I've always wanted to copy the pattern on the dress my Sicilian grandmother Rosaria is wearing in this photo from 1924; she is twenty-three.She is with her first three (of ten) children, in Milwaukee, where her family had immigrated when she was a little girl.
I assume she made all these clothes herself, coming as she did from a family of tailors and seamstresses.
I always thought it would be complicated, but looking at her dress more closely today, I see the embroidery pattern is fairly simple:
a curly S and a loopy back-and-forth design.
(The S's look like one of her SOS cookies [recipe].)
I'm going to embroider the design on the little cell-phone bag I'm making for my Auntie Vi-- Rosaria's forth child, born in 1925. (My father was the seventh child.)
