Fasteners

 

 

In the 1950s and 60s – and probably for centuries before that – anyone playing with dolls had the opportunity to learn how to use a variety of fasteners.

Of course, they learned to use them on their own clothing and shoes, but, especially with the advent of Barbie, fasteners on a much smaller scale appeared and gave them some rigorous training in tiny fine motor skills.

Barbie’s dresses either zipped (a 2-3 inch zipper with about a ¼ inch zipper pull), snapped or buttoned with buttons the size of snaps, and button holes to match. Ken’s trousers had an even shorter zipper. Dresses almost always had a hook-and-eye closure at the top of the zipper to keep it from unzipping, and Barbie’s cardigan and pullover sweater set had tiny pearl beads that buttoned through thread loops.

Snaps and buttons were generally the closures on larger dolls’ clothes, often because they were actually infant hand-me-downs – at least in our house, since I was the last baby and they wouldn't be used again.

Doll shoes offered a unique opportunity to learn to tie shoelaces that were about 1/3 the length of a child’s shoelace, if that. And some shoes buckled, as did children’s sandals. Practice on a micro scale made operating fasteners on people clothes a piece of cake.

There was no Velcro.

Nowadays there’s seldom anything but Velcro.

The American Girl Doll, which is a very nice size doll (18 inches tall), whose clothes would be far easier to manipulate than Barbie’s, is Velcro paradise. The only other fasteners I’ve seen on those dolls are zippers on her jeans, a buckle on a belt from the ‘90s (I can’t swear that zippers or buckles are still used on anything of hers) and on one occasion I found snaps to close a “button front” shirt. But that may have been a home-made outfit. Doll sneakers still have laces, though.

And it seems to be the way of things in doll life that Velcro is the closure of choice, just as it has replaced buckles on people shoes and a few other items.

As an Occupational Therapist for over 30 years, I worked in schools with special needs children. Some had physical challenges, while others had mental, sensory or visual-perceptual ones. At the beginning of that career, I would’ve welcomed Velcro. The only place it was at the time was on their hand or foot braces, if they had them.

Part of my job was to teach some of these children how to put on socks, foot/leg braces and shoes. While some had issues that precluded them putting on their own braces, I did teach them how to put on their socks and then the shoes over the braces, a more difficult task than putting shoes on unbraced feet.

Once a child was able to get that far, I took on shoelace tying. There are a few different ways to learn to tie shoelaces. When I started out, I only knew the way I’d been taught, but I quickly learned other ways to get the job done, and I let the kids decide which way worked best for them.

I did have the occasional parent who looked at their child’s age rather than their physical abilities when insisting on my teaching them a particular skill. Of course, there was also no reason why the parent couldn’t teach a skill at home if they were so insistent.

“How would I do that?” one parent asked.

“How did you teach your other kids? Do the same thing,” I replied. I had to keep my face palm in my head.

One mother of twins was constantly telling me that I wasn’t doing enough for one of her sons. Of course, despite them being twins, one was much more capable than the other. She berated me at an IEP meeting because shoelace tying wasn’t one of the objectives for the less capable twin, even though his brother had mastered that skill the year before. I told her I considered it important to learn to put his shoes on before we tackled tying laces.

I also suggested Velcro closures for his shoes – they had recently become available on children’s shoes at that point. She acted like I’d slapped her. She told me in no uncertain terms she would not get Velcro closure shoes for her son because it would make him look – and here she used the R-word. Actually,  no one would have noticed his shoes.

I was wearing shoes with Velcro closures at the time she said that. I looked at my shoes, then back at her, but she missed my point.

I also at times had to teach some children how to buckle shoes. That wasn’t as easy as one might think, since often the buckle is out of the line of sight while being buckled.

Coat zippers were another challenge. Getting the two sides attached at hip level or sometimes lower, is difficult, and sometimes the coats are too bulky to allow for the bottom to be pulled up to waist level. Getting the one side all the way into the slot on the other side is also difficult, so it is a great accomplishment when it finally happens.

Generally, when learning coat zipping, the children would practice it with the coat on a table. Sometimes they would pull the coat over their head afterwards so they didn’t have to try zipping it while it was on them.

I have a few coats myself that have reverse zippers (the kind that zip normally, but also unzip from the bottom for more comfort when sitting) that I find difficult to attach because of the reverse zip component. Or maybe because they're right-handed zippers and I'm left-handed.

Perhaps the most difficult thing I ever had to fasten was my school uniform blouses in high school. Some designer decided it would be cute to make school blouses that buttoned up the back. Given the fact that I had to go to school earlier in high school than in elementary school, and I’m simply not a 6 a.m. kind of person, that was not going to work for me. (And my maid simply wouldn't touch buttons!)

As a lefty, I have a history of needing to adapt things to my needs. The blouses were no different. I buttoned all of my blouses up except for the top button, and they hung in my closet that way, so that I could pull them over my head and button the top button very easily once the blouse was on. I then had to beg my mother to leave them buttoned that way when she did the laundry. Since they were that wonder material known then as “perma-press” she didn’t need to iron them, so my blouses were permanently buttoned through my high school years.

One thing I never understood was that, although most of my shoes had laces while I was growing up, the laces seldom came undone. I didn’t know about double knotting, so they were simply tied and stayed that way.

As an adult, however, my laces have frequently come undone. The round type often seen in men’s dress shoes – and a few of my own shoes – simply refuse to stay tied. I don’t know how my father managed to keep his tied, but I have had to resort to flat laces, since double knotting doesn’t work for round laces, either.

Of course, as an OT, I learned about many types of shoe laces, from the round and flat varieties I’ve just mentioned to elastic laces and alternate-closure laces.

Although I usually worked with children in schools, a couple of summers I worked with adults in rehabilitation. One gentleman with whom I’d worked a few days earlier was sitting on a chair with his shoes untied. He’d had a stroke, so he had one non-functional arm. I stopped to ask if he needed help with his shoelaces, and he said his therapist was getting elastic laces for him.

He and I had a rapport such that I could joke with him and he wouldn’t be offended. I quipped, “What, you mean you can’t tie your laces with one hand?”

He laughed and said he bet I couldn’t either. I said I bet I could.

Now at this stage in life – I was in my mid-30s – I had never tried such a thing. I had no idea whether or not I could tie shoe laces with one hand. And he called my bluff.

“Okay, let’s see you do it,” he said.

“Which hand?” I asked. If I was going to fail, it would be huge.

Once he ascertained that I was left-handed, he told me to use my right hand.

So, I sat down, untied my shoelace, and proceeded to tie it with one hand. It took a bit longer, and I couldn’t get the laces as tight as if I’d used two hands, but I’d done it. The man was duly impressed, but then suspected I’d lied about being left handed, so insisted that I tie the other shoe with the other hand. So I did. And that, my friends, is my stupid people trick.

The man was thrilled that I could do that and wanted to know where I’d learned it. I told him I’d never done it before, and figured it out just then. He told everyone.

Being able to tie one handed or double knot hasn’t kept me from modernizing my shoe wardrobe. I’ve never been very good at keeping slip on shoes from slipping off. As a nod to laziness, I’ve tried Sketchers hands-free shoes, which are pretty good, as well as the shoes that have elastic laces with a slider to tighten them. I also discovered that stretchy shoe laces and metal closures to go on the ends of them can be had through Amazon. They work well for regular lace-up shoes if you don’t want to have to tie them. While there’s no little bow at the top, things like that don’t concern me.

I don’t expect to forget how to tie my shoelaces any time soon, so a little time-saving – especially at the airport where I have to remove my shoes to go through TSA – is a good thing.

How Gauche

I’m left-handed. The world was not built for me.

Ok, I know what you’re thinking: good grief, one of those poor, poor, pitiful woe-is-me pieces about how unfair the world is to left-handed people. And you would be wrong. The world might be, but that’s not what this is about.

As a lefty, I tend to notice things. Things that don’t occur to my right-handed counterparts. I suppose it started when, as a child, I started learning to dress myself. Buttons were on the wrong side – although girls clothes do tend to have a left-handed bias for things like zippers and buttons. Learning to tie shoes with a right-handed mother teaching me was a revelation.

We had a plastic bank that was shaped like a shoe at our house. It came complete with a shoelace. The deal was, every time you managed to tie the lace correctly, you received a nickel. Before you laugh, you could actually buy a regular-sized candy bar with a nickel in those days, and the going rate for our tooth fairy was a dime.

My second oldest brother quickly managed to run my mother out of nickels, and he was cut off because he learned to tie his laces so quickly. But when it came to me, my mother despaired of my ever learning.

To be fair, my mother started training us in shoelace tying at age five. As an adult, I learned it’s actually a seven-year-old skill, so I shouldn’t be blamed for being slow on the uptake.

The trouble was, I was being taught to tie right-handed, something I was unable to do. Of course, being wired differently, I think coping strategies came more naturally to me than alternative methods came to my mother. I eventually worked out mirroring what I was being taught, and was able to tie my shoelaces by the time I was five and a half. It just took me a little longer to collect any nickels in the shoe bank.

Scissors were another hurdle. Back when I was in school, there was no such thing as left-handed or ambidextrous scissors. They were right handed. In case you’re wondering, left-handed scissors are hinged in the opposite direction, so that the fingers control the blade closest to them. This is the same way right-handed scissors work for right-handed people. This lends a little more power to the down blade.

Also, “in the olden days,” scissors had handles meant to be held in the right hand, and were slanted that way. That meant that, if you were a lefty and you had to cut more than a straight line, the handles began cutting into your fingers. It didn’t take long for me to figure out that if I turned the scissors upside down, so my fingers were squished into the thumb hole and my thumb was able to slide around in the larger one, I could enjoy pain-free cutting.

When I learned to sew as a teen, I discovered I couldn’t turn sewing scissors upside down because the bottom of the scissors was flat and at an angle to the handles to allow it to ride along a surface while cutting. Turning them upside down actually made it harder to cut. Fortunately for me, left-handed scissors became accessible right about the time I was learning to make my own clothes. They were twice as expensive as the regular kind, but such is the price of being unique.

In my career as a pediatric occupational therapist in schools, teachers often ask me what they can do to help their students cut better. My first question is, are they left or right handed? Most teachers are puzzled by the question. Handedness matters. While right-handed students cut circles in a counterclockwise direction, lefties should cut them in a clockwise direction. The reason for this is, if you’re doing it the opposite way, your hand is in your way, so you can’t properly see the line you’re cutting unless you angle your body in an awkward way. Even when cutting a straight line, the line needs to be on the opposite side of the scissors from the hand.

I learned young to watch people in a mirror if I needed to learn something fine-motor that they were doing. When people are explaining things to me, I often close my eyes, not because I’m trying to shut them out, but because I’m reversing the image in my head to understand it from my perspective.

I play guitar. I can play both left and right handed guitars. As a young teen, I spent hours sitting on my bureau, guitar in hand, playing into the mirror. I was trying to mimic rock star moves. As a consequence, I know what the guitar chords look like from both directions. I have, on occasion, when playing with other guitarists without music in front of us, said, “Just watch what I’m doing and do the reverse.” Right-handed people can rarely do this, and think I’m strange for even suggesting such a thing. I guess they didn’t play rock-star-in-the-mirror as kids. I guess they didn’t have to.

I truly believe that being left-handed gives me an edge when it comes to problem-solving. I never thought I was particularly gifted in this area until a few teachers met some of my suggestions with, “I never would have thought of that!” or with gaping mouths as they looked at me as if I’d just landed on the planet.

Once, after such an experience, I told a teacher, “I tend to think a little outside the box.” Her reply was, “A little?” When I came home and told Blue Scream of Jeff, he said, “You knew there was a box?”

I guess that means lefties are really a little more environmentally friendly. After all, we arrive without the packaging.