29-Sept-99 Front facings
.
.
.
I finally started sewing on those four shirts. That's right, four, not five. I decided not to cut one out of the yard sale African fabric yet. I already won't get any of these done in time to wear before it gets too cold, but I won't even have a fighting chance if I try to do too many at once.
I don't know if I ever said how I started sewing. Back in high school I was in 4-H. I had persuaded my mother to be the leader of a 4-H cooking club for boys; we did candymaking and baking one year (and got to tour a candy factory in Cambridge as part of that!), and cooked whole meals the next year. Our specialty was pizza, from scratch. But, as is the wont of journalisers, I digress.
One year at a 4-H county fair there was a home economics judging contest. I had a rough idea of how to tell what made a good loaf of bread, but when it came to deciding which of four garments was best I was totally lost. I figured it was worthwhile being able to tell, if I was ever going to shop for my own clothes, and that the best way to learn would be to learn to sew. I got my mother and sisters to teach me how to use a sewing machine and to help me make a shirt. The funny thing was, I liked it. I've always found that it's easier to find fabric I like than shirts I like. Sometimes I go years in between doing any sewing, and some years I've made a shirt a week for three weeks.
The whole thing about sewing, from a topologist's structural viewpoint, is that you have to hide the raw edges. Besides looking tacky, raw edges fray and eventually make the garment fall apart. The idea is to get the raw edges entirely inside something. By now I have a pretty clear understanding of how that's done for shirts. Pants are something else. I've made two or three pairs of pants and have put zippers in the flies. I follow the instructions carefully, and somehow the things work. When I'm finished, though, I have no idea how I did it.
The front facings I'm talking about are where the shirt buttons. In this pattern, the edge of the fabric is turned under twice so that the raw edge ends up alongside the front of the shirt, but the front is a fold. There's another fold on the back of the shirt about an inch and a half from the edge. The fabric between the edge and that fold, the good side of the fabric on the inside of the shirt, is the facing. Nothing to it. Easier done than explained. All I did so far is to sew along the edge of the facing and close to the front edge of the shirt on five of my eight shirt fronts. They're easy straight seams, but it's always a question of just getting started. Once I'm into it, it'll start to go quickly.
 | ||||