The brutality of sewing

My grandmother was a self-styled elegant lady who made clothes for family members and their Barbie dolls, raided yards for dandelions to turn into wine, and designed tricky additions to the house--to be executed by her handyman son-in-law, my father. She always kept her temper except when these projects became super-aggravating: once during a particularly annoying wall papering exercise--the paper kept getting gummed up and ripping--and once when she was sewing. "Damn," she said in paroxysms of frustration. I was shocked, and knew there must be something terrible about sewing to drive her to say this forbidden word.

In spite of this early lesson in what activities to avoid, I somehow seem to have taken up sewing as well. It must be a genetic predilection for masochism.  Plus. I'm a cheapskate, so why should I pay someone else to do my sewing?

This morning I decided to fix the wasitband on a skirt that's been the victim of my procrastination, sitting in the closet for something like three years.

First I had to pin the waistband onto the skirt, suffering numerous puncture wounds. Then the sewing machine needed to be threaded. But I couldn't remember how, and had to launch a major search for the  manual.  Naturally, it was not in the file marked "instruction manuals" and not actually with the sewing machine.

Having located this obscure piece of literature in a bag of miscellaneous weird stuff, I then had to follow the instructions, which were written for people with IQs way higher than mine, and illustrated with complicated diagrams that I was told to follow.

The instruction "Increase the tension" seemed apt, as that's exactly what was happening. I was getting more stressed out every second. The bobbin thread got all tangled up. The bobbin itself went flying off the machine, freaking out the cat, who began hissing at the empty sewing machine cover. I couldn't see the hole in the needle to put the thread through, even with all the lights in the place blazing brillantly.

At last the machine was ready, and I carefully sewed on the waistband, narrowing avoiding sewing my fingers. I vowed to never again attempt such a brutal feat. But now I'm thinking it wasn't really so bad....maybe I could even design a line of funky hats and bags and sell them online.....