me with him. Most of what he was doing had to do with copying lessons and tests for his students on mimeograph and ditto machines, which were in the building’s basement. He set me up at a desk with pens, pencils, and all the paper I could dream of. Besides regular white paper, some of the sheets were onion skin and clear plastic; others were silver and blue papers. I don’t know what they were used for, but I was always cutting them into pictures and shapes with giant scissors like these. He also let me write stories on the big old standard typewriters (none of these survive). I had so much fun with just the two of us being there. One night I was drawing when I noticed something dark moving on the gray-painted cement floor. Naturally my subsequent shrieks brought Daddy running, and it was the work of a few seconds for him to crush the giant palmetto bug under his shoe. As I said in my Button Sunday post, I don’t like roaches, but at least this one was part of a father-daughter bonding moment.
6. Like number 5, these are also government-issued scissors, and for years, they were the only pairs I remember being in our family’s house. Which meant that my poor mother was not only trying to sew with them, but she had a husband and three kids who were always taking them, leaving them where she couldn’t find them, and making them dull as we cut who knows what with them. Both these pairs of scissors were manufactured in Italy, and even though the insides of the blades are dark and discolored, when I sharpen them, they’re still quite functional. They wouldn’t work at all for fabric, though.
7. Finally, these scissors and No. 8 should look familiar to anyone who works in or knows someone who works in the medical profession. I probably have a pair of these tucked away with every craft project I ever started and never finished. They’re the scissors that are supposed to be thrown away at hospitals after they’ve been used or damaged, but they end up being cleaned and relocated to employees’ houses or houses of employees’ relatives. I have a set of hemostats that came to me the same way, and it’s amazing all the things hemostats can be used for that are not illegal. One of these pairs of scissors is always handy at my desk; the other lives in the medicine cabinet.

I never ran with any of these scissors.