Happy New Year, Cashmerettes! Hope you all had plenty of tea and crafting projects over the holidays, for that is truly the path to relaxation. Sadly, only 50% of the resident Cashmerettes managed it this Christmas, but soon enough the interview season will be finished and all shall resume!

In the meantime, there’s quite a backlog of photos to be taken, and projects to be documented. Chez Jenny there’s the final product of my “Clothing Construction 1” course at MassArt: a fully underlined and lined pencil skirt with an invisble-ish zipper and a rather nifty kick pleat.  There are plenty of mistakes but most of them aren’t that obvious until I point them out (which I do).  On reflection, the course was… okay. It was quite a lot of cash for a variable level of instruction, but the good news is that it blocked out Monday evenings as sewing time, and I got a bunch of little tips and tricks which I’m hoping are going to bump up my clothes onto a higher quality level.

Here’s the final thing, on my mannequin because I’ve yet to master the skill of self-photography:

The challenge with home sewing, I’ve found, is not actually putting clothes together – once you’ve cobbled together your first dress, top and skirt, it’s pretty straightforward to keep on cutting out pieces of fabric and sewing them together. No, the real challenge is with fitting, and finishing. I have cannily managed to avoid the fitting issues by mostly working in knits, which adapt to your body, and hence don’t need to be accurately fitted (the pencil skirt did actually go through some alternations to fit my apparently unique bum, but they were very simple). Finishing, on the other hand, is a crafty beast. There are two key things involved: learning special skills, and not being tired. The first one is achievable by reading lots of tutorials and scooting around on Pinterest, pinning items such as “how to turn a sharp corner” and “how to serge on an inside curve”.

The second,  however,  often fails me. For it happens thus. Get home, 6pm. Make and eat dinner, 7pm. Think “I know! I’ll sew a dress!”. Start at 8pm. Cut, cut, cut, cut, cut. 9pm start sewing the pieces together. 11.30pm tired, mopey, start accidentally cutting through things and then attempting to darn them together. Midnight I AM GOING TO FINISH THIS IF IT KILLS ME.

Do you see the flaw? I end up doing all the finishing when I’m exhausted. Because I am just not patient enough. And then I don’t want to put pictures of my clothes up here because I’m embarrassed that they look a bit wonky (even though I realise from a distance they’re probably fine-ish).

So, my New Years Resolution: don’t sew when I’m tired. Seriously. The hem can wait another day!