Sewing Mishaps

Over Christmas break, in an attempt to keep myself from going crazy from boredom, I made a shirt. It was a lot less traumatizing of an experience than sewing normally is for more; I think I only cried over it once, and that was after a long day of cutting out the pattern pieces. Frustrating stuff, that is. Anyway, it made me think of my last experience with a large sewing project. It went a bit like this:

I had barely enough material for my shirt and couldn’t buy more. I (with a lot of help from my mom) had gotten the pattern pieces arranged just so, so that they all barely fit – including the slight alterations I was making to the neckline. I made sure to cut the upper part of the neckline first so that I wouldn’t forget that I was altering it, then went ahead and cut the other three sides . . . and zoned out and just kept going back around the fourth side, cutting the neckline back to its original position. Oops.

I noticed about halfway through what I was doing, but wasn’t too worried because I figured that my mom, amazing as she is, could fix anything.

“What can I do?” I asked, showing her my mistake.

She tilted her head thoughtfully to the side, about to divulge some perfect solution.

“I don’t know,” she said.

That’s when I began to freak out. But as my mom, amazing as she is, continued to examine my shirt, she came up with a brilliant idea.

“You could sew some lace along the top of the neckline. That should hide the cut. And while you’re at it, you could sew some lace along the sleeves as well.”

So I did. And you know what? It worked so well that I’ve had random people compliment me on this shirt that I messed up. You know what else? It looks fifty times cuter with the lace than it would without it.

I think mistakes are like that. They help you see ways you can make things so much better, whereas if you never made mistakes, you would just keep going, not realizing that while things are good, it is possible – with a little-lot help from you – for them to be simply amazing.

So, the moral of this story is: my mom is amazing.

Oh, and I suppose mistakes being a way to make things even better could also be a moral. Whatev.