I wrote this on Saturday!

I don’t know why I’m all nervy and stressed today. I woke up happy this afternoon, and Rachel brought Maddy over so we could go see a spinning and weaving exhibit. The demonstrations were over when we got there, but we know some of the exhibitors, so we talked to people and petted a sheep belonging to a friend, who had brought him in to demonstrate wool on the hoof.

Then we took Maddy and went for a trip to the fabric store. (Cue foreboding music.) Rachel and Kim both want to learn to sew, and each of them mentioned it last week, so I told RA and we made a preliminary trip to the fabric store on Friday. Both of us know how to sew, having learned from our mothers, but neither of us does it anymore. I would much rather knit than sew, and RA would rather pay someone else to sew for her.

We thought it would be fun to teach the girls to sew, well, okay, RA thought it would be fun and I thought it would be very likely to end in tears, but we talked about it and decided that a chef’s apron and a skirt with an elastic waist would be good first projects, just to teach them how to read the directions and how to sew straight seams.

So on Friday, RA and I went to the fabric store and looked at patterns, and we bought fabric for aprons and skirts. Also, RA thought it would be fun to make a sewing basket for Rachel, who was going to be our first sewing student, so she picked out a cute sewing box with a handle, and took it home to fill it with stuff from her sewing room. She dropped it off at my house later, and she had also gone back to the store to get a couple of things that she didn’t have extras of, and when Rachel came over and saw the basket, she was pretty pleased with it!

I had bought the pattern for aprons and some Hello Kitty fabric, enough for each of the girls to make an apron, and some black and some charcoal gray knit fabrics for skirts, and Rachel liked them, but she wanted to look at more patterns, so with Maddy in her car seat, we went back to the fabric store. I gave Maddy a bottle while Rachel looked at patterns, and then I followed her around the store, carrying a baby and my very overweight purse, while Rachel picked some fabric for a dress and another skirt.

I was standing at the cutting table with the fabric bolts while Rachel went back for one more thing, when Maddy decided to hork up some of her bottle of (stinky) formula on me. Ugh. We had wipes and whatnot, so I cleaned up, but that shirt I was wearing needed to go home and get washed. We still needed a few things, like zippers and buttons, so I had to keep following Rachel around the store, carrying my heavy purse, a fussy baby in her car seat, and my coat. It was very tiring, and why I didn’t think of grabbing a shopping cart, I don’t know.

Finally we were back home, and man, I was exhausted! Rachel started clearing the dining room table, Rich took Maddy, and I started making soup, thinking it would be soothing to do some cooking. We had some ham and a hambone left from the lunch after Maddy’s blessing last Sunday, and Rich likes bean soup, so I sautéed onions and half a bag of shredded carrots and added a bag of pinto beans that had been soaking, and then the ham. That simmered for a couple of hours while we sewed.

The actual stitching is not the hardest parting of sewing, the hardest part is learning to use the sewing machine. That is what we spent the most time on, and now Rachel knows how to set up the machine, and how to troubleshoot problems. I supervised while she cut out a skirt and sewed the seams, and Rich put Maddy to sleep. By the time the soup was done, the skirt was finished, except for the hem, and Rachel took the baby and the skirt home.

Tonight I got a call from Rachel, and she was feeling pretty frustrated. I told her that she just had the easy part left, just the hem, and she was wondering which part of the hem was the easy part? She said she had been working on it and it looked like crap, and she didn’t know what she had done wrong! I asked her how she had done it, and it all sounded good – folding, pressing, pinning, all fine, but oops, it turns out she didn’t know how to do the actual sewing part! She was doing some kind of running backstitch and of course it looked like crap. Oops, it never occurred to me that she wouldn’t know how to hem!

So tomorrow we’re going to have a lesson in how to do a little bit of finishing work.