S is for Slipcovers

A not-so-secret secret about me: 

       I loathe sewing.

This pretty much makes me a genetic aberration, because all the other women in my family loved it. My grandma was renowned for the quality of her hand-smocking; my mom had a bureau full of fabric for projects she hadn’t even planned yet; one of the most common lullabies of my childhood was the whirring of a sewing machine…

But me?

       Hate it.

However…

While I can cheerfully bypass the trusty Singer for things like clothes and curtains, all of which can be found at a store for reasonable prices, I simply cannot bring myself to pay for slipcovers. The affordable ones are cheesy and awful, the nice ones cost more than that new washing machine I need. 

So…, I will sew slipcovers. 

However, I do not do so either often or well…

That corollary to the law of inertia which declares that the more you dislike an action, the harder it will be to begin comes into particularly strong play around any sewing project. I will stall and stall and stall before finally digging in. In fact, I’ve been doing the Dance of Avoidance around my latest project for about 3 years now. 

       -First I had to measure all the cushions. (Figure 6-8 weeks.)

       -Then I have to figure out the “pattern”… how to best arrange the pieces in order to maximize cloth usage. I do not have either the discernment or the patience to only cut on the straight grain. I avoid the bias, but a mix of cross and straight grains are just fine by me. So, I can cram the pieces together and save a few yards of fabric. This part isn’t quite as slow, because it’s kind of a logic problem, it's actually fairly fun. (Say 3 weeks.)

       -Then I had to find the fabric. (That took a good five months.)

       -Find matching thread and wind the bobbins - (A remarkable one week.) 

(Which is much better than last time I made slipcovers, when my bobbin winder was broken and I had to do them all by hand. [!!!] I’m using the fact that I was in my twenties at the time as my excuse for that particular piece of idiocy…)

After having stretched all that out over such a long period of time, I am now completely fed up with this project that I really haven’t actually started on yet and I deliberately turn my back to it.

No, I really don’t do this often.

As to the doing well… well…

Let’s talk about that last slipcover project.

My seams were certainly sturdy, I hold my head up there. But the tension (or lack thereof) in those hand-wound bobbins frequently resulted in some extremely snarled and messy lines of stitching. Granted, those were all on the inside and not visible… but the likelihood of sloppy tangles certainly put paid to any thoughts of decorative top-stitching, I can tell you.

There also wasn’t enough of the extremely lovely fabric I had chosen to actually cover the couch. I pretty much knew this ahead of time but I was so smitten by the beauty of that single, lone (and sparse) remnant that I was determined to stretch its inadequate dimensions to fit.

       Much creative piecing ensued…

I did manage it - and the sofa looked terrific… 

… …

       … … 

              …  … as long as you didn’t lift the cushions.

(Let’s just say that the pieces I patchworked in beneath there weren’t actually all that close in design or color to the lovely remnant… and draw the curtain quietly on the subject - before the words, “painful eyesore” can be uttered…)

My mama would have swatted me.

She would also have laughed her head off and told me she was proud of me for sewing at all.

(And then swatted me again for the bobbin-winding.)

Maybe this time around, I can make her (spirit) genuinely proud.

You know… when I eventually sew my Slipcovers.