A few months ago, after shopping for clothing, I realized a couple of things. The first is that quality clothing is expensive and good fits (for me at least) are rare and nearly always require alterations. The second is that I could probably step up my sewing skills, become more adept at alterations, and eventually learn to make entire outfits for myself. This would both save money and hopefully gain me better clothing.
To start, most of my sewing experience at this point is with very minimal hemming and repairing small tears with hand sewing. So, my first action was to buy a sewing machine. Keeping with my budget I settled on one of the lower end computerized Brother models. I also bought a small iron and a few accessories for it such as a silk organza pressing cloth to protect fabrics and projects from direct exposure to the iron.
I also decided to enroll in Sew It! Academy so I would have a structured way to learn to sew with a machine and as a way of measuring my progress. This was a great decision and after a couple of weekends of practice with my sewing machine and their fundamental exercises I was able to assemble my first project: an upcycled eyeglasses case.
The outer cover is made from a portion of a donated striped cotton men’s Oak Hill business shirt and the inner lining is from one-half of a small swag tote-bag from a recent tech conference. Constructing it involved getting some fusible fleece for the padding, cutting the fabric and fleece to match a pattern, and then sewing it all together using straight and curved lines of stitches to assemble the seams.
Though this project is small, I’m incredibly happy I was able to produce it. I spend so much time in virtual spaces for work and school that it’s very satisfying to create something tangible offline that’s useful in the real world.