The Fabric Alchemist

Ouch, Daylight Savings Time hit me like a freight train. Is this how it is going to be? Each year I get older and it gets harder for me to bounce back from the time change? Or was this just a bad year? It took a full week before I felt like my regular early-rising self again.

I started Week 3 by finishing my Akita blouse, which I wrote about and photographed here. I haven’t worn it outside the house yet. I am waiting for…something. The right weather conditions, the right occasion, something.

The week itself had a number of professional demands on my time and I chose to ease off the create-every-day mandate in favor of sleep.

Throughout the week I made steady progress on the Adelaide Dress from Seamwork. I hope to finish all the sewing by the end of this week, then order snaps and finish next week.

I also pushed myself to finally confront the elephant in the sewing room: my new-and-still-unused serger.

I had three WIP garments that required extensive edge finishing to prevent unraveling during fitting and construction. These were all projects I was excited to work on, but I felt paralyzed.

On March 20, the first day of Spring, I sat down to learn how to use my serger and finished the edges of Adelaide and a wool pencil skirt I’ve been working on. I now recognize that I had really psyched myself out about the serger, convinced it was difficult to use. I was scared to do what I needed to do, afraid of making mistakes that would reveal that I wasn’t as skilled of seamstress as I thought.

The moral of this week is: Trust yourself. 

Now that I made that tiny amount of progress, I feel a weight lifted from my shoulders. I can proceed with the actual garment construction, unencumbered.

I also learned that serging is not that scary. I even found threading the machine fairly easy. It is intimidating, compared to your single-needle sewing machine, but you are very capable of this complexity. (Yes, you too.)

I want to end with one more thing. I attended a very important event on March 18. It was an event that inspired me to redefine my “five year plan”. (Maybe more on that aspect another day.)

 

We’ve got one more week of March and I’m hoping to finish another two garments before the month ends. How is #MeMakingMarch going for you? (Even if you aren’t actually participating in the challenge.)