Life on my own: Patterns

Pat­terns are worse to fold back up than maps are. “Don’t fold the maps. Roll the maps,” I hear one of the side­kicks in the movie Twister sigh­ing. And I pic­ture him stand­ing with a thin pattern-paper hang­ing from his upraised hand, a puz­zled look on his face. I’d like to see him try to roll up a pattern.

Mind you, these aren’t tool and die pat­terns I’m talk­ing about here. I don’t even know what those look like, or if they are flex­i­ble. For all I know they’re half-inch-thick steel or some­thing. Any­way, the kind I’m talk­ing about is the so-thin-you-can-almost-see-through-it kind that tells you where to put the seams and the darts. They have num­bers, too, and a lot of other infor­ma­tion printed on them that I may or may not pay atten­tion to.

Last week­end, I decided on a whim to sew one of the pat­terns I recently bought. Sewing is one of the few enter­tain­ment options open to this small-town girl—right up there along with read­ing, watch­ing a movie, and tak­ing a hike at the nature pre­serve. All thrilling, I assure you, but I’d already had my share of those other activ­i­ties. And after all, there’s noth­ing like a sewing project to brighten up a snowy Lord’s Day, right?

I even had the per­fect fab­ric for the project already: An old sheet. Not old as in worn-out; it had only a small bleach stain some­where on it. But it was a poor orphan flat sheet that didn’t have a fit­ted sheet to go with it. It was the per­fect color. (Oh, and it didn’t require spend­ing three bucks a yard, plus gas, for a measly bit of material.)

So I decided to make myself a new blouse out of the sheet. I sup­pose it would’ve been eas­ier to cut a sin­gu­lar hole in the mid­dle of it and wear it that way, if I was going to wear a sheet. But that style is so 1980’s.

The blouse pat­tern I picked was what’s called a princess-seam blouse. In other words, it has twice the num­ber of pat­tern pieces a nor­mal blouse needs, thus requir­ing twice the amount of work. No exag­ger­a­tion there; just ask any sewing-conscious per­son. (I almost said “any sewing-conscious woman,” but there was one boy in the 4-H Style Revue when I was 14, so I have to be all inclu­sive here.)

The upside of the princess-seam pat­tern, besides that it makes me feel like roy­alty, is that it fits bet­ter than a reg­u­lar kind of blouse. If you are a guy, you wouldn’t under­stand. Get over it.

So I cut, instead of one nice round hole, a whole lot of strangely-shaped holes in my sheet—oh, but that was after I ironed the thing. I once heard of some­body who actu­ally ironed sheets reg­u­larly, for a bed-and-breakfast I think. I’d never ironed a sheet before in my life, hav­ing cho­sen a dif­fer­ent pro­fes­sion than bed-and-breakfast man­ager. And if I ever were to own a bed-and-breakfast, I would buy sheets that were self-ironing. There’s got to be a magic poly­ester chem­i­cal some­where in a set of sheets, the same kind they put in the men’s dress shirts that say you don’t have to iron them.

Then, sheet ironed and shot through with holes, I had a lot of pieces of fab­ric pinned to pat­tern pieces. By the way, pins are dan­ger­ous if you abuse them. Don’t pin and drive.

Then it came time to sew the pieces together, like a puz­zle. Except this puz­zle doesn’t have just one nice pic­ture to go by; it has about twenty pic­tures and step-by-step direc­tions. Wouldn’t it be nice if all puz­zles came with step-by-step direc­tions? Then you wouldn’t have to hunt for­ever for that one piece of blue sky that fits in this cer­tain spot. I hate skies in puz­zles. Also tree foliage.

Puz­zle pieces together, and lots of lit­tle pieces of thread lit­tered around my sewing machine, I had a shirt. More or less, any­way, and it took sev­eral hours because I’m slow. And I still have to trim the extra fab­ric and threads off, like when you even up the edges on your home­made Valentine’s card. I could make a thread wig from all the lit­tle thread bits I’ll have by the end.

I was thrilled when I fig­ured I’d about fin­ished the blouse. And that’s when I looked around and said to myself, “oh, right. You need to clean up.” So I threw away all the lit­tle bits of pattern-paper that I had cut apart (to get to the actual pat­tern printed on the pattern-paper) and all those lit­tle threads I had so far dis­carded. Then I folded up the pat­tern. Unlike 99% of seam­stresses, I am fool­ish enough to store most of my pat­terns in their orig­i­nal envelopes. Which are only about 50% the size they need to be.

Let this be a les­son to you. For heaven’s sake, don’t wear your sheets.

Posted by Sarah Einselen on Feb 24 2012. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS Feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.