The Beatles Coincidence: How My Granddaughters Found Their Mother's Childhood in a Fabric Store

I let them choose their own fabric. That was the only rule. We sat down for tea, I asked my twin granddaughters what colours they wanted for their hats, and then we went to the fabric store where they walked the aisles like it was the most serious decision of their lives ,and to them, it was.

Lizzy chose purple galaxies scattered with stars. Penny chose pink strawberries on gingham. I bought the fabric, and over the days that followed we did all of it together at my sewing table, pinning pattern pieces, cutting, sewing on my Bernina that mu husband gifted me 43 years ago for my 21st birthday, pressing every seam properly. Six-year-old hands learning what my hands learned from watching my mother's seamstress, Mrs Ouberto, more than half a century ago.

It was only afterwards that it landed.

When my daughter Kirsten was a baby, thirty five years ago, her two favourite songs, the ones that soothed her, the ones we played over and over and she learned to sing, were the Beatles songs ‘Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds’ and ‘Strawberry Fields Forever .’

Her daughters chose those exact fabrics. Galaxies and strawberries. Nobody told them. Nobody could have. They were simply drawn to the same images that once floated through their mother's earliest days.

I have been sewing for over fifty five years, and I have never had a project speak back to me like this one.

My mother Elizabeth loved fashion her whole life and said that in her next life she would be a model and a fashion designer. I made a tartan coat and cloche hat in her honour and wore them to Hobart on her birthday, you can read that story in The Day Strangers Stopped a Crowd for My Mother.

Now her great-granddaughters are at the sewing table, choosing fabric that carries their own mother's story in it without knowing. Elizabeth's coat. Kirsten's songs. The girls' hats. Some threads don't need to be taught. They just find their way through.

The girls wore their finished hats to my sixty-fourth birthday high tea, sitting proud as anything over sandwiches and hot chocolate. If you'd like to see what women discover when they reconnect with the way they present themselves to the world, our client reviews are full of those stories.

What Does 64 Look Like → hersmile.com.au/what-does-64-look-like