I Get Sew Emotional

I have a lot fabric and a lot of feelings.

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I just made this blog to have a punny name.

  • A year of sewing.

    I have been sewing in earnest for a year, which is mostly remarkable for me because the list of abandoned hobbies in my house is LONG. I love sewing so much that it has taken over our home and our budget and I want to do it all day every day.

    I wanted to learn to sew to make my own clothes. And I have – I’ve made five dresses, four tops, four pairs of pants, and two skirts. I want to make more, of course, but I am positively obsessed and fascinated and amazed by quilting. I didn’t think quilting was for me – so much precision in cutting and matching points and color theory!! – it was all too much for me to want to bother with. But when I made that jelly roll race quilt in May, I was hooked. This opened up an entirely different world of sewing to me and I dove right in without thinking about it. If you knew how many fucking ironing items I have (I HAVE TWO IRONS!!!) that I did not have a year ago – seam sticks and clappers and starch and pressing pens and hams (?!) and wool mats – before this I had the same Black & Decker iron that I bought at Target 30 years ago and never used because THE DRYER WAS FOR IRONING. That poor little iron got ran ragged in his last months. I only replaced it because the plate had a crack in it that was starting to catch my fabric and also I discovered Oliso made a Tula Pink iron and that was it. I think my Target iron was $8 and I won’t tell you what the Oliso cost.

    I made three quilts this year – one for me, one for my sister, and one for my mom. (Technically I made five if you count the two cat quilts I made, though my idiot cat couldn’t care less about the one I made him.) The one for my mom was important – I wanted it to be pretty and I wanted her to love it. So I bought a ton of fabric with a specific idea in mind, then realized after I cut seven thousand 5-inch squares that I wasn’t going to get the color effect I wanted and had to eliminate a ton of the fabric. I sewed a million HSTs and got most of the points to line up and even sent it to a longarmer rather than doing my janky straight line quilting. It turned out really beautifully and I am pretty pleased with myself for how well I did with so many goddamn points to line up. (On the plus side, I have enough fabric left over to make a quilt for me! Huzzah!)

    I cropped my mom’s face out of this photo because if she knew I posted a picture of her somewhere on the internet she would think her identity would get stolen and/or a killer would show up at her house. (I hope my mom doesn’t see this.) (Love you mommy.)

    I (maybe foolishly?) signed up for two quilt-a-longs – the Puzzle Mystery Quilt and the Murder Mystery Quilt. I feel like it’s risky to sign up for something unknown, but the world is a dumpster fire and I want to do things I love. Also I’ll have two quilts when I’m done! Assuming I don’t do the Classic Andria Move of committing myself to a long project and then bailing on it two weeks in. (You can’t see it, but I’m shrugging. I AM WHO I AM)

    I also pre-ordered a beautiful kit made with Tula Pink fabrics that will be all foundation paper-pieced and that is going to be a big challenge for me that I’m excited about. (Future blog post: why do I love Tula Pink fabric so much, please no one ever tell me something bad, her fabric brings me a really dumb amount of joy, I want it all and I am not kidding.)

    I don’t believe in resolutions. I feel like they’re a setup for failure that will only end in you hating yourself for it, and I don’t have time for that, I got shit to sew. But internet, I’m writing it down here so someone will know and remind me: I want to use the fabric I have, get rid of the fabric that doesn’t excite me anymore, and hopefully have more handmade clothes than not. And quilts. So many quilts.

  • It’s stabby season

    I made the (maybe) foolish decision to gift two quilts for Christmas and as such I am spending every spare moment sewing, pressing, and stabbing myself relentlessly with pins. (THERE ARE SO MANY.) That is not a complaint! I have loved every second of it, even the ones where I was mad at myself or mad at fabric or mad at my tiny condo with its limited space.

    I have nine days to quilt and bind one already-sandwiched quilt*, finish piecing this ^ top, make the sandwich, quilt it, and bind it. I must just love to torture myself, this is exactly what I did with my vacation sewing. I was at least smart enough to figure out I would not want or have time to make binding and bought some nice binding from Bessie Pearl Binding Co.

    At least a hundred times a week I will say that I wish I was rich so I could quit my job and sew all day, and I mean it. Like, I fully get the “a bad day of fishing is still better than a good day of working” sign my old co-worker Bob (RIP) had in his office. I have never fully latched on to a hobby where it’s all I want to do all the time. I have spent an inordinate amount of our money (and citibank’s technically) on fabric and sewing machines (I have three now?) in a somewhat brief window of time, and yet none of it feels like a waste. I may not use all of that fabric any time soon, but I have ideas for most of it (the garment quantities, anyway) and am constantly being inspired by the work I see of other sewists and quilters online. (Sometimes overwhelmingly so.)

    But we may have to move to a bigger condo if I keep this up.

  • Does everyone feel this way?

    Y’all, I hate my wardrobe. Like, I want to throw almost everything I didn’t make myself into the bin and/or donation pile. I only want to wear clothes I sewed with my own two hands and various curse words. Is this an eventuality for all new sewists? Or am I being a precious asshole?

    When I got the idea to sew my vacation wardrobe, I thought I was so clever and then I learned that basically a bazillion sewers before me came up with the same idea. Like, obviously I don’t think I was the first person to think of this, but it didn’t occur to me that it was a thing people just did. (You know what I mean.)

    I just want to make a hundred garments and then I want to wear them. I just want to sew all the time.

    As I type this, on September 11, things are wild as fuck and I’m avoiding the news and most of the internet at all costs because it doesn’t do me any good and if I want to be able to get out of bed in the mornings, sometimes I just have to put myself in a bubble for a few days and pretend we don’t live in the worst timeline. As such, I am doing lots of dopamine sewing and making some cute little fall/Halloween-themed decorations and the satisfaction is TREMENDOUS. I’m working on some crazy-quilted pumpkin coasters and then I’m going to do some Halloween bunting for my condo and office. I feel all my little neurotransmitters perking up just thinking about it.

    Take care of yourself. It’s crazy out there.

  • Aw shit, I’m a blogger.

    Aw shit, I’m a blogger.

    (insta story I posted last month)

    Will I post here? Probably! Maybe? I hope so, I did give WordPress some money, but more importantly since I got back into sewing at the beginning of the year I am ADHD-laser focused/obsessed with it and it’s all I want to do/talk about. (My poor husband.) Also I am not technical and have no idea how to use this site! (see again: poor husband.) Also I hate this template but going through them is overwhelming so I’ll probably just keep it and be mad? Happy Tuesday.