was about doing it over. If I didn’t do it right – if I didn’t topstitch perfectly or I didn’t edit a photo how I wanted – I ripped it out or I started over again. I wrote last week that I was frustrated at the pace and output of my current projects. Amy finished an entire sew-along and I’m still fine tuning patterns and construction. We all know who’s the tortoise and who’s the hare in that race! Ironically, and it’s funny how things pop into your life at just the right moment, I watched the movie Midnight in Paris (it’s cheesy but it’s Woody Allen). If you haven’t seen the movie, it’s about a screenwriter who on his trip to Paris with his fiance, mysteriously travels back to the 1920s every night at midnight. He meets Gertrude Stein, hangs with Dali and Hemingway, and almost has a fling with Adriana, Hemingway and Picasso’s love interests. The movie had me thinking about the artists of the time and their work. Do you know how many sketches Picasso drew before painting Les Demoiselles d’ Avignon? Hundreds! It wasn’t until he hashed out all the details that he started painting the final piece in the summer of 1907. Can you imagine a seamstress sewing a hundred muslins before sewing the final garment? That would be a huge no-no in today’s blogging world. But maybe that’s not a bad thing; maybe that’s something to look up to. I follow so many seamstresses who jump from making a top to a skirt, jacket, or undergarments. When they post a finished project and are unhappy with the results, they move onto another project. Why move on? Why not think of the project as a sketch, one of many preliminary sketch (not just one) that if corrected, will lead up to a masterpiece.
This had me thinking about how long it takes to get good at anything. Do you know I’ve been blogging for six years and for five of those years, I was bad… really bad. I was a cheesy fashion blogger who wrote about runway shows and it designer handbags. You can barf now. Also, you may or may not think that I am high and mighty for working in technical design but did you know that for the first year, I was awful and got yelled at? A lot too. There were so many incorrect tech packs that I sent out and looking back at some of my old work (I have it save on my computer), I think “what the hell was I thinking?” But everyone has to be bad before getting good. Even experts started off as bad. What differentiates novices from experts is that experts kept taking what they messed up on and fixed it.
So, I’m still in the sketching phase but I finally feel like my mistakes – my doing-it-over-again - and my efforts to fix them are inching me closer to something good. It doesn’t matter if it takes me five or fifteen bras before I become “skilled” because with each bra, my construction gets cleaner and I tighten up the fit and that’s all that matters to me. Just look at the makings of my current bra below (it’s not finished). Not too bad, right? Would I make you even more excited if I told you it is lined with something polka dots!