The Town of a Lifetime

If titles were given to toys from my childhood, The Town would vie with paper dolls for "Most Played With."  Way back then, my mom saw a town in a magazine, and, true to her creative and genius nature, she crafted one of her own by looking off the picture.
  

The town Mom made

The result was something children have loved and played with for nearly 30 years. Though parts of it have faded and at least two spots have been mended, the town is still in excellent condition even after all those years of attention.  

Mom and I started talking about making a town like this for my own children instead of the painted towns she made for other grandchildren.  

"It is way too much sewing for me to do alone with my bad back," she said.  

"You'll have to help me."

Plans fell into place; the children and I spent this past week at my parents' house 10 hours away; and Mom and I spent four solid days sewing the town.  We used fabric scraps from her stash in the basement and found some of the same ones she used for her town. (She cut out the dock for the new pond beside the outline of the dock she had cut out 29 years ago.)  

Our first two days were spent creating the buildings, bushes, and et cetera.  Mom cut everything out and backed them with iron-on stiffening to give them some body.  I earned a master's degree in Zig-Zagging by sewing on all the details on each building.

On Day 3 we laid everything out on a large rectangle of denim and roughly mapped out roads and curbs with string.  Then came painstaking hours of measuring and drawing guidelines so I could sew on all the yellow markings.  The curbs, parking spaces, and dotted lines in the road took a full day of sewing.

  Day 4 was full of sewing on all the pre-made pieces.  It was the reward for all the previous days' work, for every stitch I put in made the town come to life.  Everything on the town is zig-zagged: the lettering on the buildings, the parking spaces, the dotted lines, and the buildings themselves are attached with a tiny zig-zag stitch.  I worked for my Master ZigZaggers title, I tell ya!

We made a few changes from the original town, including adding garage doors to the fire station and changing the jail to a mechanic's garage, naming it LaVerne's Repair after my dad's business. 

 We also upgraded the hospital by adding an emergency entrance.  Somehow the garage doors make parking at a building double the fun.  

No, the roof isn't curvy in real life.  :)

Making your own town instead of purchasing one means you can personalize it with places you frequent.  Ours has Glenwood and Walmart.

Some favorite details on the original were kept the same, like the house with a driveway.  

 It was a good feeling to sew the stop signs on which finished the town!  Our town is longer than Mom's because we included an airport at one end, complete with a control tower and a helipad.

The final product!