Homeade shirts and "Jams"

My mom was a wizard behind the sewing machine. While most kids don't like the clothing their mothers make, I was crazy about mine. I especially loved the shirt that she made me in the pic below.

If you were an 80's kid, you'll remember that there were shorts with a Hawaiian theme that were crazy popular called "jams" and my mom must have made a pair for every kid in our neighborhood. When word got out that she had made them for my brothers and I, the other kids in the neighborhood inevitably wanted in on the action.

Friends would ask her if she could make them a pair and because of the kind of person she was, she would instruct whoever wanted a pair to simply go to a fabric shop and have them pick out a yard or so of their favorite print and she'd make the shorts for free.

Because there was alway a bit of fabric left over, and because I was so little, I would always get a pair of shorts from the scraps. At one point, the entire second drawer of my dresser was filled with jams and I had over 25 pairs. I remember getting a kick out of counting them and I would, from time to time, just open the drawer to admire my stash.

My brother Mark said that he brought some to college back in 1985 and she even made some for his college friends that school year. I always wondered how I had so many pairs because I had more pairs of jams than there were kids in the neighborhood.

Of course, I didn't only get the leftover scraps. She would also let me pick out my own fabric and would make me matching shirt and short combos which I especially thought I looked cool in. Here's one of me casually posing in front of the mailbox with my fresh new outfit.

The fact that she made jams for not just my brothers and I but also helped clothe the neighborhood will always make me smile. Like cooking, sewing was another way for my mother to share her love with the world.