Facing my fears

I can't remember when my mom first started to teach me to sew, it must have been when I was a little kid. when my brothers and I were young she used to make a lot of our clothes (she even made her own wedding dress- yeah, she has skilz!). As I got older, my mom's sewing became more important to me as we designed all of my figure skating dresses (and she'd then make our drawings reality- and hand beaded all the sequins on the darn things! Thanks Mom!).

As the only daughter I guess it was normal for me to follow in my Mom's footprints- and it's come in handy for me too- my friend Brea still talks about how I saved her butt in 8th grade Home Economics (in my high school everyone had to take Home Ec., which was a course divided into 5 sections: sewing, cooking, drafting, woodwork, and metal work). But hey it wasn't always smooth sailing! I remember that in that course one of the things we had to make were sweat pants, and because the legs of my size were too short I just went up pattern sizes until I had long enough legs (it didn't occur to me to add inches just to the legs... I was following a pattern!) So, I made an XXL sweat pant and just cinched in the waist with elastic-- I ended up looking like MC Hammer!

Anways -- there is a point to this post I promise! . Currently H and I are still work with separate bank accounts and we have a joint one for rent and household stuff. As the one who carries the purse (literally), I typically end up paying for stuff, and with Europe a bit behind in terms of paying with plastic, I usually carry some joint account cash with me. However, I was always getting my money and joint account money confused in my wallet. So with my new zipper foot and some cute fabrics I decided to make a little zippered pouch.

But... one of the things I've always been afraid of/hated/was too lazy to do properly, was zippers. I could never get them to work properly. Recently I had a flash of understanding as to why my previous zipper attempts were pretty crap, when I found out that my sewing machine has a zipper foot (amazing what you learn when you read your manual!), so tonightwith manual at hane, I set about to conquer my fears...

I don't really know why, but I decided to go all McFancy by making it lined, adding a layer of fabric stiffener so it was not too floppy, and double hemming the zipper. After about 5 attempts at the mother f****ing zipper, I finally got it. It's not perfect, but it's a hell of a lot better than some of the shoddy efforts in the past. Oh yeah, and my money even fits in it!!