How do I turn this thing on again?

Hi, I’m Amanda, and I’m learning how to sew.

This adventure started about a month ago when my mom asked me, “Hey, did you ever want to learn how to sew? Are you interested in that?”. A simple enough question. Little did she know that I’d long been harboring the secret desire to embrace my inner 50′s housewife and learn the fine art of crafting something from the apparent nothing of random bits of fabric and thread. I admitted my desire, and she signed me up for a sewing class at a local crafts store. We dusted off our old portable sewing machine and accompanying materials, which had been lying forgotten in the depths of our basement for several years. Dad set up a table for me, arranged everything, and I waited for the Big Class Day with great anticipation and no small amount of nervousness.

My supplies list arrived in the mail. I glanced at it and handed it to mom, trusting her to tell me what I needed. She said we probably had the stuff somewhere downstairs. She’d find it later. OK, cool. I’ll go back to my video games then, and let you sort things out. I forgot about all the paperwork and had some fun pew-pewing the noobs for a few hours, then went to bed that night looking forward to my birthday party, which was happening the next day. The class fell on my actual birthday, August 2nd, (send presents) so I would be receiving the gift of learning this year. Or something like that.

The big day came. I headed out with my loyal boyfriend at my side, supplies list in hand. Mom had only been able to find an old pair of scissors and our poor worn out tomato-shaped pin cushion, and about $20 for me to spend on the rest of the materials. I quickly realized I was in over my head. “coordinating material”? What the heck did that mean? “Thread”? What kind? Do you people know how many types of thread you carry? DO YOU KNOW?

I spent half an hour wandering around the store, pestering the women at the cutting table, ranting about how people never tell me anything useful because they assume I’m smart enough to figure it out on my own, cursing the stupidly vague supplies list, and generally feeling very foolish and unprepared. My poor, long suffering boyfriend endured my ranting as best he could, encouraging me that I can do anything I set my mind to, regardless of any stupid lists. I calmed down a little, eventually got what I needed, and made it to the class on time. I was now going to spend the next two hours learning how to sew a pillow case.

Right?

Our class instructor introduced herself, saying she had been sewing since she was 5 years old and as such, knew what she was doing. If I had to guess, I’d put her age at somewhere in the late 60′s range, and the width of her behind somewhere in the “Oh my is there a zipcode somewhere on that” range. I know that sounds mean, but it basically meant she never got up out of her chair, which made trying to figure out what she was doing rather difficult seeing as how she and I were on opposite ends of a very long table and sewing is a rather small, detail-oriented craft. I mean, my eyes are good, but they’re not that good.

She gave us a brief life history, and then talked a little about what we were going to do today. It started out simply enough…make a pillow case, get the right kind of scissors, (I noticed immediately that mine were the exact opposite of what was needed–thanks so much crummy instructions, would a picture have killed you?) use the right kind of thread, this, that, other thing…then all of a sudden she starts talking about fabric edges and how one edge is stretchy and the other isn’t and how we’re going to start cutting now are you ready? Distinctly un-ready, I dived into my bag to find my scissors and start cutting. My innate inability to do anything in a straight line decided to make its grand debut here, and coupled with the utter dullness of my scissors (which were straight and had been used to cut paper for YEARS) my fabric came out looking a bit ragged on a couple sides, but it managed. The girl beside me was even more clueless than I was and kept bugging me to answer her questions, distracting me from what the teacher was saying. What part of “I don’t know anything about sewing“  was unclear?

After that, we start folding our fabric into the appropriate shape. Fold the “right sides” together? What in the world does that mean? I smell a backwards Southern terminology, something like “If you don’t care to”, which is quite possibly the most grammatically confusing statement in the history of mankind. Lacking any other sort of reference point, I assume she means to fold it right to left, so I do. Now we’re  pinning. OK, cool. Stabbing thing is fun. I notice the trophy wife sitting next to me has cute, matching pins that are all pink and girly looking while she talks about how great it is to be in a quiet room without her husband or her kids bugging her. Every single one of her pins is perfectly straight and spaced precisely. I’m sweating bullets over here with my crappy, mismatched pins that are in the fabric all crooked and wrong and you’re whining about how you can’t get a second away from your family? Several of whom, I might add, came out of you? Dear gods. This is going to be one of those days.

Now we have our fabric pinned, and it’s finally time to do something I understand: Plugging in the machine! Hurray! I grab on to my brief moment of brilliance and plug mine in faster and more efficiently than anyone else, even helping a few of my other classmates with their plugs! And now my machine can be turned on. Where’s the button again? Oh, OK. There it is. Oh, there’s a food pedal. That’s unexpected. I always wondered how those things moved. OK, foot on the pedal. Ready. Wait, no? Teach is talking about threading something. Too many people are talking, I miss the instructions almost completely. Something to do with bobbins. Do I have to do this now? Holy crap. I have no idea what a bobbin is. No one else around me seems to be doing it though so I stash it away til later, especially since Teach is already talking about another subject. (Why doesn’t she give us time to process her lessons before launching into another one? OMG.) OK, now we’re threading with the big thing of thread, and we can’t skip that step. There’s a lot of looping and clicking and arrows and stuff, but it takes me ten minutes to figure it out because I’m still trying to figure out if I thread this the way she showed when she was talking about bobbins or not. No one seems to notice I need help. I try and ask for it but Teach is deep in church-talk with another student and can’t hear me. Eventually the clueless girl to my left helps me out, since apparently she’s not so clueless suddenly. Great.

Finally, I get my thread in my needle properly. This is way more stressful than I’d expected, and we haven’t even started yet. Now it’s time to practice a little. Good. Practice is good, I like practice. I go forward. I’m sewing! Hurray! But I’m watching my needle, so it isn’t straight. Trophy Wife’s stitching is straight. Hers is factory-made perfect, actually. Is she a Stepford Wife? Holy cow. I’ll bet she is. I should see if I can get her to dispense money later. For now, we’re learning about the reverse button. Cool! It goes backwards too. Ain’t that spiffy. OK, this thing moves way too fast for my taste. I need more practice, but we’ve already stopped practicing and now we’re actually sewing something. Oh crap. I’m behind again. I try and fold and crease my stuff the way Teach says I should, but it isn’t straight. I try and fix it but it takes too long. She’s giving us two or three or even four steps to accomplish at once and then moving on to another set after that, and I can’t keep up. I do my best to sew straight and not sew over my pins, since apparently that’s bad, all the while wrestling with my machine’s desire to GO FULL SPEED AHEAD CAP’N WHAT ARE YOU WAITING FOR LET’S GET THIS DONE! instead of the slow, peaceful, Noob Turtle speed setting I’d like for it to be proceeding at.

I lose myself in the stressful task of sewing straight for a few minutes. Stepford Wife is really starting to get on my nerves. She’s chatting happily while she’s sewing along, not a problem in the world, while I struggle. But I manage OK, and my stitching looks all right, even though I’m using white thread on dark brown fabric and it’s rather obvious. Oh well. This project seems like it’s pretty much a loss anyway. I keep going. Sew, sew, sew, sew…

SNAP?

Something whizzes past my left eye, stinging me. My sewing machine makes an awful grinding noise and stops dead. I yank my foot off the pedal and remove my hands, half expecting the thing to explode. Everyone goes quiet.

“What just happened?” I demand, massaging my temple a little where the Whatever It Was grazed my poor, terrified skin, wondering how close I just came to having something buried in my eyeball.
“Oh. Needle’s broken.” says Teach.

Great.

“Go get another one from the ladies out by the cutting table. Don’t worry, it happens. I’ll take a look at things while you’re gone.”

Desperate to get away from this awful class, I seize the chance eagerly. I go straight for where I’ve been heading all night to get my questions answered: The cutting table. I get an old lady with a bad copper-colored dye job who looks at me as if I’m something she scraped off the bottom of her shoe. I ask her for a needle. “Well, we wouldn’t have anything like that over here at the cutting table,” she informs me sharply, “but you can ask over there in the sewing section.” Said section is, I kid you not, twenty feet away from the cutting table. She could have jerked her thumb in the direction without saying anything and I would’ve gotten it. Apparently, though, she’d never had the experience of being nervous and missing something completely obvious before. Good for you, Copper Lady. Too bad the rest of us are human beings.

So I go over to the sewing section. There’s an even older lady over here, with snowy white hair and a much nicer expression, and she’s talking to a younger woman who’s thinking about buying a new machine. I wait anxiously behind a line of sewing machines that apparently got bored with only using one spool of thread and decided to upgrade to three. Or four. Or five. Am I going to  use one of these some day? At this rate, probably not. But I’m always respectful of technology, even when I’m freaking out, so it’s a pretty cool thought. Eventually the customer lady leaves and Snowy Hair asks me what I need. She’s very nice, if a little perplexed, and hands me a needle which I cup reverently in my hands and promise to take great care of. Painfully aware that I have now missed almost fifteen minutes of my class, in which I was already badly behind, I return to the evil little room and present my hard won trophy. Teach installs the needle and tells me to finish sewing, all the while reassuring me that broken needles happen all the time and are totally normal. Right. If that’s true, why hasn’t anyone else broken their machine? Hm?

I continue sewing. We’re using our “coordinating material” now, folding it a bunch of different ways I don’t really understand. Everybody is miles ahead of me, some of them are even already finished with their pillowcases. I’m trying desperately to keep up while at the same time paying attention to what Teach is telling us. She doesn’t slow down for anything, though, and continues bombarding us with instructions that are way ahead of where I’m at. I sew furiously, ignoring the strange grinding noise coming from my machine.

SNAP!

Bye, bye, second needle. Nice knowing you.

Now almost on the verge of tears, I call the teacher over to examine my machine once again. She is totally confused now, and tells me to go put it aside and use another machine, since now two or three people have finished their pillowcases and are leaving. I hate them all. I suspect that Teach failed to remove the bit of broken needle from the first time, however she instead blames it on my poor choice of thread, since apparently I picked up Quilting Thread instead of Sewing Thread. Silly me. No one told me there was a difference, or that quilts even needed a specific type of thread and that sewing machines turned their noses up at it. That would have been something fun to include in, oh, say, the supply list? Yeah. Thanks.

I swap machines. Almost everyone in the class has now completed truly beautiful pillowcases that look as if they were tailor made for hundreds of dollars. They leave, wishing me luck or shooting me pitying glances. I get better instructions from one of my classmates on what to do next than I have from the Teacher, who is still busy talking about church stuff with the other women. O. M. G. Is there no end to my torment? Finally, I’m the only one left in the whole class. Just me and Teach. She quietly watches me struggle, giving me the occasional nudge of direction. I’m panicking over the way my fabric is bunching up and I can’t keep it straight and I can’t see what I’m doing and oh my god it’s not going to sew right, this class was such a waste. Teach seems totally unconcerned. Great. Glad to know one of us is relaxed. Eventually she takes pity on me and straightens me out, and I finish my stitch. Everything is done. No more sewing. I take my pillow case off the machine, shake off a few random bits of thread, turn it right side out…

And it looks really good.

Holy crap.

I just sewed something.

Teach congratulates me and makes me help her put away the machines, apparently as penance for being such a pain in the butt. Though it probably has more to do with her bad, mid-60′s back. I once again marvel at how much sweet tea it must have taken to cause her rear end to reach such a terrifying width, I thank her profusely for her help to cover up the fact that the last two hours of my life have left me exhausted, sweaty, and thoroughly stressed out, and all because of her inability to communicate effectively to someone who was a total beginner. I begin to suspect the people around me attending this “beginner’s class” have in fact had a lot more experience then I have. (In some cases, I know this is true, since there was a woman there with her snotty teenage daughter who apparently had been attending home ec classes about sewing for weeks and was taking sadistic pleasure in running circles around mother dearest) I take a few flyers and leave, diving into  my mother’s car with no small amount of relief.

The class was awful. My interest in sewing, however, remains undaunted. I’m smart. If I can manage to make a nice looking pillowcase under such circumstances, what can I do if I’m given proper instruction?

Are you thinking what I’m thinking, Pinky?

I can has pillowcase?

Brb. Taking over the world.