So I recently got another sewing machine after being without one or access to one for about a year. I did not finish the guitar-shaped pillow in home economics class in 7th grade, but I never let my lack of attention to detail and poor follow through deter me from trying to learn how to sew.
Sewing has a pretty steep learning curve, at least for me. It’s extremely difficult to visualize how all the little pieces of fabric come together to form a garment. But that is not my main problem. My main problems are not paying attention to what I am doing and wanting to fix upstream mistakes (stuff that I do when I’m just starting a project) downstream (as I’m finishing up the project). With other things, fixing upstream problems downstream is easy to hide. Hell, with some things like writing it’s built into the technique. Sewing is a little different. Some mistakes I’ve made in the past by not paying attention:
- Sewed the sleeves (both sides!) shut on a t-shirt I was making for my brother. Didn’t notice till I asked him to put it on to see if it fit.
- Ripped out the outside seam instead of the inside seam on a pair of pants I was altering to make slimmer even though I had planned out the project beforehand including what seams I was going to work with.
- Cut out the wrong version of a the pattern on a shirt I was trying to make. That project went the way of the guitar pillow.
Today I decided to make my first project on the new machine: a dust cover because my sewing machine didn’t come with it’s own. I got a free pattern from Spool Sewing, and according to their site, it’s supposed to look like this:
Mine turned out like this:
Fortunately for me, I chose a nice pattern that hides the most hideous of mistakes I made. At one point, I was crying in front of my sewing machine after trying five times in a row to get the stupid bobbin to thread.
I accidentally sewed up the wrong sides at one point, and it looked like this:
Which is to say one big long tube that wouldn’t make a good cover for anything. But as you can see, I finished it and I learned a valuable lesson: I will never be able to pay much attention to sewing so I should buy twice as much fabric as I need so I can make one crappy one and one where I actually follow directions.
I can’t sew either. I’ve always tried too without success. I think your cover looks very cool, so congrats!!!!
Thanks, it is actually a huge mess LOL. But this sewing-time around, I’m going to do a series of tutorials I downloaded from the internet, so I hope that helps my skills out better than just randomly sewing stuff when I see something I want to make.