Sew Simple

I have spent most of this project working on honing my cooking and cleaning skills.  I cannot believe I have neglected a different, very important branch of housewifery - sewing!  There are entire chapters about it in my fifties books,  but I've just kind of skipped over them.  Now that I'm back in Michigan, though, I have time to develop those skills.  My mom is an AWESOME seamstress, and she offered to teach me!  Woot!

As my first project in my quest to become a master seamstress, I decided to make a skirt.  That has to be pretty easy, right?  It's basically a piece of material wrapped around your waist, and then you just sew a seam up the back.  Maybe add a button or two if you're feeling crafty.

HAHAHAHA no.  That's not how it is.  I haven't even sewn a stich yet, and I'm already horrible at sewing.  When I bought my pattern to make a skirt, I chose one from a brand called "Sew Simple."  I thought, "Perfect!  This will be great for a beginner like me.  Plus, I like the play on words."

I opened my pattern to get started, and it pretty much went downhill from there.  First of all, they have all the directions in three languages.  What??  They did not do that in the fifties, I'm pretty sure.  There are pages and pages of directions that I don't understand a word of - and that's just the English directions.

Do you know what "basting" fabric is?  Because I don't.  I know how to baste a turkey...but I have a sneaking suspicion that it's not the same thing.  What is a "selvage"?  What do all of these little triangles mean?  Am I sure I'm on the English pages?!

I decided to skip the written directions and just try to follow the pictures.  After all, a picture is worth a thousand words.  I turned to the picture directions and looked at step 1, which had about a zillion parts.  I started with step 1A, the very first step, and here's what it is:

 

 That's it.  No explanations or anything.  What does it meeeeeean???  It's like looking at ancient Sanskrit.  I'm picturing this hanging in a futuristic museum.  A school group walks by, and the teacher says, "Okay kids.  Back in the olden days, women had to make their own clothes.  They did this by a process called 'sewing.'  A few hundred years ago, back in the 1950's, women could look at these strange markings and somehow know how to make a skirt out of it."  The kids would look up in awe, except for the one squirrelly kid who's probably on a futuristic GameBoy or something.  The future is bound to still have squirrely kids.  Anyway, the teacher would continue: "Women nowadays just program their fashion needs into an iFashion box, and their clothes come out.  Jimmy!  Put away your HoloGame!  Anyway, before we had iFashion boxes, this is what people had to do.  They had to follow the secret code directions to figure out how to make things for themselves to wear."

 

My mom helped me cut out the material into the appropriate shapes (did you know a skirt takes NINE pieces of material??  WHAT??), and by that time it was 10:00 PM and I gave up for the night.  I have to go back tonight and keep working on it.  Making clothes is way trickier than I expected.  Now I see why people just go to the mall.