Since I received lots of mail about the yellow garter superstation, I thought a brief update was in order this week.
Daisy Gordon made the garters herself.
Now, a garter, even one made from silk, is no great sewing feat, but as some of you know, especially if you’re also watching the marvelous photos on the Juliette Gordon Low Birthplace Facebook wall, Daisy’s talents did not extend to the fibre arts. The Helpful Hands Club debacle is a famous proof of this lack of ability. In boarding school, when Daisy wrote home frequently for money, she used some of that scarce commodity to pay a friend to do her mending for her!
As she made the garter, she fretted that her friend’s might not be sturdy enough. “In my haste and inexperience at such work,” she wrote, “I fear it will strike you as a fizzle but I assure you, I look at each stitch with pride.”*
In this case, Daisy did have cause to be proud of her handiwork. Her garter, at least, held up the entire year she wore it.
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* Juliette Gordon to Mary Gale Carter, 9 March 1883, George Hyde Clarke Family Papers, Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections, Cornell University Library, MS2800/6/2.
What a hoot! I have had silk hand sewing projects turn into a "frizzle" more than ones and I am a pretty skilled seamstress!
In quick internet search, this is a superstition that shows up, not one Daisy invented! http://bulfinch.englishatheist.org/super/Chapter6.htm
Thanks, Katherine! As I wrote in "Superstitions," but perhaps in too little detail, these are very old folk beliefs, most of them dating from before the Colonial era in this country. They had regional variations, as your Bullfinch source (among others) makes clear, and in Europe, where most of them started, there were regional variations on the same folk belief as well. I continue to be interested in how many of these superstitions Daisy and her friends tried–and even more interested in the possible multitude of reasons why. What did they mean to her? Surely they were good fun, but I think there was more to it.