Hello, friends!
I have posts to share, with photos all ready to go but my time of late has been fractured, and I haven't gotten round to writing about them. I will soon, though. The kids are back at school and slowly settling into the year. I say "slowly" because in spite of this feeling like a much more normal year than last, it's still an adjustment. Swim season is over, along with the late homework nights, early morning weekend training sessions and mountains of chlorine-y laundry, which somehow segued into band/orchestra/play/musical season, with the children disappearing at random times for some rehearsal or other. Most recently, I'm catching snatches of a trombone oompah-ing behind a shut door, or a piano or saxophone running scales somewhere else in the house. Some days it's a circus; other days no one's home till late in the evening, and it's just me and the husband and the cats, passing each other on our way from one chore to the next. There's still homework happening, and Emily is still running her Etsy shop after (and sometimes during, because so much of it can be done online) school, and I'm constantly erasing and editing my old-fashioned paper wall calendar to keep it all straight.
It was a very different scenario last year, wasn't it? I am thankful. For the new things we get to do this year in school. All those opportunities to play in a band, swim on a team, gather in a home for a movie. And for the old things, too, the pre-Covid things we'd lost but which now have been restored to us: Math in a classroom with friends, sharing a bag of chips in the lunchroom, even simply just leaving the house to go to a different place to learn, then returning home to tell a parent about one's day, because it didn't all happen in an oversmall shared space 24/7.
I am thankful I even have an oversmall shared space 24/7. Not everyone in the world enjoyed that last year, or ever.
Speaking of gratitude, I want to show you guys what I made this afternoon (it is noteworthy that I, procrastinator extraordinaire, am actually blogging on the same day I made this project; this in itself is a rare and miraculous thing).
It's a tree appliqued on a square of fabric. Whoo! Why is this significant?
Because for one morning each week, I get to help teach refugees and immigrants to sew.
And I cannot begin to explain how amazing it feels to say that.
For years, that has been something I've wanted to do. In my head, however, it was always far more romantic: LiEr packs up her sewing machine, gets on a plane, flies to a different country where they may or may not speak English, and spends months in a rural community center empowering women to wield their own sewing machines to learn a life-changing, marketable skill and eventually a livelihood, enabling them to feed their families, provide education and sustainable living needs, and someday even start their own sewing school to keep the cycle going. LiEr wakes each morning thinking, "Ah, yes, this is what all those years of blogging tutorials and writing sewing patterns and making 1 million felt doughnuts has been for! God, are you listening?"
God has, it appears - although He has cut out the middleman and brought the refugees to me (He can be very efficient that way).
It's a long story, which I will skip over so as not to bore you with the details, but the gist of it is that someone mentioned an opportunity in passing, and I thought I'd check it out and somehow the time worked out so that people were interested to learn to sew at the exact same time I was not manically cooking dinner for the family or driving some child to a piano lesson, and voila! Instant dream-come-true.
And so, every Friday mid-morning, I get to work with some very motivated newcomers to this country and we make projects together. There's a curriculum of sorts (and you guys know how much I love curricula), and vast amounts of donated fabric and notions nicely organized into tubs and stuff, and sewing machines in impeccable working order. Funny story: I spent the first couple of sessions being a student myself, learning how the machines worked. I found it interesting that a big part of learning to sew is overcoming one's terror of the sewing machine, particularly if the manual is missing and one has to discover all its intricate workings by trial-and-error. I learned very quickly that I am only an expert at my own machine (if I can even call myself that, see this post for counter-evidence); faced with an entry-level Janome, for instance, I might as well have never sewn a stitch in my life, let alone aspire to guide others to do the same.
(Incidentally, that romantic fantasy of that faraway rural community center full of sewing machines? They were all treadles. Not an electric or computerized thingamajig in sight. Hey, it's my dream - I get to pick the details, right?).
But let's show-and-tell now. This tree-applique thingy was project #3. The learning tasks included working with fusible interfacing, the zig-zag stitch, sewing around curves and layering. It was good fun. And when we had finished our projects, someone floated the question about what to do with it.
"Bag," I immediately said. Because I am addicted to making them.
This wasn't part of the curriculum, however.
But maybe the very-motivated students might be ready for a challenge, was how I rationalized it. You know, like in a mixed-ability classroom in which a teacher prepares More Challenging Assignments for the kids who are done with their regular work and are yawning at their desks?
So that's the plan. I took some supplies home and made a sample. I had to remind myself repeatedly not to make it ludicrously fancy like the bags I usually sew. When people see it, the point is maybe for them to say, "Oo, I don't know if I can make that but I think I might be able to connect the dots if I try."
Well, here it is:
The marvelous thing about the fabric is it's some kind of twill or canvas - I believe these squares are actually upholstery fabric swatches someone donated to the organization. And because they're swatches, their edges are also pre-finished. All that was needed to turn them into a bag was sew two pieces together, hem the opening, create bottom corner darts,
and attach a pre-made strap.
I used bias tape for the strap, of which the organization had a large quantity. I went for pre-made because strap-making is a whole other new skill I didn't want to add to the mix at this point.
I vacillated on the button clasp - on the one hand, it finishes the bag and makes it more functional than had I omitted it; on the other, it ups the difficulty level because it's fiddly. There are other options, of course: snaps, for instance. Or a tie.
I'm going to leave it in for now. Upon finishing the project at home, I realized two things.
One, that it might be jumping the gun somewhat. I mean, we're veering dangerously into 3-D territory, after all, and adding details that perhaps are overwhelming for a beginning seamstress. Maybe we could omit the corner darts and let it be a flat tote even though that's not nearly as cute as a darted one? What do you guys think? Could a beginner make this without their eyes glazing over?
Two, that this project has the potential to be adapted for different challenge levels. Take the clasp/fastening mechanism alone, for instance - it's a button and bias-tape loop at the moment. Later iterations might have a button and a buttonhole. Or a magnetic snap (meaning we would need to introduce a lining). Or a small fold-over flap with a buttonhole in it. Or (shudder) a zipper. And then (double shudder) a recessed zipper.
And pockets.
OK, I'm stopping now.
Here's a last shot of Fleur modeling the bag, for size perspective.