untitled by marccc1970 on Flickr.
The following tags are in response to a dress I made recently, which was my first serious sewing project.
I know these were left as a compliment and I don’t mean to single anyone out, but I want to talk about this for a minute.
What you might be imagining when you see a post like this is that I woke up one day and decided to make this costume, and then I just made it perfectly on the first try, no problem. What you are not seeing is:
- me having to look up youtube tutorials for every single thing. “How to make a ruffle” “how to sew a zipper” “what is bias tape” “why won’t this fusible interfacing work” “how to make a bustle” “how to lace a corset”
- sewing a jacket into a mobius strip that can’t be turned inside-out
- spending five hours troubleshooting a sewing machine to discover I inserted the bobbin the wrong way
- having to go back to the fabric store a dozen times because I kept buying the wrong fabric/interfacing/tool/tape/lace
- sewing machine eating my fabric again and I don’t know why
- begging the fabric store ladies to help me interpret instructions on a pattern because I don’t know how to decode it
- redoing the corset five times because I couldn’t get it right
- a mountain of failed mockups and pattern pieces
- renting a car to drive to a friend’s house for emergency sewing instruction
- wasted material
- about 100 hours of work over several months
- crying while sewing at 4 am
- angst
Chalking up a success to natural talent is a harmful idea and unfair for everyone. It dismisses the hard work that went into an achievement, and it makes you believe that you can’t accomplish that same thing unless you were magically born with some special skill. Guess what: nobody is born knowing how to sew or draw or sing or write give a speech or compose an opera. Natural talent does not exist. There is only hard work, practice, and learning. Slam dunk the concept of talent into a volcano, where it belongs.
