Character Patterns

Finding my own characters was Simplicity with a what-cha-McCall's-it book

When I was a teenager, I spent a lot of time with people of my own creation. I wrote dozens of stories featuring dozens of characters. When I wasn’t writing, part of me was always immersed in the drama and comedy and romance in my head.

Outwardly, I lived a very ordinary life in a small rural town. One mundane drudge I had to endure was when my mom and sister dragged me to a fabric store. For the record, they didn’t want me along any more than I wanted to go. But the nearest fabric store was an hour away and I couldn’t stay home alone, so we were stuck.

I survived these harrowing experiences by parking myself on a stool where thick McCall’s and Simplicity pattern books were lined up on a sloped counter. I could lose an hour browsing through these books. Not for the patterns, good heavens no; the attention to detail required by sewing exceeded my capacity by a great deal. No, I loved looking at the illustrations of the models and matching them to the characters in my head. Look, this woman with short blond hair was definitely Molly if she were younger, and if this woman next to her had slightly lighter brown hair and maybe wasn’t so tall and willowy and had a rounder chin, she could be Valerie! (I had to adjust for “not so tall and willowy” quite a lot with these model illustrations.) I could almost imagine what my characters would look like when they were adapted into a movie, which would be a big hit and probably even have a plot by then.

As an adult, I tried to introduce my kids to this hobby. They didn’t get the fascination. They just smiled politely and went back to talking about Minecraft, a topic that hardly anybody is interested in. I couldn’t entirely blame them. Pattern books are different now, with mostly photographs instead of illustrations. And I’m still not interested in browsing the books for, you know, actual patterns. But sometimes still, when I happen to catch sight of those willowy women, I feel a flash of that rich drama and comedy and romance that filled up my younger days.