I fought the fabric

When I first started working with fabric I got so frustrated! I wanted to make what I was seeing, what I was feeling — and I wanted to do it fast.

I sewed seams together as if they would lie flat magically, giving no thought to the laws of physics. I cut curves with abandon as if they would magically sew themselves together.

I fought the fabric and the fabric won. Ha. Ha. Ha.

But really, not funny.

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“Any machine can be trained to do what mine does. It just takes several hundred hours to train one.” 

Caryl Bryer Fallert-Gentry

Well. It’s been a while. I’ve studied. I’ve stitched. I’ve had a few talks with my sewing machine.

Most of the time, my machine talked back to me. It spoke in snarled thread, frayed seams, and running out of bobbin thread at the worst possible moments. I don’t think it was happy.

But one day I realized we weren’t fighting. We were communicating! Smoothly… Quickly…

One of my favorite artists, Caryl Bryer Fallert Gentry, says that getting an even stitch is a matter of practice. “Any machine can be trained to do what mine does. It just takes several hundred hours to train one.”