Learning to sew

In 2011 my best friend and I spent a good part of the summer in Europe together. Needless to say we had a blast. While in Turkey, we spent some time shopping for carpets, but quickly realized that two young caucasian women trying to get a good deal on a Turkish carpet was not an easy task. We settled on fabric. She made some gorgeous pillows with hers, and my fabric is still properly folded on a shelf somewhere. To be honest, my idea was to use it for a tablecloth, and convince her to make it for me. I just never got around to asking her.

While knitting seemed like something I could potentially figure out in a few sessions, sewing terrified me. In high school we had to make boxers. All I remember is that I had picked out a horrible fabric with cows, and that my friend had sneaked in behind my desk and quickly pushed the fabric through for me. I just couldn't sew a straight line, no matter how hard I tried. For some reason, we also had to make frogs with the remainder of the fabric that we later filled with rice. And then there was rice everywhere in my room for months.

At some point in the past year, I decided that I wanted to learn to sew. I'm not entirely sure how that happened, to be perfectly honest. Machine sewing seemed a lot more efficient to me. Wary of my abilities, I asked my husband for a sewing machine for my birthday, but told him to wait until I could take a class before making the purchase. You know, just in case I couldn't actually sew. It seemed like a fair probability.

I signed up for a beginner sewing class at my local sewing store, and hoped for the best. At the beginning of the class, everyone introduced themselves, and talked about fond memories of sewing with their mother/grand-mother as a child. I hid in a corner, distracted people with my long French name and as they tried to make sense of all these syllables and sounds their brain wasn't used to processing, I quickly mumbled ''minimal experience''.

Luckily for me, it all went pretty well. We met twice for 2.5hrs and I made this shopping bag. I learned the basics (well some), and felt confident to start with projects on my own.