Roots. Part One: Elise.

i was born in montréal, québec, in nineteen-eighty, to a seventeen-year-old high school drop-out (nobody took a moment to tell my mother that there was a school for pregnant teens or that there were any alternatives at all, for that matter) and an eighteen-year-old whiz kid who'd been working on one of the first prototypes of the electric car with some local scholars and who would spend a good decade sporadically reminding me that he'd turned down a full scholarship to concordia university because he had become a father and "someone had to pay the bills". with my dad usually holding down two jobs and my mom struggling with her new role as a housewife (my brother came along a couple of years after me), i ended up being raised by a whole group of people and it's only in the last few years that i've truly begun to appreciate how each of these people laid a stone or two in my foundation and, whether directly or not, guided me toward what i am aesthetically drawn to now and, in some cases, created within me severe aversions toward other style elements. 

growing up, one of my two favourite people in the world was my paternal grandmother, elise. no matter what i am sewing, not one half hour goes by without me thinking of her. she grew up very poor, one of a multitude of children, and had to drop out of school in grade four to stay home and help with the younger children. eventually, she got a job at a luggage shop, got married and had four children of her own. times were difficult for her in the 50's and 60's and, for a time, one of the rooms in her apartment was a makeshift shop that instantly became a craft room when an inspector came by. she and my grandfather would walk down the street with a baby carriage, in which they'd stuffed some of the lovely dolls she had made, trying to sell them to passersby. 

most of her children's clothing was handmade. here is my father (right) with his older brother (who sadly passed away almost ten years ago. more on him soon) in matching outfits my grandmother had sewn. 

she eventually saved enough money to buy a triplex on rue de lorimier, just south of holt, in montréal's rosemont district, and the ground floor apartment was my first home. i obviously don't remember too much from when i was a toddler but i know that she constantly made me matching dress and bonnet sets like this one:

and made me my first bikini:

i remember my aunt and mother often running to my grandmother for a dress they wanted to wear that very night. she would always stop everything she was doing, including breathing, just for a moment, while she quickly thought of what she would construct and then inevitably said yes. a few hours later, whoever had asked for a new dress could be seen admiring herself in a then-sexy (it was, after all, the 80's) dress that been expertly made with love. 

when i was seven, my parents split up and, while they screamed at each other and tried to work out how to go about separating, i was sent to live with elise, at her new duplex on davidson street, for almost a year and my brother was sent to live with our maternal grandmother. i had already grown accustomed to falling asleep to the sound of my grandmother's sewing machine and waking up to it the next morning, to groping the hundreds of fabrics she had in boxes or on rolls, in her fabric room, on floor-to-ceiling shelves, to emptying out jars of colour-coded buttons, counting them, admiring them and putting them back where they belonged but this was the year i started to want to create clothing for myself. i must admit that, at that age, i mostly sketched out an idea or selected a pattern, picked out fabric from the magical fabric room and asked my grandmother to make whatever it is that i wanted and she did, usually in one evening but most certainly within two days. i don't know how many seven-year-old kids can say that this is their norm but, boy was i in heaven. 

that summer my brother and i were sent to an awful, awful camp and, at the end of august, 1987, my father arrived in a gold-coloured, ford pickup, it's bed piled high with our belongings, and told us we were moving to ontario. right before this time, my grandparemts also got divorced but continued to live next door to each other. 

from then on, time with elise became even more sacred, as she was suddenly two-hundred kilometers away, instead of six. we started visiting our mother every other week-end and getting some time with elise during summer and christmas holidays. she was more than someone to visit. i escaped to her home and hid under her wing. i drank green tea out of a large, geisha-shaped mug, ate grilled cheese sandwiches stamped with "i <3 you" and i got to wake up to the sound of her sewing machine somehow blending in just fine with vivaldi's four season and to the smell of belgian waffles. she started teaching me more about seams, garment construction and pattern alteration and i became more and more convinced that i would one day be a fashion designer. one of the most exciting things that happened on several occasions was when my grandmother would call me and tell me to quickly turn the tv on and  switch over to fashion file, where a design very similar to one i had drawn would be making it's way down a catwalk. this trend definitely helped me to believe that i could do this. 

in addition to all of the crafting and sewing, i learned how to hunt treasure. elise would take me to seemingly random church basements in east montréal and would buy me the few items i really swooned over. this is where my love for beautiful vintage fashions stems from. i got into even more when i started delving into old hollywood biographies but, for many years, this was it. i still have crocheted gloves, a cloak, jewelry and a pillbox hat that i found in the early 90's, while thrift shopping with my grandmother. sadly, over time and in my late teens and early twenties, i lost shoes, the red bowler hat with black satin ribbon and crow's feathers and many other items i had found and cherished, back then. 

when i started fancying goth clothing, my grandmother was the one to help me sew a cloak and, a year later, made me a killer, royal blue, vinyl mini skirt. 

in two-thousand, my daughter was born and i gave her my grandmother's name as her middle name. around that time, my grandparents packed up, sold their duplex and moved to gatineau to be closer to the rest of the family (everyone ended up migrating to ottawa or gatineau at some point, for various reasons). a few years ago, she sold her house and she and my grandfather moved into apartments. she sent a trunk and five boxes of fabrics and notions my way and, a little while ago, sent her surger to me, too. i still have a hard time using some of these things, as they symbolize the end of sewing for elise and that breaks my heart.

elise is the person i call the day after a clothing exchange to let her know how it went, i call her when i'm having trouble with the lining of a coat i'm assembling or if i have a question about what seam i should use. she is the one person i know who is guaranteed to understand some of my deepest loves in this life and it makes me sad to think of her living in an apartment building, in gatineau, of all places. i wish her health was good enough to allow her to come down here for some shopping and sewing but those days are gone. i'll see her in a few days, over holiday dinner and games, at my father's house and i'm grateful for that. i hope she knows how instrumental she was to me in choosing this path and sticking to it because i daresay that, without her, i would not be where i am today. 

Posted in: bio,elise,gatineau,montreal,my history,quebec,roots,sewing