.. but is now a bit of sewing that I did over the weekend.

I am still trying to get around my fear of my own sewing machine. Given than I still need the manual to work out how to fill a bobbin, insert it, and then load the silly thing, you’d have thought there was little hope for me. Hell, I thought that.

But prior to having to dig up the manual, I spent a day looking through patterns, finding one, picking a fabric, and then getting to the business of cutting the paper patterns and then cutting the pieces.

Now, I’ve worked out it’s a bit like the knitting. I love knitting, and I love starting new projects, but man, I hate casting on. If I could get someone else to do the casting on and counting and checking of numbers of stitches for me, that would be grand, but no such luck of course. It’s the same with sewing. The cutting pieces part is a bit of a pain, but there you go.

The stitching together is where all the fun is. After some careful pinning and working out where the 5/8″ marker is on my sewing machine, I was off. And the current result is this:

This is a McCall’s pattern, M5430, and it’s pretty simple as long as you check which side of the fabric you’re meant to be marking and cutting. Which, well, I got a little bit wrong, because my skirt is the reverse of what the pattern indicates.

Luckily, as ever, Ruth was on hand to help me out. What I haven’t photographed are the pieces for the waistband, which I’d already done correctly, had my skirt been the right way around. So her idea was to just reverse the waistband pieces. Which was a lot easier than having to consider cutting a couple of new pieces and needing more fabric.

The photo above also shows that I corrected the pleating so that it falls in the way my skirt needs it to, rather than what the pattern tells me. So I feel a little bit smart for that.

The fabric is a cotton/spandex blend, which is great because cotton’s probably the safest thing for me to work with as a first project, but the spandex means that there is a bit more weight and heft to the fabric, which gives it a really nice drape. I love it.

The skirt’s going to hang for a while just to get it settled before I start on the hemming. Which to me feels like a whole other box of frogs…

Now, this is a new one, and I tend to be able to blame any of my new obsessions on other people. I am the responsbile sort, after all. The sewing has two people I can blame.

Let’s start with Mummy Irish, my mum-in-law.

Some time back Mummy Irish found a quilting shop not far from where she lives. Not only was it a quilting shop, but it was also a quilting school. So every week, they learned a new technique, sewed it up. And then as the weeks went on, not only did they learn more, but all those little pieces all amounted to their final quilting project, pulling together everything they’d learned into a finished piece.

A brilliant idea, and enough to keep Mummy Irish quilting. She still goes to her quilting school, and she always has a new quilt to show. She hand-quilts rather than use her machine because she quite enjoys stitching in front of the telly, and because she simply prefers it. She says it makes the quilt poofier if you do it by hand.

All well and good. And then comes the second factor in the new hobby.

Ruth is a clever and persuasive sort – funny how a lot of people I know are like that. I’d long envied her knitting and spinning prowess, and to top it off she was getting to grips with her little sewing machine so rapidly it was somewhat blinding. She has a great love of fashion and design, and with very experienced colleagues at the fabric shop she works at and a very encouraging father, she’s got quite good indeed.

So it wasn’t very long before I was invited to her home, via her town’s fabric shops, and she sat me down in front of her sewing machine and said, “Now I’m going to show you how to sew. And we’re going to make a little bag.”

We?

It take long for me to find that sewing did suit my meticulous (read: obsessive) nature. Straight, even lines. Good, even stitches. Solid, even creases. I got so quiet for so long making my marks and pinning things Ruth thought I’d died of fear from using someone else’s precious machine.

Eventually I had a wonky little bag, with a zipper and everything. I made great lines sewing the zipper in, but one of the bag’s edges was a little shorter than the others. Still, I was very happy, and felt terribly clever.

Fast-forward my recent birthday, and a little bit of birthday money. I knew which sewing machine I wanted, and I knew where I wanted to get it from. There is a little sewing machine shop near me that has been in the business of sewing machines since the 1960′s, and they sell, repair and have everything to do with sewing machines. So I rang them up.

The lovely man in charge broke the bad news to me gently: the makers weren’t making the machine I wanted anymore. They’d brought out a new model to replace it, which cost less than the one I wanted, but he honestly didn’t want to sell it to me because a) he, too, liked the one I was after and was sorry to see it go, and b) he personally did not like the build quality of the new one enough to sell one to me when I had my heart set on the other.

We chatted for about half an hour, trying to work out what to do. Ideally I wanted to buy a machine from him, because then I knew where to go locally for good advice and machine repairs if need be. And he wanted me to buy a machine from him, because he wanted to be able to provide his good service.

Finally, I asked him about the higher-end version of the machine I was after. Funnily enough, that one in the series wasn’t being discontinued (the bastards). He agreed it was a very, very good machine indeed and would keep me happy for years. I joked that I hoped the machine would outlast me.

We did a deal. He invited me down to the shop to play with the shop model they had in. I fell in love, paid for it, and they delivered it to my door even though they were only a  10-minute drive from me. And the next time I popped in, I picked up some stuff from their haberdashery, including a very good pair of scissors, and he let me take them home free of charge, as part of the deal.

So this is my new, my very first, sewing machine. It is quite possibly smarter than I am. I’ve so far tried a few stitches, tried out the overlocker mode to see how it worked, so I can try using it the next time I have to take up a pair of trousers, but little else.

Ever since I got the machine, and the possibilities of sewing made available to me, Mummy Irish has been able to geek out a little bit with me. So on my last visit up, we picked out a project for me to do. It’s pretty much all go now; I have the fabric and the pattern planned.

I just need the nudge, and to not be scared of my own machine.