Wednesday, February 25, 2015

Sewing machines are amazing machines

Before last weekend, I got the sewing machine up and ready to go. I wanted to finish this hanji dress over the weekend, but I had to go see the baby, so this languished until a friend asked when I was going to finish and I panicked last night, sewing late, until my eyes wore out.
I started up this morning, thinking I'd be done by lunch, but I wasn't done by lunch at all. I'm not a dressmaker, and this is an intermediate pattern that I was trying to follow fairly faithfully (I skipped one step: the staystitching. I wish I didn't skip it). So it took longer than I'd like, and I had to rip out some seams because better to take the time to fix mistakes if this was a dress six years in the making.
This was the first joomchi I ever did, in 2008. Six sheets of it stayed in Korea after I left in 2009, and when I returned in 2014, I found the sheets at my aunt's house. She had intended to return them to my teacher but never did. When I saw how far gone my teacher's mind was in Jeju, I decided to keep them, bring them back, and finish her homework: back the paper and make a garment. But I won't do the rest of the homework, which is to have a famous person model the garment, photograph the model, and give everything to my teacher to have and exhibit as her own work. I picked the pattern because it had "washi" in the title. There are issues, which are hard to see from the front and on a hanger, but I learned a LOT, which was the whole point.

Meanwhile, I am still extremely behind on my long to do list, but time ticks on. I was happy for ONE day to myself today, but could use about 300 more.

Scroll down here to see info on my talk in Chicago (one of two; the other is on Wed, Mar 11 at 4:30pm).

No comments: