Every object brings along its own story. These were my grandmother's pattern-cutting scissors. I found them in my dad's gardening tool tray, fragments of old dried grass still stuck to their 12 inch blades.
My dads's mother was the first-generation daughter of Italian parents, and she worked in the garment industry. Due to her precision and experience of pattern-cutting, during the Second World war she did war work at Sun Ship in Chester, PA, cutting the bow plates for the US Government's Emergency Shipbuilding program. This was a highly skilled and dangerous job: the plates of steel had to be fastened down using a heavy lump hammer to tighten the wedges or they would fly off the cutting bench and injure or kill someone.
She was a powerful woman and a force to be reckoned with. My dad told me a story about the time some ill-advised foreman thought he could get away with goosing her while she worked. Apparently, she whirled around and thrust the hammer up under his nose and promised him that if he ever did that again, he wouldn't live to see tomorrow. Unsurprisingly, he never did. So said my dad.
Anyone who knows a dressmaker knows that, even if they dared to touch them at all, it would be more than their life is worth to use those scissors for anything other than cutting cloth. After his mother died, my dad "repurposed" hers, using them for his workshop projects and later, in the garden, to trim the edges of the lawn. At some point they must have popped their rivet and my dad in his characteristic way field-mended them with a bolt and a washer between two nuts, an unlovely but practical solution.
My grandmother would have made mincemeat of him had she still been alive.