Tuesday, August 14, 2007

exercise 0, sewing 1, God 100

What a week! I didn't "exercise" once, but I was on my feet the whole week. I had a blast at Faith Formation week, sometimes lovingly called Catholic Boot Camp. It was worth all the work. I hope my students learned a lot, but in the end, if the only thing they learned was "I belong," I've done my job. I know God will do the rest. To belong to our motley crew of dedicated Christians is not a bad fate at all. With all that confidence in God on my side, I managed to teach them much more.

I manged to sew a little bit, but am I mad at myself. I told myself a million times, "When you get your 'Walk (T)His Way' t-shirt, take a picture of it before you alter it!" After I started hacking into it, I remembered! GRRRR. I was rushed.

I requested a 3X, because I wanted it loose around my hips. It was, but like any man's t-shirt, the arms hung off my shoulders and I hated it. I took off the sleeves and put little darts down the under arms, stopping at the top of my hips. The underarm hole was way too deep, so I took the extra shoulder fabric and put in an underarm patch. That raised up the underarm. Then I cut the new sleeve and reattached it. I love the underarm patches, but I hate how the t-shirt turned out. I cut too much shoulder width off and cut the sleeve too short. Half an inch on each would have made them hang nicer. Sigh. I was rushed since I got the shirt after Catholic Boot Camp started and needed it finished before Friday.

Next I unpicked the neck trim and lowered the front neckline, reattaching the neck trim just like in this earlier post. I hate how it turned out! I must learn to use a shorter piece of trim and stretch it out more. Sigh. I was rushed.
If I was really pregnant and didn't just look pregnant, I'd have loved it. But the long length made it look like such a cute maternity top that I needed to shorten it to look more like a traditional t-shirt length. New problem. I was having a terrible time with my top thread tension. After checking my instruction book and finding nothing, I remembered a long ago experience with the same thing, and that was a thread problem. I switched threads, and sure enough, no problem. That solved everything but my top stitching problems since I was using a thread that no longer matched. I had no time to go to the store. I was afraid to use a double needle with the bad matching thread, so I went ahead and used a single needle. The thread tension pulled through OK, but it looks so "home made," in a bad way. GRRRR. I was rushed.
So what did I learn this week? God is good and gives me all I need to flourish; the first thing to go when I get busy is exercise; I love to sew for fun, but never on things that have a dead line! Oh yea, I knew all that already.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

So how long does it take to alter a tshirt like this?

Anonymous said...

I think you should create some more detailed notes about how you do this.

Is it worth it to go through so much trouble to maintain the ribbed collar? Couldn't you just fold it under?
And how exactly do you decide how much to cut out of the neckline?
Are you ripping out all the shoulder neck seams or just the neck hole?

I would love to fix my tshirt neck holes but it seems terribly complicated.

Anonymous said...

that was me
VVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVV

Alana said...

Good questions! I'm planning to alter another t-shirt soon. This time, I will take pictures of the process and write a good post to explain it all. I'm getting better at it, so it would be fun to take pictures as I go along now.