The Family Challenge
The family
When I was a teenager growing up in Devon, needlework was a compulsory school subject for girls - the boys got to do much more exciting stuff with drills and welding equipment. I spent months, if not a whole year, creating a blue floral puff-sleeved smock (it was the 70s, after all) which, of course, I hated by the time it was finished and never wore, but it did teach me the basics. After university, in a moment of uncharacteristic creativity, I bought a sewing machine so I could make cushion covers, but for years it has remained at the back of the airing cupboard and my sewing has been limited to buttons and name tags.
At my daughter Ella's secondary school, both boys and girls do design and technology, which includes modules in textiles as well as the snappily titled resistant materials and food technology.
Like most 16-year-old girls, Ella loves shopping, and Topshop in particular, but recently she has noticed that it is charging as much as £40 for a cotton skirt that perhaps she could make herself. So she has brought my sewing machine out of hibernation and is keen to have a go. Ella is very practical and constructs all the Ikea purchases in our all-girl household. I am, on the other hand, a bit of a Luddite - when Ella went on her first trip away with primary school, before she left she typed out instructions on how to work the video.
The training
Astrid Jacoby taught herself to sew in her native Berlin when she was 12, and set up Little Hands Design offering creative fashion courses for children in north-west London six years ago.
The company now runs a whole range of courses at venues around Hampstead and Highgate. We book a private two-hour session, which will take place in Astrid's workroom at her home, but first we have to sort out what we are going to make.
Astrid asks me to describe my style - I daren't tell her that I am talking to her on the phone in my pyjamas and that, as someone who mainly works from home, that is how I sometimes spend my whole day.
In our dream world, Ella and I have visions of making fabulous summer dresses that all our friends admire - "Oh this? Just a little something I made myself." But then we start to be realistic. We only have two hours after all.
Astrid offers to post out a couple of suggestions - she makes all her own patterns out of clear plastic, as even the "easy" ones on the market are too fiddly and flimsy for children - and we both like the look of a simple ra-ra skirt, which we reckon will suit Ella's younger sister, Flora. Flora, 12, has refused point blank to join us on our challenge but has no qualms about benefiting from our labours.
After a quick visit to Rolls & Rems, a bit of an institution among London dressmakers, we arrive clutching our chosen fabrics, which we lay on the cutting-out table in Astrid's workroom.
We immediately get cracking creating the four panels that will make up each skirt and gathering and pinning them ready for sewing while Astrid supervises and gives us some golden rules as we go along.
You should always, we learn, pin at right angles to where you will sew with the pinheads facing away from the seam. This means that if you do forget to take a pin out (yes, I did manage to miss a few later), you don't wreck your sewing machine.
Ella is coolly getting on with things but I am all fingers and thumbs. When Astrid mentions in passing that some of her six-year-old students have made a skirt in two hours and adds that the wraparound dress she is wearing was made for her by her son "a few years ago" - he is only 11 now - I have a crisis of confidence, but things get better once we get on to the machines.
I love Astrid's sewing machines, not only because they are more user-friendly than my almost antique machine at home, but because you don't have to work out how to thread them as she has numbered all the bits with indelible marker pen.
We sew the first two panels together and hem them to stop them fraying (no need to bother with all that complicated hemming I did at school - zigzag stitch is fine for our purposes, explains Astrid).
Then comes the moment of truth when we have to put the two pieces together and hope that the seams and hems match. Ella's do perfectly and mine almost do.
We only have the waistband and elastic left to do. Ella is still well ahead, but this sewing lark is gradually coming back to me and I am racing along doing the final seam feeling pretty smug, only to discover when I get to the end that I have hardly sewn anything as the bobbin has run out of cotton ages ago and I've failed to notice.
I soon catch up, though, and amazingly in just two hours we do indeed have two finished garments and are incredibly pleased with ourselves.
As we walk home, I ring Flora and tell her that we have made her two skirts - but Ella interrupts to say that she may keep one for herself. Your turn Littlehandsdesign.com, 020-7284 1431, or search for dressmaking courses at hotcourses.com