It's good to be humbled. Isn't it?

I am trying to put my best foot forward here, to make a good first impression and all that. But it's good for me to eat a piece of humble pie, once in a while, and last weekend I got two pieces served up hot. On Saturday I did a load of wash as usual, including a new t-shirt I'd finished days before. When it came out of the dryer, the shirt, which I might add was in my favorite, hard-to-find dark teal blue color cotton interlock, had some kind of crud dried on the front. I have NO idea what it was, but it was kind of like baked on styrofoam or something. I frantically tried to pick it off and all that happened is that it tore an L-shaped hole right where you really can't hide a patch on a new shirt. So I took it with me to a meeting and showed some friends. No one there could identify it either. Later at home I thought maybe it was the spray stain-remover I'd used; could it have been a defective bottle? So I sprayed the back of the shirt, washed and dried it, and lo and behold! When it came out of the dryer it was perfectly clean back AND front! Well the tear was still there of course. Very annoying!!

Then I went on to work on a blouse I'd started. This one was a small floral print rayon challis that I've had in my stash forever and which had been free to start with. I'm sailing away on my neckline facing; had finished sewing and trimming the seam, pressed it , pinned it and started doing the top-stitching when...this is so embarrassing to admit...I discovered I'd sewn it to the wrong side of the fabric! My excuse was it was difficult to tell the right side from the wrong side of this print. But the seam allowances were in the wrong place. That should have been a clue. I had to laugh. I figured it was time to get out of the sewing room and do some knitting.

A quick intro

One of the great things about having been a weaver for 30+ years is that I have a closet full of beautiful fabrics that are just ripe for cutting up and sewing. A lot of weavers have a fear of doing that and that's why so many handwoven garments are rectangles: scarves, shawls, ruanas. I have spent some time in the last few years working on improving my sewing skills so that I have actually cut curved necklines in my ruanas and have started applying some couturier techniques such as lining to handwoven textiles. But I have a long way to go!

I've been enjoying the sewing blogs so much and have been amazed how much I'm learning! Here I'll probably be posting a lot of questions and hope that some of you will have some answers for me.