Sunday Sewing

The informant for this folklore was my friend’s mother.  She was close to her mother and her grandmother as she grew up.  As the informant relayed this story, she mentioned how her mother and grandmother would teach her how to cook and sew.  This is how she heard the tale of if you sew something on a Sunday, you will have to pull out the stitches with your teeth if you miss a stitch.  This is why the informant never sewed on a Sunday.  Even as a child, when my friend needed a shirt mended or a boy scout patch sewed on, if he asked for it on a Sunday, it had to wait.  Of course, as a boy, he thought that it was certainly strange that his mother refused to sew a little patch on a Sunday.  She would usually rest on Sundays and wasn’t busy with her usual errands or housework, so he was confused as to why she didn’t want to spend a few minutes sewing a button or a patch.

When I asked my informant to explain why she doesn’t sew anything on Sundays, she said it was because that was what her mother and her grandmother had always done.  She did mention that she remembered her grandmother saying something about how if you did sew something on a Sunday, that it would break a commandment.  My informant said that she had never really questioned her grandmother or wondered exactly which commandment one would be breaking by sewing on a Sunday.  It is clear that my informant put her trust in this piece of folklore because it came from a trusted relative that she was very close to.  The reasoning behind the folklore didn’t matter as much as respecting her grandmother’s wishes and continuing the tradition she had learned as a girl.