NotSheep

I don’t sew. I never have. When I was 11 and started secondary school, in our second term in Domestic Science (as it was called in those days), we had to learn to sew. (First term was all about personal hygiene, in the third they tried to teach us to cook.) We had to design and then sew a wall-hanging. My designing bit went okay, but the actual sewing… well, let’s just say that when my grandmother moved out of her house when I was 28, the wall-hanging was found in the back of a wardrobe, and it still wasn’t finished.

I took an evening course once to try to learn to sew. We had to make a skirt (dunno what they’d have done if any blokes had joined). I cut mine out, sewed the back two panels together, sewed the front two panels together, and then sewed the back to the front - with one bit upside-down.

Sewing by hand is boring and you end up sticking needles in yourself. As for machines - well, I’m convinced there’s some sort of international assocation of sewing machines and they passed a resolution against me a long time ago.

Knitting, I can do. I can knit anything. My grandmother, who was a champion knitter (or ought to have been) taught me to knit when I was two years old (little blue plastic needles, in through the bunny-hole and round the big tree…) and I used to be quite a prolific knitter before I had children. Even got paid for a few pieces. But sewing… well, I think my grandmother (she also sewed) must have missed the critical moment for teaching me that. Even when I knit, I minimise the sewing-bits-together stuff, using a variety of creative techniques.

So… (heh) … I do just about manage the Scout badges that my children bring home with frustrating regularity - but I have to admit that if there’s anybody around who’s better at sewing than me (not hard) and willing to take over, I’ll willingly let them. And if not - well, I do eventually get the badges on, using fabric glue and a sort of tacking technique.

So it is with great pride that I announce that I have, this morning (drum roll please) actually sewed two tablecloths.

I made them a while ago, but did the hems with that iron-on tape stuff. It didn’t work very well on one though, so I was thinking I’d have to do something about it. And I was in a shop on Monday where they had these little mini-sewing-machines reasonably cheap (there’s no way I can justify spending the price of a real sewing machine), so I bought one. And this morning I played with it.

The first one was easy. The machine came pre-threaded, and while I’m not claiming that my lines are perfectly straight or anything, it looks very good, if I say so myself.

The second was a bit more - well, all right, it was a pain in the bum. I had to use a different colour of thread, which involved re-threading the machine. That was okay, though it took me about ten minutes to figure out how to manage the bobbin, and I’m still not sure how it worked in the end. Then the thread kept breaking, and Toby (in Storchie) woke up and started bobbing his head about - believe me, it’s much easier to sew when you’re not trying to see what you’re doing through a child’s head - and I was getting frustrated and he was getting cross (not sure what order those happened in to be honest) and in the end I handed him over to Barney, who did a grand job of entertaining him in the living-room for long enough for me to finish the sewing and stop swearing under my breath (well, okay, not always under).

But hey! I sewed! Two things!

Don’t ask me to do anything more than a straight line though