Sewing Time

I've been suffering from Restless Mind Syndrome of late and so the sewing got put on hold for a bit.  Everything  is still on the queue but the schedule has been shifted around. The external bits of my life have been a bit chaotic of late, and although I don't think of myself as being particularly regulated in my interior life, I cannot really settle down into a more creative mindset with too much is out of order.

I realize of course that any kind of creative activity needs to be practiced regularly, and I think that has been my goal. I don't want to run into the sewing room, lock the door, and finish a bunch of stuff in a rush then have to walk away for an extended period of time.  I want to make regular sewing time.  And I have come to accept that I am the kind of person who cannot really shut the door on the external part of my life and ignore it completely.  There has to a certain orderliness to the structure of life so that I can feel free to explore the inner creative instinct.  I am constantly trying to regulate that outer need for structure, with that inner more intuitive bit that my sewing taps into. 

So I am trying to expand the time devoted to creative pursuits.   I am knitting regularly, every day, and have been petty productive, even though some projects have been ripped.  But it wasn't really until the latter half of last week that I began finding daily time in the sewing room and it frankly has not been enough.  Still, the fact that I am there is good, and eventually this slow trickle will expand into a bigger stream.

What I have been doing has not been particularly blog-worthy, however.  I need clothes to wear now.  And so I have been involved in some of the more boring chores that sometimes fall on those of us who can wield a needle and thread, namely mending and alterations.  I have taken in several things that were too large to wear. If I were reconfiguring or refashioning something interesting, like a Chanel Jacket or a beautiful garment, I would share the process. But taking in tees so they don't hang, taking up baggy summer pants and other uninspiring tasks do not make for thrilling reading. And I suppose none of this is creative, but it is practical experience, and it is a joy just to make something work.

Of course there was the day I spent my daily hour cursing under my breath at a stack of J Crew tees that had all come undone where the neck band joins the body of the shirt.  They had not been worn that heavily, it was purely sloppy workmanship, and it really annoyed me.  Each top took less than a minute to serge back together.  But it took substantially longer than that to re-thread the serger with different colors of thread between shirts.  I should have known better.  I have complained about this company's merchandise before so I should have known better.  But I fell in love with certain colors in a flattering style that is long enough that my tummy doesn't show above the tops of my Jeans.

It might be easy to buy tees, but not so easy, apparently, to by perfect tees.  All the more reason to spend more time in that sewing room.