Just when you think you have things figured out… it turns out you don’t. Now I’ll admit that I never assumed that running an Etsy shop would be easy or even that I remotely know what I’m doing when it comes to running my own business. But, I thought, I do know how to sew and that’s a good start. It turns out that finding the time to accomplish your goals is difficult when you have a million things going on. And, as is typically the case, when I’m at my most confident in terms of sewing, the sewing gods remind me that I’m only human.
Several months ago I posted this picture to my social media accounts:
I arrogantly declared that today this bag was a hot mess but by tomorrow it would be something beautiful. Tomorrow took about a month and a half to show up due to work conflicts, kid conflicts, and, well, sewing problems. Everything that could possibly go wrong with this bag did. This is not my first rodeo with this pattern — in fact this is one of my favorite bags to make, and I’ve made about five of them. In fact, I adapted the initial pattern to make it better and am really proud of the changes I made. This bag, though, this gorgeous gold canvas bag, gave me FITS. I think I ripped out more seams than I sewed. I forgot to leave holes for turning and had to go back to redo my work. My sewing machine decided to wage war on me and caused numerous problems (it’s never OPERATOR error. Nope.). But finally, finally I finished the bag. You can see the final product listing here.
Lesson: never brag about what you’re going to do until you’re done doing it! The sewing gods were definitely laughing at my over-confidence and decided to remind me that the art of sewing is one that takes patience, a lot of careful work, and the ability to admit mistakes and then to fix them. And a lot of ironing. Sewing is actually a lot of ironing. In fact, sewing involves less sewing than you would think: it’s about 30% tracing and cutting, 10% pinning, 30% ironing, 10% ripping out seams, and 20% at the actual sewing machine. But I love it and look at this gorgeous bag!
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