Less Confident Now

Okay so I just opened the pattern for Kate’s Halloween costume and am totally overwhelmed. What the hell was I thinking?

There are two huge sheets of onion paper with all these letters and numbers and lines on them–and to make the costume number and size variants even more complex, it’s all written in several languages. This costume would be a great team-building activity for a UN off-site.

Under a cheery headline entitled “Simply the Best Sewing Techniques for Fur Fabrics” it says that in order to get the seams to lie flat with “heavier fur fabrics” you may need to “shear away” some of the pile and “pound with a heavy object to keep seams and edges flat.” Pound the fabric? I can’t help but think that instruction is there for us rookies to see if we actually take the bait and do something as ridiculous as that. I mean, how does Suzy Homemaker sew a costume while her kid is napping if pounding is required?

Anyway, I might not even need to pound. Is the fur I got considered heavier? What is the baseline one uses to determine where their fur fits on the heaviness scale?

And as if it’s totally easy to figure out what part of the pattern you need and what you don’t and then how to cut it and pin it to the fabric and cut that and sew it all together then actually have it fit your kid, the only instructional illustration they have in the whole pattern is a little line drawing of a woman’s hand and a mallet pounding a furry seam. Of everything required here I think I could figure out how to pound the fur, thank you very much. Now that I’m looking at it again, maybe the pounder in the drawing is a judge and she’s repurposed her gavel for fur-flattening purposes. (One never gets to use the word gavel often enough.)

Speaking of words, what the hell are selvages?

Oy. I fear that I might have gotten myself into a bit of a pickle. Ah well, I only spent $35 on all this. Probably twice what it would have cost to buy a costume that’s ready to wear.