Learning Sew Much!

Rob and I have found ourselves leaving Woodhaven at least once per week for various verging-on-essential reasons. We are taking all the precautions while gathering mail at the post office and procuring the greenest bananas possible.

The homemade face masks a friend generously gifted us were almost working. Sadly, the elastic was too long and the masks were too short to go under our chins. I guess Rob and I both have long faces?

I switched to sporting a bandana with rubber band ear handles. This resulted in me breathing in A LOT of fabric while also fogging up my glasses. As if shopping in Albertsons with one-way aisles isn’t challenging enough.

It was essential for us to get some salami to go with our
cheese and crackers.  Oh, and maybe some wine.

With weeks if not months of Face Mask Fashion still ahead, I conceded that Rob and I needed a better option.

I contemplated asking my mom – who has been sewing since she was in grade school – to make us masks. Then she shared that the masks she made for her and my dad took her all day and she had to rip them apart three times to finally get them right. She seemed sort of over the excitement of sewing face masks.

An accomplished quilter told me that she made herself a mask. “The next one I make will be easier.”

Two women with more than a century of combined sewing expertise hinted that sewing a face mask is not a simple as Cheryl on The Sewing Room YouTube Channel would have me think. I typically can read between the lines pretty well.

And yet.

It took 3 days, lots of online disappointment, a driving tour of craft store parking lots with hour-long socially-distant lines outside, a raiding of our linen closet, a package from my mom, and encouragement from the nice lady who owns a local sewing store to finally assemble all of my Let’s Make Face Masks! supplies.

After watching Cheryl on an endless loop for several hours (her hubby Manny is adorable and I am still hearing Cheryl's eyeblinkingly slow voice in my head), I determined that a sewing mat thing with one-inch squares and a built-in ruler was essential. My purple plastic Back to School ruler wasn’t quite precise enough, and the metal tape measure from the garage was too wiggly.

I feel so crafty now!

The mat I found bragged that it is “Self-Healing.” I assumed that meant it came with a nice bottle of Zinfandel. Instead it just meant I can poke pins in it and cut it and it magically and instantly smushes itself back together. Oh that my fingers could do the same.

Rob and I decided we each wanted two masks -- for variety, self-expression, and the need not to do laundry so dang often. Wisely, because I know me, I decided I needed a fifth fabric as my “practice mask” so I could make all my mistakes in one place before moving on to easy perfection. So smart. So optimistic. So clueless.

Cheryl promised me the mask would take 15 minutes. I’ve slogged through enough dinner recipes to know “Prep Times” are underestimated by at least 150%. By the time my 15 minutes were up, I had cut out two 9” square pieces of fabric and was trying to wrangle a piece of interfacing.

Finally, I was ready to baste. Unfortunately, I didn’t know what that was.

I know in the kitchen "basting" means I get to use that fun pipette thingy to suck up liquid and splash it all over meat I’m praying won’t burn. In The Sewing Room, I learned it meant I needed to use my machine to quickly sew my two pieces of fabric and interfacing together in a Fabric Sandwich.

I searched my "Brother Operation Manual" for instructions about basting. The machine has far too many knobs and dials and diagrams of straight and zig zag lines to easily answer an advanced question like that. Even in Spanish.

Deciding to be an over-achiever, I bailed on basting and instead sewed the pieces together using the setting my machine was on to hem Rob’s khakis last summer. Baste, hem, whatever.

Things then hummed along pretty well. I got the ties pinned into place, I remembered to back-stitch the corners, I flipped the sandwich inside out without ripping out any seams, I pinned the three pleats into place. I even created the little pocket for the pipe cleaner to mold the mask around a nose. I was ROCKING it!

About 3 hours later, I was done with my 15-minute Face Mask.

I modeled it for myself in the bathroom mirror. I hunted down my seam ripper.

Although quite pretty, my pleats were way too small. The mask gaped at the sides and it felt like I was wearing about 8 inches of fabric on my face. Because I was.

Bad pleats.

With more precise use of my fancy new sewing mat, I pinned the pleats more closely to Cheryl’s prescribed ¾”. MUCH better result. That Cheryl knows what she’s talking about.

Good pleats.

Concerned about whether the ties would fray, I tossed my practice mask into the washing machine and called it a night. I was pleased by how well things had gone considering I don't know how to sew and even threading the machine requires some self-healing.  I started envisioning making personalized, adorable masks for family and friends. Could sewing be a new hobby??

Ready to rock Day 2 and crank out four more masks and then have lunch, I retrieved my practice mask from the dryer. The ties were fine. YAY! However, I couldn’t find the pipe cleaner in the nose pocket. I checked my pocket seams. They were all intact. Hmmm.

Squishing the fabric between my fingers, I finally found the pipe cleaner. It was all bunched up like a fuzzy yellow potato bug in the corner of the pocket. It had not enjoyed the laundry experience at all and had tried to escape.

Cheryl hadn’t mentioned this part.

I spent the next several hours inventing new ways to place a pipe cleaner securely in a face mask. (Current front-runner for sentences I never thought I would type.)

I eventually landed on making an external pocket and sewing it to the inside of the nose part of the mask. I could then remember to take the pipe cleaner out of the pocket before tossing the mask in the laundry. (Let's assume this is foreshadowing; I haven’t washed the new masks yet).

As I attempted to sew small pipe cleaner pockets, I got an object lesson in a concept called “Seam Allowance.”

You see, when you cut fabric, you want to be sure to leave enough room for the thready sewing part. Because that thready sewing part takes up space and leaves you with less fabric to work with than what you start with.  Brilliantly obvious.  Now.

I spent at least 45 minutes turning my teensy practice pocket inside out because I didn’t leave enough room for the seams. If I had sewn the tiny pocket to my mask, I would have been lucky to shove an uncooked spaghetti noodle in there. Lesson learned.

I decided to caption my Lesson and keep this little
memento in my sewing basket.  Never forget.

Seam allowance understood, I then couldn’t figure out how to keep the end of the pocket from fraying. I think I’ve heard rumors of some sort of zig zaggy stitch option that encloses the fabric in a cozy cocoon of thread. I didn’t have the mental strength to weed through my bi-lingual, marginally helpful, poorly illustrated Manual de Instrucciones to find out if my fancy machine offers such a solution. So instead, I did this:

I decided to put clear fingernail polish on the ends of the
pockets.  Rob devised a way for me to do that without
getting the polish stuck to the pens.  Engineers are handy!

Overall I spent three days fighting my sewing machine. And becoming BFFs with my seam ripper. And wafting about Woodhaven with the intoxicating aroma of Icy Hot for my upper back. In the process of making 5 Toni-crafted face masks, I learned a few things.

• I learned about “Upper Thread Tension” when the thread on the underside of my fabric was all loopy. I also learned this tension can vary by fabric, even if the fabric seems eerily the same.

• I learned the importance of placing the bobbin in the holder correctly when I ended up with a Jacob’s Ladder of thread under my presser foot. I also learned that the other presser foot – the one on the floor – works better when pressed with a Croc instead of a sock.

• I learned that it’s important to keep your fabric moving against the road blocks of pleats because otherwise you end up with a bird’s nest of thread attached to your fabric.

• I learned what it sounds like (ker-THUNK) and smells like (hot metal, like when you accidentally leave a baking pan under the broiler) when you break a needle in apparently too much fabric.

I had to dig the smaller part out of a
pleat.  I later found a few more small
bits lurking about.  Go big or go home.

• I learned that bifocals are not useful when sewing.

• I learned that maybe a thimble might have been a good idea. In other news, I’m trusting the blood will wash out.

• I learned that I am really stubborn and don’t easily give up despite uttering some unholy words now and then. (OK, maybe that’s more of a yet-again confirmation and not so much a lesson.)

• I learned that pleats are stupid.

As I ripped out seam after seam after seam, I started to fear running out of black thread. This is no small concern as Michaels, Joann’s, Walmart…all of them…tout having all the supplies you need but in fact they do not (thanks for the info, Marjorie at Michael’s online chat. You were almost worth the 43 minute wait.).

I also got dangerously close to having to make a new bobbin…and more distressingly having to consult my "Preparing the Bobbin Thread Quick Start Guide" yet again. Two days later, I am still finding bits of black thread around the house. In the kitchen, on the couch, next to my toothbrush, on my pillow case.  Apparently we bonded, me and the thread. So much thread.

This is truly only a fraction of the thread I ripped out.
I think my seam ripper needs a name, since we spend so
much time together.  Henceforth, she shall be called Cheryl.

Now that I’m on the other side of this…and am no longer hunched over a sewing machine webbed in black thread nor sitting in pout-position on the floor ripping out yet another seam…I am pretty dang proud that I participated in this weird initiation rite of COVID-19.

There’s this odd feeling of being at war and that somehow sewing masks for my family (thank God there are only two of us) is somehow doing my part on the home front.

I am looking forward to pulling out our face masks someday, maybe a decade or two down the road, and reflecting on the weirdness and lessons of 2020. Including that pleats are indeed very stupid.

TAA DAA!!

The nice lady at the fabric store ran out of elastic so she
invented a way to use stretchy fabric for ties instead.
She called it "Designer Elastic."  Because we are that fancy.