The sewing chair #9

The Trouble With Sewing Is That I Want to Know Everything

I am jealous of people who know how to sew.

This is an inconvenient admission from someone who also knows how to sew.

I can make a quilt. I understand a quarter-inch seam, know why pressing matters and have developed firm opinions about rulers, rotary cutters and which sewing machine should be used for which job. I have pieced blocks, worked with appliqué, experimented with English paper piecing and Manx blocks, and begun hand quilting.

None of this was something I expected. I never imagined I would become interested in sewing, much less this wrapped up in it. I thought I might learn to make a few things. I did not anticipate developing opinions about seam allowances, spending an evening reading about batting or looking at a bag and wondering how its corners were constructed.

Yet here I am, regularly watching another quilter do something that makes me wonder where I was on the day everyone else learned that.

Someone will casually match a striped binding perfectly at the seam. Another person will identify a fabric collection from three inches of floral print in the corner of a photograph. Someone else can look at a quilt block and immediately explain four ways to construct it, which method wastes the least fabric and why one of them will make the points behave better.

Meanwhile, I am studying the same block as though it may eventually confess its secrets under questioning.

The jealousy is not mean-spirited. I do not want these people to lose their knowledge. I would simply like a duplicate copy placed directly into my brain.

Unfortunately, sewing knowledge does not arrive that way.

THERE IS ALWAYS SOMETHING ELSE TO LEARN

Quilting alone is enormous.

There is traditional piecing, curved piecing, appliqué, foundation paper piecing, English paper piecing, hand piecing, hand quilting, free-motion quilting, ruler work and longarming. There is color theory, fabric history, quilt restoration and enough batting choices to make one suspect that cotton, wool, polyester and bamboo have formed separate committees.

Every subject opens into another subject. Learning about hand quilting leads to needles, thread weights, batting, marking tools, thimbles and the mystery of why one person can make twelve tiny, even stitches appear on a needle while I am negotiating with three.

Even sewing two squares together is not necessarily simple. We sew them together, press them in a particular direction, cut them apart, rearrange them and sew them back together. Then we discuss whether the finished block would have been more accurate if we had used a completely different method from the beginning.

But I do not only want to quilt.

I want to make clothes that fit. I want to understand garment construction well enough to alter a pattern without feeling that I am interfering with structural engineering. I want to insert a zipper beautifully, make a collar lie correctly and sew a sleeve into an armhole without either one becoming openly hostile.

I want to make bags with crisp structure and professional hardware. I want to know which stabilizer will give a tote some body without turning it into carry-on luggage made of drywall. I want neat zippered pockets, straps that do not twist and corners that look deliberate from every angle.

I want to make curtains, cushions, slipcovers, table linens and all the other things included in the cheerful phrase home décor sewing. That phrase makes it sound as though one simply selects a lovely fabric and spends an afternoon improving the house. It does not mention measuring windows, calculating pattern repeats, matching large prints or discovering that the floor, ceiling and window frame have never agreed on what constitutes a straight line.

Quilting, garment sewing, bag making and home décor may all involve fabric, thread and a sewing machine, but they are not small variations of the same skill. They are neighboring countries with related languages, separate customs and surprisingly specific border requirements.

Naturally, I want citizenship in all of them.

EXPERIENCED SEWISTS MAKE IT LOOK DECEPTIVELY REASONABLE

People who have spent years sewing can make difficult things look perfectly manageable.

They say, “I just drafted a facing,” or “I changed the pocket,” or “I added foam stabilizer,” with the same calm tone I use when announcing that I reheated my coffee.

Their hands know how fabric behaves before the fabric has an opportunity to misbehave. They clip, grade, understitch and turn, and a smooth, finished edge emerges without drama. They cut into expensive fabric without requiring a period of silence first. They seem to know exactly how much ease they need, which needle belongs in the machine and why the thread is causing trouble.

Some of them can hear that a sewing machine is not quite right.

I am deeply impressed by all of this. I am also a little irritated.

Not with them, exactly. I am irritated by the number of years and projects required to become the person who knows those things.

I would like the skill that comes from making twenty shirts, but I would prefer to acquire it somewhere around shirt number two. I want the judgment developed through several failed bags without having to produce the bags that teach it. I want to skip directly to confidently altering patterns while retaining the right to be surprised when the instructions suddenly introduce a gusset.

This is unreasonable, but it is sincere.

SOMEWHERE ALONG THE WAY, I LEARNED QUITE A LOT

The internet places the work of thousands of skilled people in front of us without necessarily showing the history behind it. We see the beautifully fitted jacket, not the years of sewing or the practice garments that came before it. We see the perfect quilt points, not the seam that was unpicked three times. We see the finished handbag standing upright with gleaming hardware, not the earlier version whose zipper wandered off course.

Even knowing that, comparison gets under my skin. Someone else’s strongest skill sits beside my current attempt, and for a moment the difference looks like talent rather than years of practice and accumulated mistakes.

The strange thing is that while sewing continually shows me what I do not know, it has also begun to reveal how much I have already learned.

I sometimes hear myself explaining why a scant quarter-inch seam matters, how pressing a seam in a different direction may affect the next step or why one ruler works better for a particular cut. I can look at a block whose points do not match and usually make a reasonable guess about what happened. I know when my accuracy is beginning to drift and when I am too tired to make the decision the project requires.

I have learned enough to have preferences based on experience instead of packaging.

Techniques that once seemed mysterious have become familiar. Tasks that required repeated trips back to the instructions now happen almost automatically. The knowledge accumulated so gradually that I did not notice how much of it I was keeping.

There was no particular project after which I suddenly became knowledgeable. There were simply quilts, blocks, experiments, mistakes and corrections, each leaving behind a little more understanding than I had before. Somewhere along the way, I became genuinely competent in more areas than I realized.

That recognition feels almost as strange as the jealousy.

I still see what other quilters and sewists know that I do not. But a person just beginning might look at something I have made and assume I possess the same mysterious confidence I see in others. She cannot see the seams I ripped out, the instructions I reread or the number of times I searched for an explanation of something everyone else appeared to understand.

She sees the finished quilt.

Perhaps that is what I am seeing when I look at everyone else.

WHAT I WANT TO LEARN NEXT

I have begun to notice that my jealousy often points toward something I genuinely want to learn.

If I feel a pang when I see a beautifully fitted handmade dress, it may be because garment sewing interests me. If I keep examining someone’s precise bag construction, perhaps I am ready to make more bags. If hand quilting stops me every time, I probably want more practice with the rhythm and control of those stitches.

It is easy to take someone else’s skill as evidence that I am behind. But sewing has no sensible finish line. A talented quilter can still be a beginner at fitting pants. A garment sewist can make a beautifully tailored coat and remain entirely uninterested in calculating half-square triangles. Nobody knows all of it.

I know far more than I once did, and there is still an astonishing amount I do not know. Both are true.

I still want to walk into a fabric store and understand exactly how each material will drape, stretch, press and behave. I want to fit trousers, construct beautiful bags, make useful things for my home and continue exploring every corner of quilting that catches my attention.

I will never learn all of it. Considering that I never expected sewing to interest me in the first place, I am not entirely sure how I ended up with a list this long.

I am, however, going to need another notebook.

~Chris