Friday, July 9, 2010

An Interlock for you and Interlock for me!


July 4th was actually a pretty uneventful weekend. It was so hot in NYC that I barely could leave the house - cranked up the AC and put some juice pops into the freezer. I was going a bit stir crazy as I waited for some fresh tee shirts to dry, so I decided to take up a long time friend on his offer of some sewing lessons. [in someone else's house making stuff counts as going out, right?]

Me and sewing go a long way back.... as a child growing up to very DIY parents, I was taught hand sewing very early on. And while i was quite terribly at embroidery, I did always love to sew. Being too young to learn on a machine, my mom taught me the basics of hand sewing and my barbie dolls were never the same. I would horde all the scrap fabric my mother cast off from her finished projects and create collections for my dolls - many times simply sewing the outfit on to the Barbie as their are no zippers small enough to keep a nice line on a dress at that scale. As I got older I started making clothes for myself, but i was really wary of jumping into the machine sewing... i kept to my hand sewing, and would create fashion shows for my family using my sisters as models-- we went from terry cloth wraps (that was all the fabric we had in the house at the time!) to detailed sequin Matador pants - I wish i had a photo of those - they were HOT!

Many times my mother would sit me down on the machine after having cut a store bought pattern and try and get me used to the machine. I was like a race car out of control and couldn't sew a straight line to save my life, so we let it go, an di went back to the hand sewing. And while i always had a sewing machine only ever really used it to sew curtains and eventually moved away from sewing my own clothes.

Sites like Craftster and BurdaStyle helped me get back into it with free pattern downloads

Gosh this blog post is getting super long... oops

well the long and short of it, i had a FANTASTIC refresher course with my friend Quoc, where we went from pattern to serged piece in an hour and a half - it was great! And really gave me so much confidence! I went straight home an bought a serger on ebay.

Stay tuned for more tales of sewing