Sewing is Coping

I have a friend, Amanda, who can do just about anything she puts her mind to. She's smart, funny, generous with her time as well as her money, and all around a good friend. She proposed using my sewing machine one afternoon to make a drape she'd bought from Pier 1 into a valance. I pulled out my Bernina Pearl that I'd received from my mother-in-law, used in one and a half sewing classes (I couldn't stick out the second one!) and had since been delegated to the front bedroom closet I mentioned in my first post, a fellow castaway among items I wasn't sure just how they would fit into my life. Say hi, Amanda!


So I set the machine up for Amanda and watch while she sews her valance, and I remembered a towel that I'd been meaning to reseam for months. I went and grabbed it while she made her final adjustments. Within minutes I'd sewn the bottom seam and the towel looked like new. That moment changed my life (yes, perhaps I am being a bit dramatic, but perhaps I'm not). From that moment on, I felt like a new person. A person who could set her mind to something, and make it happen. The power of creation from my own hands was empowering in a way I hadn't felt since I'd painted canvases during Artbreak. I felt alive! I will come back to sewing in a future post, but for not I am going to follow, chronologically, the projects we pursued that helped me morph into someone who outsourced into someone who saw something and knew she could do it.

From that point, I told Amanda I thought we both needed headboards for our beds, which were currently on a box frame, unadorned. I'd researched it a hundred times online, but never tried it on my own. Amanda was game and so we set our sights on our next craft project.