so not sewing

Yesterday while having a coffee break with colleagues at the office we were speaking about my skirt with its built in petticoat which seemed determined to always be hanging out the sides of the slits in my skirt.  At this point one of my friends commented ...."why don't you just stitch it, or actually put a "now I can't even remember what she called it" at the top at the same time to make it less mobile".

She said it as if she had said why don't you take a pen out of your drawer, or reverse out your parking.
I can bake, I can write, I can fundraise, I can do a lot of stuff.

Sewing is not one of them.  I am officially sewing disadvantaged.

And I am not referring to the fact that I cannot make a dress or fix a problem like my petticoat, I mean that the thought of hemming a school skirt or sewing on a button leaves me traumatised.

When I was younger, much younger, I decided to enrol at Knit Wit .. anyone remember them?  You went to basic sewing classes using only a sort of stretchy fabric.  We had to make a skirt and a dress.  I went to all the classes.  I ended up with neither but my instructor did end up with a severe alcohol problem by the time my lessons were done.  It seemed so easy there ..... loading the cotton into the sewing machine, feeding the fabric slowly under the needle .... so therapeutic, so simple, so relaxing ..... crap - it was stressful and annoying. Once home, despite my best efforts, I could not get the cotton threaded through all those eyes and other up and down pieces all over the sewing machine and my first attempt at "gliding" the fabric under the needle ended in a large thud and that needle holding thingy jamming down against the machine.

I fear the words "mom please shorten my school skirt".  Jess is now almost ending her first term in Matric.  Her one skirt is perfect so we wash it all the time.  Her other one is lying in state since October for me to shorten.  The one that I did took me 16 days.  OK slight stretch of truth but once we had determined the length I had to go slowly around a flippen 6 panel skirt (6 panels are not for novices) and make sure each inch was measured from waistband to hemline so that it was even.  And the sewing!!! I tried first with looooong piece of cotton so I would not have to keep ending and starting.  Great but not so easy to pull a metre of cotton through each time because it hooked on my slops, the couch and the alsation.  So I went with shorter pieces but for some reason my ends and starts kept coming loose and then my worst ... when you pull the cotton through and it makes that knot thing.

So I will be asking my always sewing savy boss to please help me ..... in the time she does it I will still be looking for the sewing box we have.

Now Nic needs a blazer button .... oh heavens ......

Till next time
c'est la vie xxxx