“It’s like two triangles and a waistband, how hard can it be?” I shouted through the house at my husband when he asked me why I was trying to sew a skirt, my third sewing project ever, in one day.
Oh sweet summer child, you have no idea the days-long ordeal that is about to unfold…
On May 1st I posted about wanting to learn to sew my own clothes. One week later, I bought a sewing machine. A few weeks after that, I built up enough courage to work through a video course to sew my first garment, a pair of pajama pants. The following week I sewed my first shirt following a similar tutorial. The newbie gains were coursing through me, and I was so ready to tackle the first project I really wanted to make — the Estuary Skirt by Sew Liberated.
Two back pieces. Two front pieces. A waist band. Two front placket pieces. Two pockets. Buttons. Thread.
Take a deep breath. You got this.
I could walk you through the comedy of horrors errors that went on while making this skirt, but I’ll skip that and get to the meat of it all instead.
What I will let you in on is that I hastily read through the pattern instructions and did not give myself the time to fully digest so many new-to-me skills without a video to help guide me along. I will also let you know this project was doomed from the start. I measured my waist wrong and made a size that was two or three sizes too big, only to realize my fatal error in hindsight. After two days of wrangling this project through minor mistakes because I wasn’t attentive enough to the instructions, I excitedly pinned the skirt closed to try it on…only to find out there was no way I could salvage the skirt in its current form to fit me properly.
Or so I thought.
I cried so many ugly tears over this skirt. I just wanted a linen chambray skirt I could wear to work the next day, not a lesson on resiliency or being a beginner again. There are thousands of finished projects of this skirt just on Instagram. Why couldn’t I add mine to the pile?
Why does learning something new have to be so fucking difficult sometimes?
It has been a long time since I picked up a new hobby and stuck to it for any length of time to feel like not a beginner. I’ve been knitting long enough to know how to muddle my way through a mistake if I really don’t want to rip back. I may have only been sewing for a month at this point, but I know enough about garment alterations to know that there was no way I could fix this skirt without (1) unpicking every single stitch all the way back to the beginning and trimming my fabric down to the proper size, (2) fixing it in a way that altered the final shape of the skirt, or (3) tossing it altogether and admitting defeat.
When I was younger, I would have gone with option three in a heartbeat. In fact, that is what I did when I tried to learn how to sew in 2016. I made one mistake that tangled up some thread in the machine I was gifted for my birthday, put the machine back in the box, and did not open it again until I donated that sewing machine in a move a few years later. I told myself I couldn’t learn how to sew because I made what I now know is an incredibly common beginner mistake. I had no resiliency to bounce back and try again,. Honestly, I probably would have done the same just last year because I wasn’t in the headspace to be resilient enough to be a beginner at something again.
I grew up in a household that expected perfection, where mistakes were not tolerated. I was told to not be a perfectionist while also punished for not being the perfect eldest daughter. I was not given space to learn resiliency by making mistakes because my parents would not tolerate the emotions that sometimes accompany the building of our resiliency muscles. In my journey to find resiliency through craft, I have learned that it’s ok to be sad or angry or frustrated when faced with a decision like what I had with the skirt. It is ok to feel disappointed, to cry, to express that emotion however you do (within reason).
When my mom saw me get teary-eyed after making a mistake on a cross stitch pattern when I was 12, she took it away from me and threw it away. She would not give me the space to work through that on my own in the way and the timeframe I needed. All this act did was feed into my belief that mistakes are not to be tolerated, and if I made a mistake it meant I was not good enough to do said craft and shouldn’t even try again.
I wish I knew how I was able to build the resiliency skills, on my own time and terms, to bounce back from a mistake with knitting. Every project I make, even today, is riddled with mistakes, but I don’t let that stop me. Maybe it’s because knitting is easy to unravel and do over, with little prep needed to dive into a new project. Mistakes feel so much more insurmountable in sewing. If the mistake is as bad as what I did with this skirt, your options are pretty limited.
If I knit a sweater too big, I lose some time but I don’t lose materials. Mistakes in sewing mean I lose both time and materials.
The stakes feel so much higher.
I can’t believe you messed this up so bad. You’re such an idiot.1
After I decided to leave my PhD program this year, something lit a fire inside me. I wanted to be a beginner again. I wanted to learn something more useful for the apocalypse2. I wanted to do something new and watch those skills build up more and more until they turn into beautiful things. I wanted to try sewing again, but I was afraid I would fall into my same habit of making one mistake and abandoning the journey altogether.
I’m experienced enough in the world of hand crafts to know that it is very difficult to build the resiliency needed to muddle through mistakes without making mistakes in the first place. Fixing mistakes and bouncing back does involve some knowledge of your chosen craft, but it starts with having the resiliency to tackle those mistakes in the first place. The easy way out is to toss whatever you messed up to the side and say you can’t do it. It’s a lot harder to take a breath and work through what you need to do to recover and move on. For many of us, learning how to do that doesn’t come naturally, either. It is something we have to be exposed to in order to learn this important life skill.
After a couple of minutes of releasing my frustration and disappointment with this oversized skirt from my body through the act of crying, I took it off and beelined back to my sewing table.
“I made the skirt too big,” I told my husband as I walked by his office, where he was gaming with a friend.
“Oh no babe, that really sucks. Can you do anything about it?”
Six months ago I would have said no and let my dreams of sewing my own clothes go. But now? That fire burning deep inside me didn’t let me skip a beat.
“I think I can add elastic to the whole waistband to bring it in enough to wear without it falling off me. The pockets will be pulled towards the front more than I would like, but it won’t be noticeable to anyone but me.”
My husband nodded and went back to his game. I sat down at the table with my seam ripper and started to pick apart the elastic I sewed into the back.
My idea did indeed work, and today I get to wear my (almost) dream linen chambray skirt as often as I wish. The pockets pulled to the front like I expected, but it really isn’t noticeable to anyone but me.
I could have easily given up, like I have so many times in the past, but I didn’t. Being a beginner is fun and scary and frustrating and oh so daunting sometimes, and this is exactly what I need in this season of my life.
I have already altered my skirt pattern and will attempt a smaller size very soon. I made notes on my pattern instructions so I don’t make the myriad of mistakes again. I feel ready for more, to learn more, to create more.
Sewing is helping me find my resiliency again.
My inner critic is mean af.
Knitting is useful, if you live somewhere cold. I’m working with the assumption that I will be left behind in the tropical hellhole I live in should something go down, where wool garments are only useful for a couple months of the year.