I read with interest about the father who had sewn a dress for his daughter (March 10). I am from Germany, and that is nothing new, that a man sews a dress.

My mother’s grandfather was a master tailor in the late 1800s, and I have a charcoal portrait of my mother’s mother wearing a very fine dress he had sewn for her as an engagement gift. People did not give diamond rings then; only the nobles and wealthy folks.

My grandmother had worked for a noble family as a young woman, as a cook. Her Christmas gift from those people was a very fine wool cloth. My grandfather had his father fashion a pretty dress for her.

In those days, they did not have paper patterns to sew, so it took much time and measuring to make a dress. One of his daughters said, and I quote, “He was a fine artist, master, to create a fine garment.”

She is long dead, as well as my grandparents, but my grandmother gave me a baby dress my great-grandfather had sewn for her first baby. I still have it. I also remember, as a small girl, playing with some baby shirts with a V-insert of eyelet lace. They were lost in World War II.

It is too bad that girls today are not taught the womanly manners: sewing, cooking and housekeeping. What good are soccer or hockey when they can’t sew a button or boil water?

Heidi Weber, Dryden