The guy teaching the classes is obviously passionate about all kinds of sewing arts, particularly hand sewing work (darning is closer to sewing than to knitting, which I didn’t really understand until I took the class).
I’m working on making sashiko patches to cover the holes our new cats have made in the old comforter cover on our bed and I’ve got a small darning project in mind to repair the pockets on a cardigan.
What you need to understand is that I started with the attitude that I was no good at any of this stuff. I mean, I can thread a needle and put in a hem, sew on a button, stuff like that.
But although I learned how to crochet (which I liked better than knitting) and even did a bit of embroidery when I was young, I never felt like I was good at it. So I stopped doing it.
It didn’t help that many years back I took an aptitude test in which I scored 5 percentile on the test for using small tools and other fine motor coordination. While it was useful to know that I’d better make sure I had some job skills that didn’t involve putting together tiny electronic parts – which always sounded like the job from hell to me – it did discourage me from trying things like decorative patching or jewelry making.
As I’ve noted here before, I started taking drawing classes a few years back. I’d always thought I couldn’t draw. That’s what they told me when I was a kid and took an art class.
I just figured all this stuff required natural talent and good fine motor skills and I didn’t have those so I couldn’t do it.
I was wrong.
There are several things I was wrong about.
First of all, I can clearly do these things, especially if someone shows me how they actually work.
Drawing, for example, is really about seeing. The first class I took was based on the book Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain, and while I don’t think the left and right brain side theories hold up, that particular approach to learning to draw was very helpful to me because it taught me how to look at what I was trying to draw.
I also learned it was OK to erase, as well as some tricks for seeing the relationship among the things you were drawing.
In the sewing classes, I learned some little skills. In darning you don’t make knots, but you do have some systems for making sure the final product won’t fray. In doing sashiko, you occasionally make a knot, but there are tricks for that, too – tricks I didn’t know.
There are more skills to sewing than threading a needle and winding it through cloth.
It occurs to me that I should take this teacher’s class in hand sewing, and maybe machine sewing, even though I more or less know how to do those things. It turns out there are a lot of little things that make it easier.
Another thing that’s really important about learning to do new things is even more basic: You don’t have to be good. Continue reading “Learn Something New”…