This week I started working on some of my large projects for school, and it's been surprisingly great and productive - and much faster than I had anticipated. I was working on my pants and jacket slopers back in October, right before Mackie got sick and Beetlegate 2013 started full-force. I was almost finished with the pants and had done one muslin of the jacket before everything went kablooey. Then I went and lost a bunch of weight, and all my muslins went into the freezer, and the whole concept of school projects went into a big, overwhelming pile of stuff to blatantly ignore.
But then: you know how sometimes you think you've forgotten how to ski because you haven't done it in a long time, and then you actually go skiing, and you do just fine, and you realize that just because you can't explain how you did something, doesn't mean your body has forgotten how to do it? Well anyhow, this is a real thing, which I'm gently reminded of it every time I can sit down and play a sonata I learned when I was in middle school, or when I can do a Continental cast-on myself but have to think pretty hard to teach someone else how. How do you do it? I dunno, you just... do?
It's with this in mind that I've come back to the actions of design: pulling muslin on grain; walking in side seams; easing a sleeve cap. I thought that I had forgotten, but it's only that I got caught up in other things for a little while. Yesterday, I finished my jacket sloper, and then spent the better part of an hour tracing out the pattern pieces for my Jasmine blouse and cutting them out of a length of quilting cotton as a muslin. There's something really nice about sewing things slowly and thoughtfully, even if it means I don't have much to show for it.
I'm hoping that I'll have something sewn up next week, but we'll see. Right now, the small victories are pretty intangible, but I'm hopeful that they'll keep happening until they're big enough to share.
Happy Friday!
No comments:
Post a Comment