The Exciting Off-Limits Room

Hello, this is Aine.

Until I was about to graduate from elementary school, my grandmother's room was often off-limits.
"You can't go into Grandma's room for a while, okay?"
"Okay!"
There was always a solid reason for it being off-limits. And a very exciting reason at that.

When she was young, my grandmother studied both Western and Japanese dressmaking. Even as time passed, her skills never faded, and she would make dresses and yukatas for me, and jackets and aprons for my mother.

Yes, the room would become off-limits whenever she was making clothes. Dangerous tools like sewing pins, needles, and fabric shears would be spread out across the room, so it was off-limits to keep me from playing and getting hurt.

Even when it was off-limits, I would slide the sliding door open and watch her make the clothes from the very edge of the room. The cute fabric we had chosen and bought together would be cut with scissors, the pattern pinned in place, and then she would sew it all together with a treadle sewing machine—clack, clack, clack!!!
Watching it change shape bit by bit until it finally looked like a dress made my heart race with excitement.

"I need to make some adjustments, come here."
"Okay!!!"

When called, I would enter the off-limits room and try on the nearly finished dress. My grandmother would look at it from various angles—front, back, and sides—to make adjustments.
A few days after I took the dress off, it would be finished. A dress made from my favorite fabric that I had chosen with my mother and grandmother. She never cut corners on the buttons or the little decorative accents, either.

Unfortunately, I no longer have those dresses or yukatas, but I have inherited and now wear the winter jacket she made for my mother. It is one of a kind in the world. It has a design that doesn't even look handmade despite being crafted by hand, and I feel proud to still be wearing it today.

The off-limits room
That was my grandmother's shop
Where she worked so hard to make clothes for my mother and me
A room filled with wonderful, exciting secrets and magic

*Aine*