If Ida Lue Perry’s heart beats a little faster when Scarlett takes down those green drapes and declares her intention to make something, well, you just have to understand.
Perry has been using needle and thread to wrest something from nothing since before she graduated from Greenwood High School back in 1958.
“I guess the first thing I ever made was a dress for home-ec class,” recalls Perry, who has way too much energy to be a grandmother of eight.
Since she began sewing, Perry has seldom been without needle and thread close at hand.
In high school, she sewed most of her own clothes. After she married, she kept five children in clothes till they married and started families of their own. Now she sews for the grandkids.
She’s sewn more prom dresses and wedding dresses than she can count. If it can be sewn, she’s probably made at least two — from pillow cushions to pillow shams, lampshades to rag dolls.
“Give me a picture to go by,” she says modestly, almost shyly, “and I can sew just about anything.”
Ask how she came by her love of sewing, though, and Perry appears genuinely perplexed.
“It just came natural to me. It’s easy for me,” she says by way of explanation. Unsatisfied with her own answer, she gathers her thoughts about her for another attempt.
At last she offers this: “I like fabrics and colors and how it all comes together. It’s kind of like a puzzle. I just … love it.”
Her mother sewed some, but she didn’t love it. Not the way Ida Lue loves it. Her two sisters never took to it much either.
Her grandmother is the only member of the family she remembers sewing for the pure pleasure of it.
Listen long enough, though, and clues about how Perry came by her great love begin to emerge.
Once, the night before a big date, a much younger Ida Lue found herself dissatisfied with her wardrobe. She vowed to sew more suitable attire by morning.
Not enough time, teased her father, you’ll never finish. Oh yes I will, she retorted. The bet was on. Finish the dress in time, her father told her, and he’d buy her enough material to make another.
She finished the dress. To this day, she still remembers the pride in her father’s eyes when she tried on that dress.
That’s why Ida Lue Perry sews.
When she couldn’t talk her husband, John, out of going hunting even on the coldest, wettest days, she took up needle and thread and sewed him a proper hunting outfit to keep him warm.
Last year it was a tent for the grandkids, the big tepee kind — “and everything that goes with it.” They loved it, and they loved her for doing it.
That’s why Ida Lue Perry sews.
John and Ida Lue were high school sweethearts. Both serious-minded, they dated for more than three years before taking the big step. They married the summer she graduated. Forty-two years later, they’re still making a go of it.
He worked the family farm — “cotton and beans.” Sewing was a way for her to contribute.
“I didn’t sew for anybody, not at first,” Perry recalls. “Just for family.”
Gradually, though, she began to take on other projects.
While her daughters were in school, she made the outfits for the entire cheerleading squad. She didn’t charge anything for her services. “I just did it to help out,” she says.
She sewed the wedding dresses for each of her three daughters and for one of her daughters-in-law. “I didn’t meet the other daughter-in-law ’til three days before the wedding,” she says.
Word began to get around. If you need something done, they said, take it to Ida Lue. Take it they did.
Just a few at first, then more. Soon she was coming into town three, four, five times a week to do a job for somebody.
“Word of mouth is how it spread,” she says.
Eventually, Sylvia Hamrick and Kim Young, two interior decorators Perry occasionally did work for, convinced her to open her own place, and Lu Lu’s Creations was born.
The homemaker had become the entrepreneur. The sewing skills she already possessed. After raising five children and making ends meet on the income from the family farm, the business skills seemed to come natural as well.
Today, she shares office space with Hamrick and Young. If business is ever slow, the three friends merely step through the door that separates their offices and pass the time in pleasant conversation.
“I started out with two rooms,” Perry says. “Now we have six rooms between us.”
Lu Lu’s even sports a tanning bed for clients who choose one of Perry’s more daring creations. “For pageants and all,” she hastens to explain.
On a table in Perry’s fitting room sits an autographed picture from Angie Carpenter, Miss Mississippi USA 2000. “I did some alterations for her,” she says.
It’s the closest she ever came to sewing for anybody famous.
If she ever harbored dreams of displaying her talents in a more public arena — in the footlights of a fashion runway, say, or for a Hollywood wardrobe department — she kept those dreams to herself.
Perry adheres to the unwritten code that those who work with needle and thread do not criticize a fellow craftsman’s efforts, especially one just starting out or one with less talent.
“Store bought,” though, is fair game.
“If I go in a store,” confesses Perry, “I’m going to look … see what they did wrong.”
It is fashionable in some quarters to look down on clothes made by hand, as though “homemade” automatically means “not very well made.”
Don’t tell that to Ida Lue Perry.
“A lot of your store-bought things, the pattern doesn’t match, even your high-price things,” she points out.
And then there’s that matter of price. “I’ll look at some things and go, ‘Oh my! I could have made two of these for that price,” she says.
Oh yes, about the Lu Lu: “My grandchildren call me that.”
They even got her back in school not long ago. She explains, “One of my granddaughters is in junior high, and I made some dresses for the school play. She volunteered me.”
That’s why Ida Lue Perry sews.
