SEW THERE!

I decided late last year that:

2015 is the Year That I Get Crafty.

I've long been interested in sewing but learning how has never seemed like something that I could actually do. I'm not particularly good with my hands. I don't have an eye for fashion. I'm not even that good at following directions.

All of those skills are prerequisites for learning to sew, or at least they should be.

So what the hell am I doing? Hopefully proving everybody wrong. Hopefully learning a thing or two about stitching. And hopefully learning a thing or two about myself.

Because this whole project isn't only about learning to sew. It's also very much about stitching the torn fabric of my soul back together. 

I'm a huge fan of the Broadway musical Rent. I've watched the live performance twice and I own the DVD and soundtrack. I have most of the songs memorized. In the liner notes, the play's title was explained. The word Rent has two meanings. First, it refers to the money that the characters can't come up with to pay for their apartment, highlighting the poverty and struggle they live in. And it also refers to being torn apart, the act of ripping the fabric of our lives into pieces. Ideas of alienation, regret, and loneliness appear again and again in the musical.

I read that many years ago, and I haven't been able to get it out of my head since. For me, fabric is more than pretty material that is fun to touch. It's us, it's humanity. It's our lives and our families and our hopes and our adventures and our disappointments. It's our shared history. And learning to sew is about more than learning to stitch pieces of fabric together in an attractive way. At the risk of sounding like a cotton commercial, t's about repairing the torn fabric of our lives.

SEW THERE! Is a year-long adventure with craftiness, sewing lessons, yards and yards and yards of pretty fabrics, multiple dozens of spools of threads, my gorgeous Singer One sewing machine I've named Dolores, and crazy me! There will be pictures, videos, tears, probably blood, and hopefully more than a few success stories. Follow along! We'll have fun.