(Yes, I went for "anniversewry" rather than "sewniversary". I don't question your pun choices.)
This month marks my one-year dressmaking anniversary. In May 2015 I completed my very first self-made skirt and allowed the sewing machine to eat a piece of my soul. I have made around sixty articles of clothing since then, and though I still feel like a complete beginner amateur rubbish person, it's a more refined version of the complete beginner amateur rubbish person I was a year ago. I've learnt a lot, both about sewing and about how to do general life shit. To mark this momentous occasion, here are fourteen things I learned: seven about dressmaking, seven about being a person.
Dressmaking
1. Pinning is overrated. At least I think so. Pinning patterns to fabric takes AGES and it doesn't seem to be worth it. I find it so much easier to get started on something now I know I can just put the pattern on top of the fabric, stick some weights on it and cut it out. It cuts down the time by about two thirds and cutting out is no longer a stressful thing for me. Yay! I also tend not to pin straight edges and just line them up as I sew them. Pinning is great for curves and sleeves and other fiddly bits, but otherwise? Unnecessary. Also they know my views and now go out of their way to poke me a lot more than they used to.
2. I find that either it's cutting time or it's sewing time. Going straight from the cutting table (i.e. the floor) to the sewing machine basically never happens. What I tend to do now is cut out two or three patterns at once, then put the pieces to one side. That way, when I'm in the mood for sewing I've always got something to be getting on with. However, my brain has decided that marking and pinning darts is part of the cutting process and not the sewing process. If I've cut something out and left it for a couple of days and come back to find I didn't already sort the darts out, getting started on the sewing is a lot more of a challenge than it otherwise would be. I'm not sure why this is.
3. I will possibly always struggle with pretty finishing. I can deal with taking my time on things like zips and sleeves, because they're integral to the garment and give me a sense of achievement, but hemming? Eh. It's dull and non-essential to the dress being a dress and I can't be bothered. My scratty hems bother me when I look at them, but I cannot make myself take pride in doing them well. Stupid hems.
4. Facings suck and I hate them. Some people seem to manage to get them to stay on the inside, but I have had endless trouble with every facing I've ever used. Learning that it was fairly easy to chuck the facings away and replace them with bias binding or a lining made a huge difference to me.
5. Full bust adjustments are necessary and wonderful and it annoys me so much that I can't just ignore them. This is a lesson I hope to carry over into my second year of sewing, where I learn how to do all the other necessary and wonderful and annoying fit adjustments.
6. Most patterns overestimate the amount of fabric they take. I still buy as much as recommended if I haven't used a company before or the pattern has a fabric-hungry skirt, but by rejigging the layout I managed to cut the Anna pattern's fabric requirement by a metre and I can get a tulip skirt out of a metre rather than the 1.8m listed in the instructions. Saving money AND not having that really awkward length of scrap that feels like a lot to throw out but not really enough to keep!
7. Fabric is much better as a thing than it is as a pile of fabric, even if the "thing" it turns out to be is cushion stuffing and a learning experience. No fabric is that precious and special, and even if it was it's not worth much sitting in a cupboard. Make the thing! I have learned this, and no longer sit on fabric because it's too special and/or expensive to cut into. What I have not yet learned is how to get over the "this thing or this thing" indecision, or the "but I bought three metres of this and if I make that thing then I'll have a really awkward length of remnant left over" roadblock. Working on it.
Life
(I posted about 95% of this stuff on another blog last month (I have too many blogs), but I'm putting it here too because it's relevant, dammit)
1. How to plan.
For my first few months of dressmaking I flailed, bought masses of random fabric from remnant bins, made stuff I couldn't actually wear, then got discouraged and stopped for about a month. Standard. Shortly thereafter, I read Colette's Wardrobe Architect series, got inspired, and set up a regime of slightly over-the-top planning. I keep working documents on how much fabric is in my stash and how long it's been there, what stage my current projects are at and what I need to do to finish them, what I'm considering doing next, what I buy versus what I use.
I post on Mondays and/or Thursdays (and occasionally Saturdays) depending on how much I have, with a minimum of one post per week. I post about my planned projects every two months, giving me a commitment I'm forced to keep to because I put it out there. I review things I made previously, analyse the gaps in my wardrobe, and keep track of the new skills I've learned already and want to learn in the future. As a result, not only do I have a much more coherent wardrobe, but keeping on top of my hobby doesn't feel like a challenge anymore because my planning and posting habits are so ingrained. This is literally the most organised I've ever been about anything and I really hope these skills are transferable.
2. How to fix things.
My clothes, and the clothes of people around me, now have a much longer shelf life because I'm able to fix them. I can mend holes and reattach things that fell off and hem things and take in seams. This is super handy for me because I've always been a "find something you really like and wear it til it falls apart" person rather than a "wear it twice and chuck it out" person, even when my shopping habits would have suggested otherwise.
3. How to get away from disposable fashion.
I've written fairly extensively about this before, so I won't go into it again. I will just say that I'm sticking quite firmly to my resolution; I rarely buy clothes on the high street now other than undergarments and jeans and I don't miss the giant Primark bags full of things I'm "meh" about at best one little bit.
4. How to support small independent companies.
I genuinely didn't think this was a thing I cared about. It had never occurred to me to worry about it in the past, because with big multinational chain places you know what you're getting, right? But home sewing is still a pretty niche hobby and it's almost inevitable that you will use an indie company at some point. Classes, fabric shops, patterns and pattern distributors... most of the ones I have used have been small and independent, and it turns out I love it. Indie sewing companies are the best; they do so much more for you. They put up free guides on how to alter their patterns for fit or for style, they send hand-signed compliments slips with your orders, they write tutorials and make videos, they do probably completely unnecessary series of posts which change your life in a small but significant way (see point one re: Wardrobe Architect series). I have found people and companies I actively want to give my money to, and I like it so much better this way.
5. How to dress myself.
Yeah, I know, I know. I've spent fairly significant portions of my life going "oh God, I don't know, I don't want to be going out, scratty jeans and whatever jumper I find first will have to do because I can't be bothered to think". For seven years I worked somewhere without a dress code, so I used to go into work scratted up and nobody said anything (except that one time when I showed my department head a photo of me dancing in a blue lace dress and she said "why don't you wear that to work?" and I didn't know what to say that wouldn't sound rude or sarcastic). Taking up dressmaking and having to think so much about clothes means that I now own very few scratty clothes and have started forcing myself to think of my wardrobe in terms of outfits, so that when I don't know what to wear I have several default outfits that I know work together.
6. How to accept a failure.
This is definitely still a work in progress, but I'm much better at it than I was. I started out looking at subpar projects with a combination of "it's... probably fine? probably nobody will notice that it's not fine?" and "OH GOD I FUCKED IT UP I AM TERRIBLE AT EVERYTHING", but after several failures and several more successes, I feel much more able to look at a thing and go, "Hmmm, that didn't work quite the way I wanted it to" without it meaning that I've wasted my time making it or that I am terrible at making things. I can (most of the time) note that the thing didn't work, have a decent idea as to why it didn't work, take that as a lesson and move on. Sometimes I can take the thing that doesn't work and remake it into something that does work, sometimes that's not possible. But I can be zen about it as I'll have learned something from the process either way.
7. Ironing is a thing.
I had literally not ironed one single thing in my life before last year. I didn't see the point. It was a waste of time, nobody cares if your clothes are wrinkled, it's all just going to end up back in the floordrobe again anyway. But ironing is necessary for sewing. I admit to still doing a LOT less than recommended, but I have an ironing board set up in my room for when I need to iron on a piece of interfacing or flatten a lining to the inside of a dress or press a dart or what have you. To begin with it was just for construction purposes, until I started looking at myself in the mirror and thinking "If I tell people I made this skirt, they're going to look at all the wrinkles and assume I'm not very good at it." I don't iron everything I wear (I still think it's unnecessary for stuff that doesn't really wrinkle), but my cotton skirts and dresses? They get ironed now.
Here's to more learning, more fucking up, more success, more clothes, and more unnecessarily long blog posts. Cheers!
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