The first thing we were instructed to do was to wash our fabric. I have never done this. It always seemed like too long to wait. Here I was ready to attack the fabric with scissors and you wanted me to wash it. It was not happening. So in my previous sewing life, I happily pinned on the pattern pieces and away I went.
Now, I'm trying not to cut the corners. It will make a better product in the end, I tell myself. The first time, I got up the nerve to throw my three lengths in the washing machine, they were all busy. As I looked incredulously at the machines, I exclaimed, "Who, I mean really, who does their laundry at ten o'clock on a week-night?"
The next night, I went down and there were free machines. I threw the fabric in and after some time, pulled it back out. I brought it back upstairs and started on the painful and long process of ironing it. We will gloss over the fact that I was ironing lengths of cloth past ten o'clock at night and that I finished the job off this morning before 7 this morning. I'm working on a tight schedule.
I am happy to report that I did not burn myself with steam, although the iron was doing it's best. I found out that the best part about ironing the fabric was that you got to know it a lot better. I found a nub on one length that I now know to avoid. I discovered that they all iron relatively easily. And then I discovered that one length would wrinkle if you looked at. One second it was perfect and then you picked it up with kid gloves and it would turn into a nervous wreck and bang, wrinkle city. The thought of handling it to make a shirt fills me with fear.
However, the biggest problem I discovered was when I tried to deal with one of my shirts that I had washed with all the lengths of fabric. Fine enough but do you think I could iron it properly? It's "ironed" but it's not crisp. I have discovered that I am about to embark on a shirt making class and I can't iron the finished product. This is a problem.
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