I’m a professor by day and a sewer by (late) night. I started sewing as a girl, with the help of my mom, who somehow found the time to make all four of us Halloween costumes and special-occasion clothes while working as an elementary school teacher. As a kid, though, I got frustrated easily by all my mistakes and didn’t really progress much beyond hand-sewing doll clothes.
When I was in college in Portland in the late ’90s, DIY was undergoing a resurgence and a lot of my friends were taking up knitting, screen-printing, and the like. I’ve never much liked knitting (too slow!) but was excited to return to sewing. Unfortunately, without any training, I found patterns confusing and frustrating, and never made it too far beyond altering t-shirts.
The summer before grad school, I had some time on my hands, and took an excellent sewing class at Stone Mountain & Daughter, in Berkeley, where I was living at the time. I learned how to follow a pattern, thread my machine properly, and some sewing fundamentals I somehow had never learned. (Take a class! It’s worth it!)
In grad school, for reasons that now escape me, my main fixation was making messenger bags and purses. I’ve always loved Queen Bee Creations and my holy grail was making something as nice as their stuff. I got pretty good at sewing with vinyl on my ancient Singer and made tons of bags for family and friends. I liked putting in special pockets for things I knew they had to carry, like medication or teaching supplies, and I learned a good deal about reinforcing seams, attaching zippers, creating pockets, and the like. At the time, a lot of the conversation about sewing took place on the Craftster forums, and I loved learning new techniques and admiring others’ work there.
I sewed off and on through grad school and into my first job. After I moved to L.A., I got pregnant with my daughter, which gave me a great excuse to make baby dresses, which I really enjoyed. (Now I love indulging my five-year-old’s whims about what she wants to wear — usually something shiny and twirly.)
This latest sewing jag has been inspired, in part, by losing a bunch of weight over the last year, which has left me with a much-depleted wardrobe and some confusion about my new shape. I find it helpful and interesting to sew for the way I look now. I like learning what looks nice on me, and that no one’s body matches pattern proportions “out of the box.” And of course I love clothes! I also got a serger for my last birthday. Like a lot of people, I let it gather dust for about six months, but now that I’ve learned how to use it, it’s opened up a whole new world of knits for me.
The online sewing community has changed so much since my last real encounter with it! Ten years ago, Instagram didn’t exist, and there was nowhere near as many indie pattern designers and young sewists out there. It’s really exciting to me that there’s now so much activity among sewers all over the world, and I have really, really enjoyed exploring PDF patterns and the world of YouTube tutorials. Sewing, for me, is absolutely engrossing. I can go for hours and hours without wanting to quit. I love that it’s totally dominated by femme people, especially since my day job involves work in male-dominated fields like machine learning and data science.
Of course, sewing is far from the only thing in my life, and I struggle to fit it in amidst childrearing and work. A lot of my sewing takes place late, late at night, when everyone’s asleep and I finally have some time alone. I think I need to do a better job of finding reasonable hours to sew, since I’m chronically sleep-deprived!