Sew With Heart | Building Sewing Skills | Guest Post from Connect The Dots Crafts

Building Sewing Skills

I am so honored that Claire asked me to write a guest post for her Sew With Heart series!  I am so inspired by her posts and her style – it’s exciting to be sharing a little bit of my own creativity here on her blog. 

Building your sewing skills is a process that requires patience and boldness.  Here are some bits of advice from my own experience in learning to sew in the past few years.

Build a relationship with your machine

When I was younger, my mother tried to teach me to sew with a machine.  I tried to learn, but she had an old machine from the 1970's that seemed to break every time I touched it.  I would get discouraged, tell myself I wasn't good at it or that the machine "hated me," and move on to another medium.  Now, I watch my sewing students go through the same situation when they sit down at the machine for the first time.

Getting to know a sewing machine is like building a relationship.  It takes patience and perseverance to get through that awkward beginning stage of getting to know each other.

When my mom gave me my own machine three years ago, I went through the same awkward period - things would get tangled and jam, I would get frustrated. But instead of giving up, I gave him a name: Silas.  I talked to him when was loud and grumpy.  I thanked him when he did things really well.  It took me a while to learn about what he likes - how to thread him just right, how to load the bobbin so it points the way he needs it, with the extra thread hanging out just so...

Now I can do it without thinking - we are very in sync.  And I still talk to him all the time.

One tutorial at a time

One thing that kept me from learning to sew at a younger age (besides my mother’s grumpy machine!) was understanding patterns.  I am a visual learner and reading directions and trying to visualize what I was supposed to do was really confusing to me.  But learning to sew nowadays is so simple because of the plethora of online tutorials available in the blogosphere.  I think they are truly FABULOUS because there are usually photos to go with each and every step, so you can see exactly how things will come together.  My favorite source for finding tutorials is One Pretty Thing. When I first began, I would pick out fairly simple/straightforward projects, and bookmarked any tutorials that were more advanced than I was ready for. With practice and time, those advanced projects didn't seem so hard anymore.

Go for it

Making clothing was a particularly scary thing to me - I started by revamping some thrift store finds and things from my own closet, and eventually worked up to making some dresses from scratch. I challenged myself to give it a try by revamping/making a garment once a week for 10 weeks - and I followed through. I'm always up for a challenge!

If you want to make your own clothes, find some tutorials and go for it! Bookmark projects that you want to tackle, and start with the simple ones. Eventually, you'll feel up to the challenge of some more complicated garments. I found that Kathleen from Grosgrain is a particularly great resource!

To sum up, my advice on building sewing skills:

1. Build a relationship with your machine and persevere through that awkward period of getting to know each other’s quirks.

2.  Build your skills by tackling some online tutorials; bookmark any that seem more advanced, and come back to them later.

3. Go for it!  Don’t let fear hold you back – give yourself a challenge and see where it takes you!

Happy crafting, and good luck!

Carole Ann

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All images in this post are Copyright Carol Ann Penny - Image edits done by Claire Donovan for Heart Handmade UK