In Which We Fail to Sew a Fine Seam

I've just spent an utterly humiliating morning, completely failing at a project I’ve been putting off for weeks.

I'm beginning to notice that if I keep delaying an activity, it’s because my subconscious is well ahead of me. It's already calculated the whole thing is going to screw up big-time, sensibly ignoring my conscious brain’s assurances that I’ve thought it all through, and it’s Absolutely Fool-Proof.

‘Oh yeah?’ says my subconscious.

And when it comes to sewing projects, it speaks from bitter experience.

All my life, I’ve been defeated by needlework. My schooldays were blighted by blanket stitch and bias binding. Stunningly, in the latter half of the twentieth century, my teachers seemed more interested in neat handwriting and invisible hemming than mere academic achievement. I think the problem was the sheer scope and magnitude of my failures – it must have been hard to believe I wasn’t doing it on purpose.

First, there were the knitted gloves, which then became mittens, which were finally, after a year of hard labour had produced a single grubby, lopsided square, declared a Useful Kettle-Holder.

Then there was the little girl’s dress: a disaster waiting to happen.

‘The poor child will have out grown it long before it’s finished’ sighed my exasperated needlework-mistress, unpicking yet another seam.

It was eventually completed. Whether it got worn I don’t know. The recipient was recently appointed a Professor of Art History, so is almost certainly too big for it now.

I never stood a chance. My mother couldn’t sew, and neither could her mother. They didn’t need to. I grew up in a welter of adoring great-aunts, some of them professional needlewomen. Amazing gauze and velvet party frocks streamed continuously from their skilled, arthritic fingers. Then another aunt married a textile designer, and the circle was complete – all I had to do was model the results.

We did eventually own a sewing machine. My father purchased it from the elderly admirer of one of the great-aunts, in exchange for a bottle of whiskey. It was a pre-war treadle machine which, if you didn’t peddle continuously with Le-Mans-style tenacity, would leap suddenly and unnervingly into reverse.

When we moved house, it was replaced by an equally decrepit table-top model. And with this I still try, and fail, to sew. I read the other day that the needle on a sewing machine should be replaced after each project: mine's still using the needle that saw it through the Blitz.

But it’s a bad workman who blames his tools. I blame my own incompetence and poor observation skills.

I copied a simple top, which has always fitted surprisingly well, using a chintz off-cut I’d bought years ago for a potential nativity shepherd. I tacked it carefully together using the original top as a guide, so there could be no possibility of error.

I tried on the results, and the seams split. It was far too tight. I tried on the original white top. It fitted perfectly. I laid the white top against the chintz one. They were identical.

I pondered this bizarre conundrum for a while.

Then I grabbed the sides of the original top and pulled. It flexed. It was bias cut, giving the linen weave an elastic quality. My chintz top, of course, was not.

So that’s the end of that. What a waste of fabric. I shall just have to make it into kettle-holders.