In which I lose confidence

I mentioned the other day that Bonnie inspired me to get out the sewing machine.  I think I also mentioned that my sewing skills are pretty basic, right?  A little background…y’all already know I have the “craft gene”.  I also learned to be crafty through osmosis from a mom who crocheted, cross stitched, sewed, cooked, gardened (that’s sort of crafty too), macrame (it was the 70s!), wood burned (still the 70s) and latch hooked (yes, still the 70s).  I’ve probably left something out (no, silly…not the knitting….she never knit) but you get the idea.  I always wanted to learn to sew and when I was about 6ish my mom help me cut out a pattern for my doll and I hand sewed it by myself.  It seemed I would be destined for sewing greatness when I was old enough to operate a machine but somehow the interest never materialized.  My only contact with sewing from then on was picking out the pattern for the formal dresses my mom made throughout high school and handsewing on an occasional button.  Fast forward to November 2005.  Tuesday Morning had a big sale on sewing machines and I decided it was finally time.  I did a tote and a handbag with plans for more, but I haven’t touched it again until now!  The only excuse I have is that it isn’t convenient.  The machine is upstairs in a dark room with yucky carpet that houses much of the stock for Diva Knitting.  It isn’t conducive to popping up there to sew whenever the mood strikes (especially when there are mounds of roving to navigate to get to it).  However, since my sisters are coming to stay next weekend (that means serious cleaning and reorganizing of Diva Knitting Inc. Upstairs so that I can have two beds free) I can now easily get to the sewing machine.

Sew…….Wednesday I started cutting out my pattern.  Bonnie mentioned that the skirt looked like a good warmup, so I thought, “Great!  That’s exactly the one I’ll start with.”  Well, I thought that meant the pattern would be relatively easy and it is…but apparently I am a moron.  Of course, I couldn’t just do the pattern as it was.  I wanted to shorten it.  No big.  The pattern said just fold up the bottom to the height you want.  Easy.  In theory.  Here is the first attempt.  I knew there was a problem when the back flounce wasn’t matching up to the back of the skirt.  And then there is the fact that it looks completely wrong.  Look closely at the pattern picture compared to mine.

One nice thing about sewing is that “frogging” isn’t nearly as painful as it is with knitting.  Undoing the seams took about 5 minutes and cutting the new piece (fortunately I had enough fabric, ironically because I had shortened it) and redoing it took maybe half an hour.  What is really irritating is how I can do all this work not noticing something so obvious!  In my defence though, when the pattern said fold it up, it didn’t say which way (even though I still SHOULD have noticed, but it was curved darn it).  Now I just have the waistband, zipper and hem left.  Speaking of the hem…I started to do it on the machine (as suggested in the pattern) and it looked TERRIBLE.  I guess I’m going to hem it by hand.  Fellow sewers…thoughts, suggestions, help with the hem???

 Finally, that knitting thing.  I’m about 5 minutes away from having my Opal socks finished.  Which is a good thing, since yesterday marked the beginning of the Summer of Socks.   I need to get a new pair on the needles!