The First and Last Project

Post 22

When I was young I remember watching my mom sew. She's really good. I wanted to learn and she was happy to teach me. At least for the first few minutes. She had me begin by practicing straight lines on scrap cloth. My lines weren't very straight and it frustrated me. Then the cloth got folded up somehow and my mom thought it would be a good opportunity to teach me to pick stitches out. To me, it was just a scrap piece of cloth and there was no point. I decided sewing was boring and gave it up. It takes WAY too long to get what you want.

Fast forward several years to two and a half months ago. I bought this:

It sat in the box in our bedroom just like this for two months untouched. Then one day I opened it, took it out of the box and looked at all the parts. I realized I didn't have a clue what to do with it. So I put it back in the box and put it back in my room. But my friend Patti is having a baby soon and I wanted to make her a blanket and JoAnn"s was having a great sale on flannel, so I bought some.

I took the machine out of the box again about a week ago and actually read the beginning of the instruction manual (don't tell Fred) to figure out how to thread it. It wasn't too hard and I thought, this sewing thing isn't so hard after all. Unfortunately when I start a project I usually just want to get it done, and I don't think I had all the necessary tools for starting this one.

Problem one: I didn't have my rotary mat yet or a measuring tape on hand so I just eye-balled the size of my fabric and cut where I thought I should.

Problem two: This particular blanket requires the sewing of lots of straight lines. A plethora of them. Basically starting in the center going diagonally you have to sew a line every half inch. Yuck. Then when I started sewing after pinning down my unevenly cut layers of fabric, the tension was all messed up. Like I know anything about tension. Except for the tension, I felt between me and my machine after running through half a spool of thread trying to figure out what was wrong. I sucked up my pride and called my mom, confessing that I was actually trying to use a sewing machine and needed her to help me figure out why it was malfunctioning. After the tension problem was solved I was faced once again with the task of sewing the straight lines. I actually tried using a water-soluble pencil to draw the lines first, but partway through just a couple of lines it broke and I didn't have a sharpener.

So like a good seamstress...I began sewing figuring I could eyeball it. I was quickly reminded of my childhood experience. And just as I chose then, I decided not to pick out any of the crooked lines I had sewn. Of all the 3,945,867 lines I sewed, I think one of them might have been straight, but since all the rest were crooked, it looked just as bad as the rest.

To spare you the rest of the details of this story that is becoming ridiculously long, let me just say that the remainder of the project involved cutting through layers of fabric, including the wrong layer - twice, a few exclamations of frustration on my part, a vow to burn the blanket along with my sewing machine in a bonfire, the calming response and subsequent help from my patient husband, more guess-work stitches and the final product.

Didn't turn out quite like I was hoping, but it's done. And now I might have a sewing machine for sale.