Sometime circa 1990, I was in a junior high home economics class sitting behind a sewing machine learning it's ins and outs. This was not my first rodeo, however.
My mother had an old school Singer sewing machine. It was built into the table and flipped upside down when not in use. It was not the best-behaving machine, or so I thought. Looking back, though, 95% of it was user error!
I made a few small fabric pouches, some simplistic doll clothes, but mainly just cut up my old clothes into scraps and sewed them back together again. In the midst of all that, I taught myself to make awesome hair scrunchies. Not a big deal, right? Wrong! (in the early '90's, these were VERY popular (just ask my mom...she's still wearing hers!)) In a small town, there was limited availability both in quantity, but mainly in variety. As a result, we walked around like a pre-teen version of the Stepford Wives in our matching scrunchies. But for me and my new-found skill, the entire Wal-Mart fabric section was my oyster!
Needless to say, that was my self-taught (and jealousy-provoking) foray into sewing.
So by the time I had 'formal instruction', I thought this sewing thing was a walk in the proverbial park. And it was...at the beginning. A stuffed soccer ball in my school colors - a breeze! A basic mini-skirt (again, it was the early '90's) - more of a challenge, but still a success. Then I got cocky: strapless dress for the winter formal - total disaster!
That was the day I learned short people can have long torsos. If you, too, have a long torso, you know that strapless anything is not great. That is unless you don't mind having a Janet Jackson-esque 'wardrobe malfunction', or be showing midriff all day. As for the fate of that dress...it made a super-rad scrunchie!
