Tips and Wrinkles

CoBloWriMo #8

“Write about your favourite tip or trick that you think everyone should know about”

I’ve ummed and ah’d over this one.  It feels really arrogant to proclaim something ‘that I think everyone should know about’.  I mean, I could give all sorts of essential tips, but they’d only be of any value to beginners, and would insult the intelligence/experience of the rest of you.  [I’m thinking of tips like ‘always press at every stage’, ‘don’t miss out the stay-stitching’, ‘understitching is a thing!’  And so on.]

I’m determined to stay more or less on schedule with the daily post though, so here goes.

My tip?  Go for it.  Just go for it.  You don’t need lessons, you don’t need a permission note from the sewing police, you don’t need stabiliser wheels.  Just pitch in.

I’ve learned from buying patterns [often WAY beyond my skill level] and bashing on.  Most garments at least ended up wearable, even though they wouldn’t even have passed muster on GBSB lol.  And now we have t’internet, pretty much everything you could ever need to know is available.  Not to mention everything you could want to BUY…oh dear, that stash.

There are still things that scare me off, and some of them will always stay beyond me, probably more because I can’t even be bothered to try them [lazy, lazy Fairy] but even in the last 4 years, my skill set has probably DOUBLED, and that’s a conservative guess.

at rest

I can honestly say that sometimes I surprise myself with the finished item, I was just admiring the wife in her black linen shirt earlier today, and patted myself on the back…

I can remember the first shirt I ever tried to make:  it was at school, it was a vile red cotton with white daisies [the only fabric at the local market that weekend that my mum would buy for me], it took months to make, and I never, ever wore it.  A few years later, under my own steam, I made a blue-and-white striped pull-on shirt, with white cuffs and a grandad collar.  It had the wonkiest front placket you’ve ever seen, the inside was a ruddy mess, the top stitching looked like it had been done during a seizure, and I wore it to death.  [It eventually finished its days as a maternity top worn with huge blue dungarees.  I looked like Andy Pandy.]

I mean, what’s the worst that can happen?  You make something, it ends up in the bin.  Meh.  As long as it wasn’t silk embroidered designer tulle, so what?

GO FOR IT peeps!