A Stitch in Time Saves Eight

Today, I'm wearing my $12 GAP skirt. It's a sweet navy blue wrap-a-round number with pleats that also happens to be machine washable. GAP, I love you. Of course, its manufactured as cheap as all hell, so it was never really worth the $30+ dollars they gypped a good number of hardworking females out of, but that's why most of us wait for the sale with the hopes that the size XX will still be available when it gets to wholesale price. I wore this skirt with little incident the first couple of times, but after a few washings I noticed that the hem was coming down. Amend: the starch that was originally put into the fold that was supposed to be a hem to get around actually manufacturing a better constructed piece of clothing and thereby saving the GAP the $0.25 in thread and Chinese manpower must have washed out and my faux-hem was succumbing to gravity. And no amount of ironing -- cuz, yes, I'm the last of the ironing women in the world -- was able to trick the faux-hem back in. See? $12 was just about right, wasn't it? I had two choices at this point, I could (A) pay the nice Korean woman at Jack's Dry Cleaners $8 to run it through her machine. Or I could (B) hand-stitch it myself. Since I'm blogging about it, you can safely assume that I chose B.

Around the age of nine, my mother sat me down to learn how to mend and hem clothes. I thought this was unnecessary as I fully expected to be rich when I grew up and therefore would just pay someone to do unpleasant tasks for me...like hemming skirts and cooking nutritious meals. But since I wanted to learn how to sew a sock doll, I acquiesced to my mother's domestic tutelage. I was Machiavellian even then. What was most pressing at the time was the easy whip stitch. My mother, however, knowing that she had a child who intuitively knew Princely machinations the way Jesus knew Talmudic studies, coerced me into believing that I needed to know the back stitch too in order to create clothing for said sock doll. (My mother was slick one.) I suffered through the instruction and after the doll was done -- not coming out nearly as perfect as she looked in my mind -- I abandoned all my knowledge and went back to believing that I would have no need of the information again. Oh, the arrogance of youth!

Flash forward to quite a few years later a Los Angeles studio apartment where I spent evenings whip stitching threadbare jeans and $10 Old Navy yoga pants that will ultimately be stolen from a dryer. But I hadn't hemmed since that sock doll mostly because if the item of clothing didn't fit, I didn't buy it, and the hem-worthy items I did purchase were usually pants and I just panicked at the idea of sewing one leg shorter than the other. Peace of mind comes cheap at the going price of $8 and a machine-sewn pant leg pegged by a Korean seamstress. However, here I was with a simply constructed skirt that really just needed a quick back stitch. I mean, com'on!, even I can hem a skirt. So, one evening, I decided to put in a movie and get out my needle and thread. I figured, by the time the movie was over, so would my simple task. Man, I suck at time management. By the time the movie finished, I was possibly 1/3 of the way through the hem which just proved to me once again that I need to lose weight because if I was a size 6 there would have been less fabric to stitch. It took two more of these movie/hemming episodes for me to finish the skirt. But after all was watched and done, there was a sense of accomplishment in the act of this "womanly art."

It is now lunch time and for the first time since I finished the hemming process I took a close look at my handiwork. I can tell where I stopped and where I started as the first few stitches -- maybe an inch worth each time -- are sloppy and a little all over the place, but then I see where I evened out and got into a flow. Here, the stitches are small and pretty much in a straight line. I'll never be mistaken for a Thai child leg-shackled in a sweat factory, but overall, I'm happy with the result. Thanks, Mom, for under-estimating my earning potential! I could have never done it without you.