Try again

Pretty well right after I posted about sewing up seams on Tuesday, I hauled off and finished the last side seam in a pretty craptacular fashion. I know I've posted before about the strategy of pinning sweater pieces together using locking stitch markers, with the idea being that you can check out how well the pieces match up with each other, and any corrections that are needed to adjust for imperfections can be spread out along the length of the seam, which effectively hides them, instead of winding up with a whack of extra fabric on one piece at the end. I've used this strategy every time I've needed to sew a seam ever since I learned of it, and it works really well.

Until it doesn't.



Well would you look at that. I sewed the seam, looked at that wonky mismatched bottom edge, wondered briefly if I could live with it, and wove in the ends. I don't really know why I wove in the ends, because there's no way I could live with a sweater hem that looked like that when I could fix it, but it was the last seam I needed to do - I'm guessing some sort of fatigue or ennui was guiding my hands. About 45 minutes later I came to my senses, picked out the end, undid the seam about a third of the way back, and then re-did it, making a few adjustments as I went. The initial pinning had suggested that I wouldn't need to do that, but something was lying to me, clearly.



Much better.

Once I'd decided that I needed to correct that seam, my initial impulse was to just do it. Fix it, and it will look good, and no one will be any the wiser. But there have been a number of discussions in various places about the negative consequences of what we share, particularly in this age of social media. There's a clear universal desire to only present your best self in public, and of course there are reasons for that - we don't want to be judged poorly, and perfect-looking images are of course more pleasing to look at. The problem is that humans are inherently imperfect, and if a person only shares the perfect-looking glimpses of life, this can lead others to the conclusion that this individual actually is perfect - when they're not - and the observers coming to that conclusion end up focusing on their own imperfections, getting the impression that they are somehow deficient, since they aren't able to rid themselves of imperfections the way the apparently-perfect-person did.

So I snapped a quick shot of my goofy seam, and then later, a shot of it once it had been fixed. Now there's a record - I employed a strategy that should have let me avoid a bad result, I got a bad result anyway, but I was able to go back and correct it to get something I was happy with. No perfection just magically happening here.

Since then, I've added the pseudo-buttonbands to the fronts, so now all it needs is the neckband and all the ends dealt with and trimmed, and then I'll have a new sweater! I'll likely send it for one last block, for the sake of the ribbing. But then it'll be ready for wear - just in time for the warmer months.

This means it should start getting really hot soon, right?

In other news, I did manage to get a dress yesterday, but only one, because the only dresses I was able to find for the amount of money I initially thought to spend were absolutely not the sort I could wear to a wedding. So the one I got cost more than twice what I thought I was going to be spending. I like it quite a lot, though, and I may be able to wear it to the Christmas party this year, and there may be another wedding for us to attend next summer, and there may be occasions to wear it more this summer too. That helps take the sting out of the price tag.

Comments