Sewing. It’s been a while. The dust cover has been protecting my sewing machine for a few weeks now. Okay, who am I kidding? A few months. I don’t know where the time has gone, but I’ve simply not gotten round to doing any sewing for a long time. Considering it’s my favourite hobby and the thing that I love to do to unwind, I’ve been getting really rather upset about it. Not only could I not find the time, but I also couldn’t find the inspiration. I knew that I needed to create some DIY sewing projects for the Oxfam Fashion blog (my last post was in March – so naughty, I know) but the longer I’ve left it, the more difficult its been to start sewing again.
I usually get very excited about sewing when The Great British Sewing Bee is on TV, but since then my creative oomph has gone downhill. It’s not as thought I don’t have anything that I want to sew: I have lots of items of clothing that need fixing, a bundle of fabric and patterns ready for the making and dresses that need adjusting. I’ve even got a deadline looming to sew a teddy bear for my niece’s Christening gift (just like I did for my nephew – see my blog post here). I’ve had the date on the calendar for months but haven’t even started cutting the pattern and now the big event is only two weeks away. I’ve got to get out of this sewing block and just get on with it.
This week I did it. Not the teddy bear, but I broke through the sewing block. I needed some sheer curtains in the living room and had bought the fabric for them a long time ago but at the time all the measuring and sewing seemed like too much effort. I even considered just folding the fabric over the curtain wire and leaving it doubled up rather than sewing it, but when I tried this it blocked out too much light and was also not quite wide enough for the window. In essence, it would have been a bodge-job and I couldn’t have lived with it for long. So I huffed and puffed and sulked for a while before starting on the project. Really, the hardest thing is cutting into the fabric for the first time. It takes so much time and careful measuring before you can even make that first cut and that’s what has really been putting me off doing it. But I measured twice and cut once and as soon as I had the two curtain pieces in my hands I was immediately fired up to sew!
Okay it was only a very simple project: I only needed to fold and sew a channel at the top of the curtains for the wire to feed through, and I added a line of lead-weight rope at the bottom to hold the curtains down. Essentially, it was only four lines of straight stitch, and took a matter of minutes, but the sense of achievement that I felt after completing the project was fantastic. it really spurred me on to keep sewing and I repaired one of hubby’s shirts that had needed stitching for months. I’ve definitely got the sewing bug again and I’m glad that I forced myself to crack on – it goes to show that even starting the smallest of projects is a step in the right direction.
