This week the pattern for the Monkeys' Halloween costumes arrived. (Oh my, I discovered a place to shop handmade -- Etsy.com !) While Monkey1 was at school, Monkey2 and I visited one of those low-price box stores for material and picked our colors: one dress pink, and one dress blue. I put the fabric through the washer and drier, to remove the store sheen and take care of possible material shrinkage. Today, with everyone out of the house, I opened up the pattern envelope, studied the layout and sewing instructions, and spread out the material.
There were six yards of material. The dining table was too small. I pulled at the table until I was able to put the extra leaf in the middle, and then with the fabric doubled, it fit. I unfolded the brown thinner than tissue paper pattern pieces, finding the ones I needed, and arranging them on the material. Apparently I read the material needs list correctly because everything fit as shown in the diagrams. I pinned. I cut.
Sewing lets the mind wander a bit while the hands are busy. I wondered, when was the last time I used a pattern, a store-bought pattern?
Not the First-Day-of-School-Dress. I had made a pattern out of two pieces of wrapping paper -- circle for the skirt, and rectangle for the bodice.
Not the T-shirt dresses or the St. Lucy's Day dress. I measured the children who were to wear these and then drew the cutting marks right on the material.
Not at the tv station. Sewing buttons of course needed no pattern. I made a table runner, and a lectern drape in each of the liturgical colors, and a curtain with pleats, but I just made those up to fit the sets.
Not the hooded towels. This popular baby shower gift was made of a towel and half a wash cloth.
Not the crib quilts. I was given the finished dimensions and cut the material and the batting to fit.
Honestly, I think I have to go all the way back to 8th grade. Knee-length shorts called "jams" were popular at the time, so as part of my Mom's teaching me to sew attempts, we bought a pattern, selected material, and made them. I recall the fabric was a muted Hawaiian print with French newspaper type clippings all over it.
I find it very hard to believe that I only ever followed one pattern from start to finish, but as I think of all the clothes I wore, a lot of homemade white shirts for school and homemade skirts for church, I can't recall actually making any of them. There were some shirts my sister made that I later wore, but none that I made. But, I was the bookworm. My sister industriously filled several Hope Chests, and I added books to my yearly booklist and wrote teenage poetry.
So that's what I was thinking as I was following the pattern pieces, cutting with my brand-new pinking shears this afternoon. And then I thought, "This would be a really good project to try the time lapse photography function on my video camera; too bad I didn't think of that before I started." However, I had two dresses to cut out, so for the second one, I set up the tripod and camera, looked up "interval recording" in the manual because I'd never used this feature before, and started recording. An hour and ten minutes later I had all the pieces of the second dress cut out and five minutes of video. I fed the footage into my video editing program, sped it up, and had a nice one minute recap of my sewing project thus far. (Watch Cutting Blue Material )
Now I wonder how I can fit my tripod and camera into the corner over my sewing machine...
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