Learning Blog 5: I made animals!

Okay, so maybe I didn't make them...  my mom had already precut all the pieces, so she did all the hard work.  But I sewed the pieces together!!!  All by myself!  :)

Soulless sewed animals...they still need their stuffing.  

This was great practice.  Three weeks ago when my sister was showing me how to use the basics of my machine, she knew me well enough to tell me not to rush it.  If I make a bad stitch, go back and undo it, redo it, and then move on instead of saying "good enough' and regretting later.  While still not an expert, she knew me enough to address one of my biggest weaknesses,  a lack of patience, before I got myself in a tangle.  I kept hearing her voice while I worked on these, and several times I found bad stitches I needed to pull out and redo.  I'm grateful: I only needed two minutes to take out and redo bad stitches, and hopefully these little critters will last for quite a few years!

I was also glad for the practice to just sew.  I'm getting more used to how much pressure the foot pedal requires, and how fast it will respond.  And I found myself getting into the flow!  After feeling tense the past couple weeks, it was wonderful to settle into the "mode" of following the seam lines and hearing the machine hum.  A wonderful change from the snagged messes and tension problems I was dealing with before!

However, I've still felt very novice in our I feed the fabric into the machine.  I've seen others sew, and they seem to be able to just guide the fabric in circles to get the needle where they want it to go.  For the critters, I was stopping to pull up the foot every time I needed to change the direction of the needle.  Any tips?

I'm also practicing testing the stretch of fabric, and even printed off a couple patterns to start trying to make sense of them.  While I liked math in school, I have always struggled making sense of drawn diagrams showing how to construct things (unless it's a landscape-those I understand).  With patterns, it's still a struggle to understand how to lay them out on a bias.  I'm also finding what kinds of patterns are easiest to read: ones with a drawing of what the finished piece looks like, a list of needed items, a brief summary of how to put it together, and then the pieces.  Some patterns seem to be written by experts with little teaching experience: they draw the pieces on paper without any sort of description and expect that one can figure out how to put them together.  I'm sure other experts could, but for now I'm grateful for very detailed instructions.  And for DIY bloggers who document nearly every step with photos and written descriptions.  :)

I realized another mental barrier I have with sewing is that I feel like I need to know EVERY detail before starting a project, and I want it to be perfect.  Looking at blogs of professional seamstresses, I was starting to feel very tense.  But once I found a carefree blogger who had stitched a top piece out of scraps of fabric, I felt liberated.  I need to keep reminding myself that I can learn and grow bit by bit, and I will have small successes which build on each other as I keep pushing myself to do more.