Becky’s got a brand new bag

Sorry, Instagram followers, but hey, when I repeat something on my blog, there’s a LOT more story than there is on Instagram.

I’ve shared a photo of this before.

I made this little bag in the 1970s when I was a Young Hippie. I used the butt out of one of my First Love’s jeans, including his back pocket (which I used to tuck my hand in when we walked side by side). Then I sewed on the butterfly patch, and there used to be a rawhide cord as a drawstring, but that got pulled out long ago.

I told my mother it was a dope bag, because that’s what every parent wants to hear from a teenage daughter. It wasn’t true. This bag never held drugs, but I liked the idea of her looking for it in my bedroom (I was a regular target of search and seizure by her) and coming up with nothing.

Recently, Tom and I both had pairs of jeans that had passed the point of wearing unless you’re a teenager, and we are not. We threw them in the fabric pile. I’d already pulled the pair of our late friend Steve’s 501s that I’m sure he used to wear to dance the night away in San Francisco. I had determined that I wanted all this denim to make doll clothes.

But first, thinking of my old “dope bag” (insert eye roll), I pulled the back pockets off my jeans.

Then I stared for a while at Steve’s 501s and took deep breaths.

Then this happened.

I cut the button fly out of the 501s.

I sewed that inside one of my pockets.

But just a top seam.

Pause for memory. Sewing denim is what cost me my privileges on my mother’s sewing machine. I mean, you’d THINK it would be the words “dope bag,” but that came later. I sewed other stuff on denim, and I kept breaking sewing machine needles. Then one night I needed to put buttonholes in a Home Ec project, but she was SO DONE with me and sewing by then, that she took me to Lynne’s house and let me spend the night ON A SCHOOL NIGHT just to get me out of her hair.

That is where Lynne’s mother sat patiently with me and taught me how to do buttonholes and buttons. I highly recommend always having a second mother, because Lynne’s was mine, and I loved her with my whole soul for about a million reasons other than the buttonhole tutorial.

I clipped the pockets together and marked the other pocket with chalk to show where the buttonholes should be.

BOOM! All buttoned up.

Then I stitched the two pockets together, and I have a little bag that buttons up.

There’s still plenty of 501 denim for the dolls. I’m not sure what’ll go in this bag–no drugs! Again, we are no longer teenagers. Drugs only mean medications for the maladies of aging. (Somewhere, my mother just cackled.)

It doesn’t matter whether or not anything is inside my little denim bags. They already hold decades of great memories.<