Sewing motivation in little steps

You know what sewing is like: you're really into it, making great progress, you're so looking forward to the finished garment... and then something happens that slows you down, interrupts your flow, gums up the works - you put your sewing aside, and despite your good intentions, you don't get round to pick it up again another day. 

Unfortunately it often happens that a short break from sewing results in a much longer period of not sewing at all.  Sewing is not like knitting that's easily put-downable and pick-upable, to coin a phrase.  You have to pull the sewing machine back out, free up the space for all the stuff you need, get all the bits back together, - and you generally need to plan things a lot more than just carrying on on impulse.

I have found it incredibly easy to lose my motivation to sew.  While the thought of my massive fabric stash, and all those lovely patterns, and all these exciting ideas what I could make (if only), and what design features I could incorporate... they seem to percolate away but not lead anywhere.

Tash has written a great post about sewing motivation, I very much enjoyed it.  My post is about  one technique that I use to overcome the not-sewing-but-I-really-want-to slump: do something, anything that comes to mind, even if it's just a little something.

Small steps, the itty-bitty tiny ones, are very useful to regain your motivation to sew again.

The sorts of things I like to do, just one at a time, - in no particular order:

• Read through some of the sewing instructions to check how it deals with a particular part of the sewing process
  
• Wind my bobbin - ready to sew whenever that might be ('bobbin mates' are great for keeping a bobbin spool and sewing thread together)
  
• Look at my fabric and stroke it a bit (yes really. Though that works slightly better with wool when comtemplating a knitting project)
  
• Clearing my cutting table. You never know it might make me spread the fabric out and maybe even cut out some of the pieces... or all of them once I get started and it's not as horrendously labourious as I expected...
  
• If I am further along: pin something, measure something, baste or tack pieces together, do a little pressing with the iron, ...
  
• Set up the ironing board, including iron, tailor ham, clapper or whatever else I like to use
  
• Heck, even dust off my sewing machine.  It likes a bit of tender loving care occasionally
  
• Write a bullet point list of steps needed from now to the end of the project, or just a couple of points of my next steps
  
• Lay my dressmaking pattern envelope on my sewing table, or put it with my machine.  Adding the fabric to keep it company is good too
  
• Cut out the pattern tissue pieces.  Even if I only start with the big ones, or the little ones, I can usually go on to do all of the ones I need (I have big freezer bags, with a ziplock top, that I put the tissue pieces, pattern envelope and other materials into ready to use)
  
• Look at the pattern envelope to familiarise myself with the line drawing, what kinds of pieces there are, what shape they're in, where the seams are. That sort of thing
  
• Take out the sewing instructions and circle all the numbers of the pattern pieces for my chosen view or option
  
• Go out and buy or look for the other bits I'll need: check the zip colour and length against my fabric, pull out interfacing, set out pins, chose buttons (or pin different options to the fabric to see which I like), grab tape or ribbons, double-check that my sewing thread hasn't gone dry and brittle if I had it a while (been there, done that), double-check the pattern for anything I forgot
  
• Check out the fabric in the mirror to see what it'll look like on me
  
• Sew 'just' the one seam... which usually leads to a bit more... and this little bit here, and that one bit there...
  

Any of these things might be all I do at the time.  It gives me a feeling of satisfaction that I managed to successfully put a stop to my slump.  And strangely enough one small thing is often enough to do a second little something: either straight away, or a bit later in the day.

The best thing about the little step approach is that everything more is a bonus and you're not expecting that you'll complete your project in a few hours from the time you get up to do anything.  If you're literally only reminding yourself of the sewing instructions then that's enough to get you thinking about things in a practical manner again.

And that seems to losen the paralysis of "I really want to sew, so why don't I?"

What other small steps can you think of?  What do you do to get yourself over a long pause in sewing?  What gets your creative energy flowing?

Please let us know in the comments!

Member of the month - Beth

How to sew a ball gown in a bedsit without (entirely) losing your mind

 

I am fairly new to sewing and when I started I shared a large two bedroom flat with one other person....  now I live in a very small "Studio" (really a bedsit) in East London.

 

This adventure started as most of my sewing projects do… with some beautiful fabric I bought nearly eight months ago. And for the sake of full disclosure I am still working on this project. But there is a photo shoot on the 31st of May  and I am hopeful it will be ready.  I will post photos of the completed dress. 

 

 

It being an African printed canvas as I had to buy 6 yards of this beautiful gold and turquoise material, with a complex geometric pattern.  For £15 how could I go wrong? If you live in London go to Dalston market and look for the store near to the butcher selling cows feet.

 

Having so much beautiful fabric I decided to make myself a ball gown length full skirt. To put this decision into context I live in a tiny bedsit in central London so sewing something this big was always going to be a challenge but little did I know how much of a challenge it was going to be.

Also I am also a very novice sewer and the only things I had managed to complete before starting this project were a pleated skirt and some shoe bags. But fortune and fashion favour the brave, and I foolishly thought that it would only involve sewing longer seams. A lot of unpicking for accidentally sewing the pleats together happened when sewing the skirt.

 

I experimented with various ways of pleating the fabric, but as it was very stiff it looked more like a kilt than a ball gown.  My solution buy a vintage vogue dress pattern and just not sew the top bit, and add half a meter to the bottom. Turns out that this would have some interesting structural implications.

 

My first challenge was cutting out the fabric.  I discovered that the fabric was very narrow compared to others that I have bought. This meant that the gold bits would be hidden in the pleats of the dress if I used my original vertical layout, so  I opted for a vertical layout. I also had to cut from salvage edge to salvage edge. 

 

My room is only 4.5m long so I needed to rearrange my furniture so that I would have a clear path to lay out the fabric.  This was like playing solo twister! 

 

I then started to place the fabric so that the patterns would match, given the horizontal & vertical patterns in the fabric, choosing a pattern with princess seams, was not the best idea (next time solid colours only!). I thought I did the pattern matching correctly but turns out I matched on the cutting edge rather than the sewing line. GRRRRRRR!!!!!!!  After much foul language, tears  and ripping out seams I got to a place that I was happy with, the patterns if not the fit.

 

The pattern was originally a dress and in altering it I forgot to take account of the weight of the fabric.  It being very heavy I needed to put some structure in place.  I originally tried grosgrain in place of boning on the outer skit, then tried to use it as casing for plastic boning. Neither really worked. I tried boning the inner skirt, but it wasn't strong enough.

In order to provide the support  that I needed I had to sew a underskirt and add a wider boning to it. Professor Pincushion has some useful tutorials. But this didn't look that great. I have now opted to sew the boning to the grosgrain then sew the grosgrain to the outer fabric. 

And this is where I have got to so far.  To do  this week: 

1) adjust fit of skirt (I have gained weight over the last 8 months)

2) finish sewing in the boning/grosgrain 

3) attach Petersham at waist 

4) attach underskirt

5) do zipper

6) hem 9m of circle skirt :( 

 

7) Find an occasion to wear this thing! 

 

What I have learned

• Buy a foam gardening kneeler (pound shop ones are good), it will save your knees when pinning and cutting fabric.
• Yes it is worth it to baste your seams.
• If you are going to be walking on your fabric to cut it out wear clean socks.
• Electrical tape is awesome for marking hemlines and holding seams together.
• Write the piece number and direction to the centre front in the seam allowance so that you can remember which piece is which when you come back to your project  after a few weeks.

 

Shortcuts for tracing and cutting out

Giselle asked me to pop this note in the blog - thank you Giselle!

Getting all the right equipment has been a quiet obsession of mine in recent years. And an expensive one. Sewing isn't cheap when you decide to do things properly, is it? Even though I sourced my Horn sewing cabinet on eBay, I still had to spend £50 on the insert to fit my ancient John Lewis machine. Even though I sourced my as-new Janome overlocker the same way, I still had to drive across England to pick it up.

Still I am quite proud of my little home-made shortcuts for tracing and cutting out tools.

Cutting tables are expensive. Here in my narrow attic landing - AKA my sewing room - is a six foot long folding banqueting table that I am loving using as a cutting table, laying out table, anything table. Approx £30 from Amazon. The height is not ideal - I have to be careful how I lean over it. 

  

Have you noticed - tracing paper is ridiculously expensive? We all have our shortcuts for this problem. I read on a forum that gardener's fleece is good. This is a floaty but surprisingly strong stuff on a huge, huge roll used to stop plants getting frost damage. Prices vary but £19.99 for 100 metres is normal. It is 1.5m wide. You can see it sitting on the left hand side of the table which I have cleared of all stuff, as I am about to trace a pattern. 

It is the Renfrew top from Sewaholic. I have made it in size 16, I love it but it is quite large so I want to try it in a size 14 using a great cotton jersey from Goldhawk Road with Jackson Pollock splashes all over.

So I lay the pattern pieces on my table:

And then with a swift, graceful yet decisive movement as of a Downton Abbey maid changing the bedsheets of a dissolute aristocrat, I just whisk the gardener's fleece over my pattern pieces and weigh it down where I need it weighed down, using a set of 16 50ml cosmetic jars filled with lead shot (used for fishing tackle) all also obtained on eBay. Not as lovely as Matt the Sewing Bee's polished stones, but serviceable. We all have our own priorities for cutting weights and mine were: cheapness and flat bottoms. 

You can see from the picture above how the gardener's fleece is so fine that you can barely see it there. A cinch to trace over - and so cheap I do not feel obliged to save little bits and corners of it. The odd yellow thing with white spots is the bag I made to keep my weights in - it is sewn from some hand-batik-ed curtain fabric which we salvaged from the  house I grew up in, and it was made by an artist friend of my parents  in the 1950s. I have several pieces of his fabric which I am very attached to. 

I then traced my pattern pieces and cut them out. I have to say, I wish I hadn't used a black Sharpie pen this time as now I have little black marks all over my new cutting table where the Sharpie has gone through the fleece. Last time I used a ordinary finliner pen and it was perfectly adequate, and left no marks. You live and learn. 

Hidden sewing gem in East London

Just a quick post with a heads-up on a great place to sew I stumbled across this week. Departure Cafe is part of a community project in Limehouse, and as well as having a big cafe and second-hand book shop, hires sewing machines for just £1 an hour. A brilliant antidote to many of London's sewing cafes, which I often find overpriced. The atmosphere was relaxed, with avid sewers dotted throughout the large cafe space working on their projects. Could make a great venue for a future LDC meetup.

Departure run informal sewing groups and structured courses, along with ceramics and film nights among others. The sewing sessions are in the afternoon - worth checking out if you're free in the daytime.

I'm always on the lookout for new places to sew - so if anyone has any good tips, post them up.