It still hurt a little, the memory of her home economics teacher telling her she was useless at sewing, but 47 years on, Peg Billingsley had a greater ache to mend.
Her best friend, dad and mother had all died within a year. The grief was heavy. She needed an outlet.
Recently, while searching Etsy for vintage patterns, Peg Billingsley discovered a listing that caught her eye. It contained a Marian Martin apron pattern with contrasting pockets, but more intriguingly, it had the original mailer envelope, addressed to a Miss Helen Ransom from Richmond Hill, postmarked 1943. Billingsley set out to learn more about this woman.
From the 1930s through to the ‘70s, the Toronto Star regularly featured write-ups on Marian Martin sewing patterns which could be purchased by readers. This mail-order business was syndicated in newspapers across Canada and the U.S., often sold under different names but tied to a company in New York. This page is from 1943, the same same year that Eric Mabley’s mother Helen Ransom ordered her apron pattern from the Star.
Peg Billingsley with some of the aprons she has made. Billingsley, a Canadian, living in Alaska, started sewing to channel her grief over the loss of loved ones. She found herself drawn to historical patterns, wondering who the women were who bought and made them.
Helen Ransom as a nursing graduate in 1949. Six years earlier, she was a teen who had ordered an apron pattern from the Toronto Daily Star, setting off a sequence of events that would this year lead a stranger in Alaska to track down her grown son.