The sewing disaster.....

Have you ever made a mistake when sewing? Have you ever made two? What about when every thing you touch goes wrong? That’s the story of this dress.

It started out like most relationships, we were so in tune, I was blinded by love - Thick pink stripes! A square neckline! Oh be still my beating heart. But somewhere along the line it went so terribly, terribly bad. 

Separately the bodice and skirt were perfect if a little on the big side. I fitted and refitted and pinned and measured and confidently took in my seams and without a refit and I overlocked the seam allowances… mistake number one. Well, actually mistake number two as while I was fitting the pins holding the bodice together at the back had made a secretive and hasty escape, so my ‘needs to come in 2 INCHES’ (how was that not my first warning flag?) was actually ‘needs to come in 1 inch as the back’s not pinned together!’

So, uh huh, the bodice is now too tight… well that’s not the end of the world, I can always make a super small seam for the zip – crisis averted, now let me line up my darts on the skirt to the bodice and stitch that sucker closed. Oh wait, I lined up the centre dart with a side dart…

wonky skirt

After all of this I STILL had high hopes for me in this dress, I could just see myself in it already, dancing, romancing, taking Brisbane by storm! I won’t lie, I was feeling rather frustrated but thought I could still salvage that skirt with a bit of unpicking and repositioning. But you know there’s more coming right? As I was using the super quick (or is that super lazy?) way of unpicking – running the unpicker down the seam between the two pieces of fabric instead of upicking from the wrong side of the fabric – and yip, you guessed it, I cut a hole in the fabric.

The only thing that DID go right...a gorgeous ungathered cap sleeve

And so finally it became clear to me, we were over, before we had really even begun. I don’t like to quit, and I always tell my students not to give up as sometimes a project that’s annoying or looking ugly really comes together in the last couple of seams and can become a favourite item of clothing but its just not going to happen for me and this dress….

The moral of the story? No matter how great at sewing you (think you) are, don’t forget to take your time and  treat every project (no matter how easy you might think it will be) with the attention they all need to become great pieces – a lovely item of clothing isn’t whipped up in an hour.

I loved this fabric – does anyone have any suggestions on what I could do with the pieces of this dress?