The One I Was Afraid to Make

Last summer I sewed my first dress and mentioned that the reason for making it was to practice sewing before I got down to sewing THE dress.

It was this sheer curtain fabric that had inspired me to want to make a cute summer dress, but I was afraid to get to it due to my obvious lack of experience with sewing.

So I had this rough sketch of what I wanted (sans the measurements) for over a year lying around in the perpetual black hole that is the backlog of things Josie wants and intends to do.. eventually. When the timing is right..

To work around my AuDHD hangups about things I don't fully know how to do, I decided to use a made-up sense of urgency for this project roughly about a week before my birthday in June. With the idea that I wanted to be able to wear it on my birthday, but in case I failed miserably, I could just chuck it in some dark corner and no one needed to be the wiser that I had attempted to sew it in the first place.

This ended up being a successful setup for my brain, and so, slowly but deliberately I started on the project on the 7th of June by figuring out the measurements.

The fabric was too sheer to be used on its own so it has an additional white fabric lining.

I did struggle a bit with gathering, as I had watched some tutorials, but they did not translate well to IRL as my thread kept breaking, that is until I figured that I don't have to do it with the sewing machine and opted to manually sew large stitches that helped with the gathering without breaking the thread.

The gathering ended up not being evenly distributed in the end anyway - a point of contention with my 'in-house sewing mentor' who insisted it needed to be redone.

One thing that really stops up any of my projects usually is needing to unrip something for error corrections and re-doing, so, despite my best intentions of not copying 'bad emotional patterns' in regards to sewing, a sense of anger did manage to bubble up. Luckily being highly aware of how and why these emotions were coming up, I was able to manage them eventually and figure my way through them.

At this stage of the process, having to add sleeves, I did feel another mental block coming up in the project as I was not entirely sure how to make the sleeves properly and since I was already feeling an attachment to what I had so far the dread of messing it up with sleeves was too much.

But I couldn't give up now. I had to find a way through this mental block. Usually at this kind of stage I would either - 1. leave the project unfinished and go on to distract myself with other things, or 2. rush through the unknown part, taking too many risks, cutting too many corners and messing everything up.

I did not want to go down either of the two familiar paths, so I had to do something radically different. I ended up, just taking my time, observing, and not rushing to do anything but not leaving the project either, this allowed me to get through the mental block without a disaster or an unfinished project.

So I figured out the sleeves too. They ended up maybe a bit too puffy, and not quite exactly how I intended them, but they are ok, and they work just fine.

So this is the end result. Again, I'm highly aware of the lack of quality to it, but it doesn't matter, because I'm just learning, this is only the 2nd dress I've made, but I've made it, it exists. It's not perfect, but it's cute and it's mine and that's all I can ask for.. for now. I've now as a result caught this unreasonably optimistic feeling about my further path with sewing, especially after binge-watching so many sewing tutorials on YouTube.

I feel like with time and practice, I could actually make the kind of clothes that are not just cute, but also well-made with quality seams on the inside as well.

So, this is how it looks on.

I did finish it on the 11th of June, so well in time for my birthday.. it's just that the weather was stubbornly uncooperative, so I couldn't wear it on the 14th. But that's ok.

There's plenty of summer left for me to wear it.

Now that I've caught the sewing bug, I have my eyes set on the next project - an even more challenging one. But don't hold your breath though, as I'm going to need to hunt for the perfect fabric and the rest of the materials, and I might still chicken out and end up only making it next summer.