gotta do sleeves

 In an earlier post, I made reference to my poor fabric-cutting ability. I'm still not great with scissors, but it turns out there's this rotary-cutter thing:

You use it with a special mat, and you can just draw the outline and cut with it (and that exposed roller is sharp enough that you can end up with blood on the walls if you're not careful; I popped for the slightly-more-expensive one with the self-retracting feature, but changing blades will take some grace). There's a certain amount of disdain for them in the sewist community*, and I'd be among the disdainful if I had better scissor skills, but I don't. And this thing makes for easy, accurate work of cutting patterns.

(*Yes, there's a sewist community, complete with snobbery and hierarchy. There is ALWAYS another rabbit hole...)

So I cut out a t-shirt pattern, and started sewing it up, and discovered:

• Slippery knit fabrics really are as difficult as reputed, and 
• I suck with sleeves.

 The next thing, to do, of course, is cut out a bajillion sleeves (even with this rotary cutter, there are enhancements to my technique I'd like to introduce) and do the steps involved: easing, gathering, fitting, and all that jazz. Like this video. And this one.

I've got yards of junk fabric and no plans to ride this weekend (too cold). I won't be a master, but I hope to be better at this by Monday. I figure it's the seamster* equivalent of "wax on, wax off".

(*Because of rampant sexism, "seamstress" is a word in disrepute, as "actress". I mourn the loss of them. But no such association is attached to "seamster"; indeed, I wasn't even sure the word existed, although dictionary searches indicate it does. It's archaic and obscure enough to be appealing to me. "Plain Jim, Seamster". I oughta have labels made.)

In other news; I've altered a few of my button-down shirts (after doing about a dozen polos and another dozen turtlenecks) and have a tentative plan to do some for someone else.