Extreme Sewing

“They feel funny,” Layce said pulling at the inseam of her freshly tailored palazzo pants. She pulled at her butt and then her crotch. She pulled the waist up…

“Oh, don’t do that,” I said. We all know why. She pulled them down. “Better.”

“There’s still something wrong,” she said.

“It may have been your tailor,” I said.  I was her new tailor and I knew why the pants felt funny. It was my fault. She wanted me to alter one of her maxi skirts into palazzo pants. Trusting me to do it was her first mistake.

I looked up on YouTube on how to do it.  It seemed simple enough. Mark this. Cut that. Sew seam. So I did all that—only I did it backwards. This facilitated cutting more seams and sewing it all back together again and when I did all this some inches had been lost in various areas–butt, crotch, waist, but not the length. They were long enough just not in the right places.

This fiasco did not daunt me. I continued to sew. I lost needles and pins only to step on them later. I was covered in thread. My command of the pedal resembled a student driver—lurching forward at 50 mph then slowing to a snail pace and everywhere in between.

I almost lost a finger while vacuuming up my sewing mess. A loose piece of thread wrapped around the vacuum’s roller and when I tried to get it out, it garroted my finger. It happened so fast that by the time I turned the vacuum off my finger had turned blue.

I remained undaunted. Next on my project list was a vest. The pattern I’d chosen seemed simple enough. In sewing there’s a lot of ‘simple enough.’ I showed Layce’s mom the pattern and asked about how to read the algorithm on the back which told you how much fabric I would need. While making  place mats I’d been to the fabric store three times for more fabric, more thread, and more bias tape so I wanted to save time and gas and get the right amount of everything because it always seemed I had too much of this and not enough of that.

All of this was received with “Do you have any idea what you’re getting into?”

“No, but that’s the beauty of it. Extreme sewing. You’ve got to start somewhere and just take the leap.”

“That’s sky diving, not sewing,” Layce informed me, tugging at the crotch of her pants.

“Same difference—the moment of truth always arrives. Just look at your palazzo pants.”

P.S. I’ll post a photo of my vest if I ever finish it.