In-Depth 2022: Blog Post V

Ah hello hello again! To be quite honest, it doesn’t feel like that long since I last wrote an update. Perhaps it’s because I… to be completely honest… haven’t done much in the last few weeks. I’ll explain.

So, Mai and I are still working on altering patterns before we go onto basic clothing and altering clothing patterns. While I will say the last lesson we had was extremely informative (especially the information on seams and how what I’m learning will tie into clothing seams), the process was… if I had to choose a collection of words for them I would say it was slow, tedious, complicated, painful, tricky, and disappointing among other descriptive words. Of course, this is part of everything in a topic you love, and I’m referring specifically to sewing complicated turns. Straight lines are fine. Fun to do actually, the outcome looks very nice. But curves… they’re hard to do, and whenever I do them, I do them well until the VERY END when everything goes downhill. This means I have to rip out the seams a lot and just… waste a lot of work. I also made the mistake of choosing fabrics that look better together than compatible fabrics when starting this project. But yeah, that’s the update, as per usual I’m adding some photos below.

I want to note that I’ve been thinking that I’ve set my expectations of how much I’m going to learn in this mentor experience a little high. When I first decided I one day wanted to learn to sew and create my own designs, I was watching experts who have already learned the skill. It has become clear to me while working with Mai that there is a lot to learn about sewing, mending and clothes making. So, I don’t believe that by the end of the in-depth project I will know everything about sewing but I believe I will know the basic skills and have enough knowledge to continue learning how to sew with or without the help of Mai (preferably with). This is something that I have realized I’ve become more invested in every time I sew a perfect piece, find an intriguing design, or even think about my future dreams. So as long as it may take to fully learn the art of sewing, I’m willing to spend that time.

On to the questions. A learning opportunity that Mai provides to expose me to learning I suppose would be taking my interest and teaching me new skills that I’d be interested in. Obviously, I need to learn everything eventually, but doing projects makes good opportunities for me to learn new skills and stay interested. Learning opportunities to reinforce new learning and accelerate new learning could be tasks like “Complete this project with the skills you’ve learned” or “try figuring out how to do this” as it’s a form of thinking and practice that helps you remember what you’ve learnt, which also eventually makes you work faster and understand new terms you may come across quicker. Something going well in our mentoring relationship I’d say would be how open Mai and I are to what we’ve accomplished, what our goals are, and what we’ve achieved. Aside from understanding and celebrating accomplishments and goals, when I screw something up, Mai always tells me any similar experiences they had and how I’m still doing well even with a small trip up. I feel like something we’ve both learned/are learning about each other is just why we like to sew and why we are passionate and excited about it. I’m excited as a new learner and Mai is excited as a teacher and someone who enjoys the art and what you can create from it.

I feel sad that this entire experience is going by so quickly. I only have 1 blog post left to write but I still want this to last so much longer. Anyways, that’s a complete recap of what’s gone on.

Alright, signing off,

Athena

Here’s the bag pattern alteration with the pattern with straight lines. It was pretty fun to do.
Fun game, figure out where I screwed up on the curved pattern.
K so, do you kind of see those yellow lines? Yeah, they were supposed to match up but since I used chalk instead of a pen, I screwed up a bit and they’re about half a centimetre off. I need to practice my alignment.