For Christmas, the hubby gave me a sewing machine. No, he wasn’t trying to break the last bit of my spirit and turn me into a complete wifey — I actually asked for one. (Well, indirectly, but that worked.)
My intention was to do bookbindingy stuff with it, cover details, notepad spines, and such, but as soon as I got it, I started seeing the world in stitches. It’s amazing how much stuff in our everyday lives is sewn together, and we never even think about it.
The thought at the core of the DIY spirit goes something like “Hey, if somebody made that, then that means I could make one, too.” Of course, what that observation carefully steps over is the enormous talent or capability gap between not having a clue and being able to produce our own version of things we like.
Such is the case here, where even threading the sewing machine took about half an hour of careful scrutiny, gazing back and forth between the machine and manual, whose illustrations followed the last of the repeats of the instructions. So I’d look beneath the Russian text at the vaguely numbered graphic — like a keyframe in an animation with all the vital in-between frames missing — then flip back a page, re-read the English, then go back to the large plastic machine sitting on my desk like a porpoise. I felt uncomfortable echoes back to grade school Home Ec classes, where I constantly received “speeding tickets” for my lead-footed operation of the foot pedal. (This probably explains why I’m having so much trouble learning to drive Craig’s manual transmission Polo.)
In the end, though, I got it! I shortened a too-deep pocket in a pair of Craig’s trousers, secured the little hang-tags in the corners of all our dish-towels, and then I decided to make something I needed: a change purse. (Since we’re verging on me losing every last bit of my testosterone here, let’s call it a “change pocket”.)
Here’s the end result:
It’s somewhere between “pirate” and “steampunk” in design, looking like a cross between a casket and a desiccated mouse.
Still, I love it, because I made it. (Though I’ll undoubtedly be replacing it at some point with another try.)