frog-stitching
Are you a sewer? I’m not, but only because I refuse to apply the term. I am a sewist. Or at least I aspire to be. Meanwhile, the weather is turning hot and I need new summer clothes. So it’s high time to wade in and improve my skills. My secret weapon is Pattern Master Boutique by Wild Ginger. This is a pattern-drafting software program that creates custom-fit sewing patterns. Don’t buy it unless you are ready to forever afterward look at bodies and clothing in a new light.
It’s a huge boon to be free from sizes. Some bodies, including mine, have never worked with ready-to-wear sizing. Too small and too big in all the wrong places, we end up buying clothing that will decently go around, and we end up with clothing designed for a completely different framework. Fabric looks nice when it’s hanging right. Fabric can’t hang properly off a body wearing what is otherwise completely the wrong size because it has to cover the rack o’ doom. Or whatever your most prominent bits may be. I spent years thinking I was just naturally crummy-looking, until I finally realized that the problem is that clothing in RTW sizes looks crummy on me. There’s a big difference.
And once you’re wearing something made to fit, there’s really no going back to settling for crummy. You don’t even get to how it looks in the mirror before you realize it just plain feels wrong.
So, I’m sewing. I’ve promised myself better fabrics than I can get in the chain stores. I’ve delved deeply into books and DVD tutorials–yes, more classes. Of course, the kitty made holes in my new blouse–the first bit of really nice shirting I allowed myself–with her overgrown nails. (So I’ve learned to trim my cat’s claws, and I’m quite proud of that.) And the skirt I quickly sewed this weekend turned out too short to wear bare-legged to church.
It sure looks better on me than shorts, though. And done is better than perfect. That’s what the sewing mavens say. This little garment is packed with great techniques. A mitered hem with walking ease, a la Sandra Betzina. Margaret Islander’s burrito technique. A quite nice lapped zipper and a fabulously comfortable elastic-interfaced waistband. And frog-stitching galore (rip-it, rip-it).
My sewing improves as I come to accept that sewing is almost equal parts cutting, seaming, steaming, and ripping. I am patient with it, for the most part, with a patience that must be a divine gift as it certainly doesn’t grow naturally in my heart. Assemble the raw materials, act upon them, refine the results, undo the parts that don’t work, and go again.
I need to sew my life.
much to learn
So many classes, so little time. I may not have been blogging lately but I’m not dead. I’ve finished a medical billing class. It’s not enough, of course. The next step is to work my way through the industry-standard textbook and workbook. Quickly. I don’t have time for classrooms, commuting, loan applications.
And then I’m thinking I should cover the basics of accounting the same way. I have never in all my thousand years imagined myself an accountant or aspired that way, but hey. Cash flow is a useful concept. If I’m going to work in medical billing–and I’ve been invited to do so–it would be helpful to be able to see the big picture.
And then, if I’m going to go into medical office management, around here at least, I need my Spanish. I’ve already got a pretty decent Spanish course languishing on my bookshelf–was going gung ho for a while and then put it away and forgot to pick it up again. And then it turned into one of those huge things.
I don’t know if I am going into medical office management. But it looks like time for an exit plan from transcription. I’m so spoiled in my job right now that I’ve never justified turning to something else, but it’s not going to last forever. One of my bosses has finished his med school training and residency and is going into private practice this summer–thus the billing job–and the other is following in his footsteps. I love these guys. When they got to the five-year plan that said big changes were coming, they consulted us. T works for them too, and he will be done with his degree next spring, so big changes are presumably on the way here as well. At any rate, we’re all on the same page. The same shaking patch of ground.
Keeps us young, I guess. Except for T, who’s young anyway. Relatively speaking.
Okay, and then there’s the lampwork class I was signed up for last weekend, that got canceled. Instead I ordered a DVD tutorial. And then, looking for more info, I found a whole glass fusion studio in Austin which I am DYING to just move into. But I don’t have to, because they have classes.
jamming
Dad says I should blog more. I agree. If I’m not blogging, you can be sure I’m not writing anything else either…’cause this stuff is basically effortless. And a warmup for other endeavors. And fueled by any damn thing, really.
Except that…once I stop, it begins to look harder. It looms larger. It weighs so much, that need to start again, it’s so important, there’s so much raw material backing up behind the dam that it all begins to compress into a huge mass out of which I cannot tease one single thread to take hold of. I’m the same way with everything, I’m afraid. Certainly with the two novels half- committed. With the housework. With the sewing. With all the creative projects. None of them require anything in any way terribly difficult, taken step by step, but once I stop doing them for any length of time, they’re enormously difficult to start again.
I have so many things to say. None of which matter, exactly. It’s all whistling in the dark, innit?
But none of those things will come free until I grab hold. It’s quite the log jam. Or….ugh. I am just now remembering being a kid, 9 years old maybe, and getting mats in my thick stubborn hair, because a brush wouldn’t go all the way through it. Nobody bothered to figure that out, and instead I was shamed and blamed for being…what? Lazy? I would sit and work out the tangles with my fingers, tiny bit by bit. The same way I need to unstick my motivation, my ideas, all this ridiculous crowd in my head.
stunting my brain
Japanese human tetris, because sometimes mindless hilarity is the best medicine.
