As a young girl in the beautiful green mountains suburbs of Vermont, I would love to design clothes. Typically, I drew garish dresses of which the cast of Dynasty would approve. I thought I would one day be a fashion designer but my hopes were quashed in seventh grade when I nearly failed Home Economics because I OVERSTUFFED MY PILLOW. Seriously, it was like a rock. I could have caused serious bodily damage if I chucked it at my mean teacher's head. My interests turned elsewhere and I focused on painting and drawing.
In the back of my head, I wanted to give sewing another try. This past weekend my parents came to visit The Prof and me. We had a great time and while I had my mother there, I decided that I wanted to learn to sew something other than pillow covers or drapes. While we were doing our errands, we stopped at Joanne's Fabric and bought a pattern for a skirt, material, and thread. Although I had ambitions for something much more complicated, my mom, knowing my history of sewing and knitting picked out the short bus version of a pattern. I think my blind cat could probably figure it out. At the register, my mom realized it included directions for a zipper and she quickly nixed that idea because most likely I would have FAILED at zipper implementation and decided never to go near my sewing machine again. NEVER!
Sunday after our friends left from brunch, I pulled out the sewing machine and my mom grabbed the pattern. She studied it very carefully and told me that we needed my measurements before cutting out the pattern. I fidgeted and stalled because I did not need my mom to know the extent of my girthiness. Once I extracted those hideous numbers, we followed the chart to see in Simplicity's world, I am giant. Being the most awesomest mother ever, she assured me that all patterns run small. Yeah, right. I know that I'm a wildebeest.
Carefully I cut the pattern out with scissors I must have used to trim branches on my front tree because they could barely cut through the flimsy pattern. Next I laid the pattern on the fabric and here's where my mom clearly does not have confidence in my sewing abilities. She showed me how to pin the pattern to the fabric. Aw yeah, Mom thinks I'm a half-wit!
I spent the next 3 hours cutting, ironing, sewing, pulling out thread, breaking my mom's wine class (she needed a drink towards the end of our sewing adventure), and burning myself. There were numerous moments where I really thought that I wanted to give up or drop the sewing machine into the lake but I persisted. And holy cow, the skirt is not half bad AND I am wearing it to work AND I got compliments on it. Of course if they looked closely at the hem it appears that I was drunk stitching. I promise! No alcohol in my system!
Here are two pictures of them. I realize one is blurry but for some reason I like that photo. The skirt has two different types of material, as I'm sure you can tell. And yes I'm an attorney and I wear flip-flops at work.
