My Very First Sewing Project! (Pt. 2)

Welcome back, friends, and Happy Mother's Day! It's time to hear a little more about my first foray into sewing. When I last left off, I was just getting into the first stitches of my roommate PS's pajama pants, and overcoming the initial hurdles of getting used to my machine.

It's... *gasp* ... My First Seam! Aww, isn't it cute... and kind of crooked and weird?
That's a seam only a seamster could love.

Anyway, as you might imagine, a lot of the sewing in this particular project is nice and straightforward: one big seam for the outside of the legs, and one seam for the inside. I think the hardest part about most of it was remembering which pieces were the fronts and which were the backs. I foolishly kept putting away the layouts and patterns and then dragging them back out again to remind myself. (By the way, I'm on my third pair of pajama pants now and learning from my mistakes - I hang all my unsewn pieces on the wall on a pant hanger, with their patterns!)

So that was all well and good, and then out of nowhere came my next big hurdle: CURVED SEAMS. While I loved the logic puzzle of constantly trying to figure out exactly what I was sewing (pants look really weird when they're inside-out and still missing their outer seams), I made some very silly mistakes in the haste of dealing with instructions more complicated than "Pin, Sew, Repeat." So we're going to play a little game: SPOT THE PROBLEMS!!

Funnily enough, I think I was actually taking this picture at the time because I was proud of nailing my first curved seam.

I feel like I'm forgetting one or two, but I know I made at least two errors here. The first one is pretty obvious if you're a sewer: See that vertical seam in the middle of the crotch, parallel to the curved seam I just sewed? Yeah... I sewed it closed, to the side. It's supposed to be open! That seam is a little awkward now.

The second mistake may not be obvious unless you've read the pattern: notice how little seam allowance there is in there? (That's the distance between the stitching and the edge of the fabric - it's supposed to be 3/8 of an inch) Yeah, so the pattern calls for you to trim the allowance in the curved area down to 1/4 of an inch... but just the curved area. The ones on the side are supposed to stay untrimmed (natural?) and get pressed flat like a regular straight seam. Welps. What's cut cannot be uncut, and I hope PS will forgive me for some slightly-less-than perfect PJ pants. Sewing a project for all three of us is an interesting prospect: whoever I make pants for first gets pants first, but they sort of get the pants with all the mistakes. I guess it's kind of like being the oldest kid in a big family? Anyway, here are middle-pants-getter SM's slightly-better seams, for comparison:

I probably need to stop doing this.

Uh, so that picture probably isn't super helpful if you don't know what you're looking at. It is the same seam as above, but from a different angle and with the pant legs spread out to the side. The creature's mouth is made of the two perpendicular seams (inside the legs) which are properly sewn open here, and that little forehead stripe is where I left the seam allowance wide so it could be pressed open.

Anyway, after all that fun stuff, I ended up with two pairs of what I like to think of as pseudo-pants:

That is to say, they are shaped like pants, but don't have waistbands and aren't hemmed yet. Also, due to the dark pattern, SM's look like giant drop-crotch clown pants in that photo, and that's pretty cool. As of the writing of this entry, PS's pseudo-pants have gotten a waistband, and my pants are all cut and ready to be sewn. But that's a story for another day!

I'll leave you today with a bittersweet and hopefully inspirational story. I work at a children's clothing store (whose name I won't mention because I'm about to be slightly critical of our merchandise, which is for the most part excellent.) Essentially my favorite customer right now is a little 4-or-5-year-old girl named Malia (I am guessing at the spelling). She came in a few weeks ago with her grandmother and spent about an hour and a half deliberating over dresses and trying on, I think, nearly every one in the store. She's absolutely wonderful: smart, shy, thoughtful, and full of initiative and personality. Every once in a while a kid comes in who is clearly doing all the legwork of shopping for themselves, and there's nothing to prevent me from talking to them like they are the customer. That is a very fun experience. Anyway, Malia came back a few days later with her mother for a few minutes, and as far as I can tell this was just so that Malia could introduce the two of us. She poked her head into the back room while I was working on sorting shipment, and sort of excitedly pointed me out to her mother like "Oh that's the guy who helped me!!!" I was honored, and the two of them came back a few days ago to buy some gifts for friends and some new pajamas for Malia. While I was ringing them up, another customer commented on how beautiful Malia is (she really is!) and how she looked like a princess (she kind of does!), and I thought this was cute if a little weird to say. Then I looked at the pajamas Malia was buying. They were covered in princesses! White, blonde princesses. Malia is neither white nor blonde. Malia is (as far as I can tell, and this is probably an unfortunate generalization) Indian. She's got dark skin and black hair. She's amazingly gorgeous, but the princesses on her pajamas don't look anything like her, and I think that's a little sad. I think that Malia should have princesses and whatever other sort of model of beauty or success that she wants that look like her. So I've added that to my list of clothes to make someday: pajamas with princesses of every color, size, and shape on them, for every little kid who wants to be a princess. So... here's a question: what do you think kids need to see more of in the world around them? What should be on their clothes, in their movies, in their books, etc.?