Posts Tagged ‘embroidery thread’

You Are Not Alone

February 6, 2015

It happened again today. I have been sewing for over fifty years and yet every once in while I still sew two pieces of fabric together with a right side facing a wrong side. How does that happen? Even though I know better, a couple of weeks ago, I failed to check the location of the seam of a quilt binding before sewing it to a quilt to make sure that seam didn’t become perfectly placed at the mitered corner of the quilt. The result; not only one seam at a corner, but a seam at two corners!

I experience similar adventures with other needle art stitching. I have been knitting for nearly as long as I have been sewing and yet, when knitting a sweater, somehow missed a very important sentence which instructed me to work a special stitch along the front edge of a sweater. The entire front was completed before this sentence “suddenly appeared” in the instructions! Sometimes an embroidery stitch seams to go astray, your thread knots or you sew thru your thread. All techniques that would be quite impossible if they were supposed to part of your design.

As the saying goes; we learn by our mistakes. I have learned a lot! Admittedly, that is not to say that I still don’t repeat some of those same mistakes over and over. However, I am becoming very good at correcting them. I think being proficient in what we do is not necessarily doing it perfectly the first time, but rather how to correct the mistakes when we make them. And, we will make mistakes.

The next question becomes how many mistakes do we correct and how perfect do we try to make our project. We all have different visions of perfection. There will always be someone who tries to make you conform to their ideas of perfection. Correct what you can’t live with, accept the imperfections that are minor to you, move on, and most importantly have fun.

I can help you with trying to avoid the most common mistakes. I can definitely help you with how to correct your mistakes. Don’t be discouraged by your errors. You are in very good company! Seam rippers are one of our top selling notions and I never knit without my tool for picking up dropped stitches close at hand. As for embroidery thread tangles, I have learned how to undo most of them. If that fails, I can show you how to cut the thread and secure even the shortest end!

Don’t let the fear of making mistakes hold you back. Look at them as a challenge; conquering a mistake is quite rewarding. Keep on stitching, learning and having fun!