My First Stitch in 19 Years

Since I decided to get back into sewing I've been itching to get going. I follow quite a few sewing blogs, but one in particular has my completely hooked and that is Tilly's blog Tilly and the Buttons. Tilly only started sewing a couple years ago and she's already making patterns. I gotta say I love this girl. You may have seen here on The Great British Sewing Bee.

I wanted to start getting familiar with my sewing machine again as well as reading and using patterns. After all, it's been 19 years; it's just like starting from square one and I forgot EVERYTHING!

The first thing I did was grab a piece of fabric, turn on my sewing machine, and just started stitching. Every motion felt like a baby's first step, not to mention, I completely forget how to thread my darn machine. Thank goodness I still had my handy dandy sewing machine manual.

Here's my first set of stitches.

I hit a few snags in the beginning; my thread got jammed up a few times and I didn't have my machine threaded properly, so I had to rethread it. But, all-in-all, I felt pretty comfortable and it felt so good to sew again. I figured it was better for me to start practicing on a scrap of fabric instead of trying to actually construct a garment right out the gate. 

I've been trying to figure out what garment I want to construct first; a skirt, a dress, a shirt, etc. I bought a few patterns a couple of weekends ago and I had every intention on making this one particular dress. I even bought fabric for it (stay tuned for that blog post), but then I visited Tilly's blog and fell in love with her Mathilde blouse. It is such a beautiful garment and I could picture myself wearing it A LOT, so yesterday I went ahead and purchased and downloaded it.

Sidenote: When I was sewing back in the day, of course digital PDF patterns didn't exist, so this is super new to me, but I kinda love it! It's so amazing to be able to download and print out a pattern. Not to mention, it's much more sturdy than your typical pattern.

I downloaded the Mathilde pattern and instructions and I immediately got super giddy. So, I'm reading the instructions and it mentions tucks, which the blouse has 6 of. Well, I didn't know what the hell a tuck was. I read her instructions, but just couldn't figure out how to make it. Caveat: This Mathilde blouse pattern may not be a beginners pattern, but hell, I'm up for the challenge and it's so pretty I'm determined to make it.

Since I couldn't figure out how to make a tuck, I did what any other self-respecting tech saavy sewist would do--I Googled "how to sew a tuck".  Low and behold, another sewer I just started following last week came up in the search, Raechel Myers who runs a really terrific blog and has some great tutorials on there. Raechel's "Sewing 101" tutorial has an entire lesson on how to sew tucks full on with step-by-step video instructions. 

I printed out Raechel's blind tuck marking guide and followed the videos to begin the lesson.

The marking guide and step-by-step videos helped me tremendously and the end result was a pretty good looking tuck; especially considering it was my first one.

Check out my tucks!

Now I know how to sew tucks for the Mathilde blouse pattern.

Thanks to Raechel Myers for the superb "Sewing 101" tutorials and to Tilly for crafting such a beautiful blouse pattern. I can't wait to submit my photo of my finished garment to go in the Mathilde photo gallery.

Check out Tilly on The Great British Sewing Bee. By the way, this show totally sucked me in. I am dying to see episode 4.