Last weekend I went drank from the firehose, renewed some friendships, and took a hit to my ego. First the good stuff:
The costume conference was my first costuming event in six years and one I desperately needed. Due to both The Book* and covid I’ve not made anything in an age and needed this spark to make me want to make things again.
Being around other people as interested and excited as I am about the subject matter helped too. I lurve me a good online conference, but there’s something about sharing interests and projects face to face that gets lost on Zoom. I renewed friendships and made new ones with a variety of intelligent, creative, and inspired people who get why the correct sort of thread and the right tools for the job matter.
There’s also something about the tactile aspect. To my pleased surprise, most of the conference was hands-on creation, which is great because I learn best by doing. Also, not to malign writing, but between it and my day job I spend a lot of time pushing pixels around. It’s nice to get the physical feedback and a material object I can refer to and use.
Speaking of which…
This was a historic costuming conference so most of the sewing was by hand, and the classes included a variety of small or otherwise hard-to-see things: sewing dark on dark, a needle lace sampler a couple of inches wide, embellishing round button blanks smaller than the end of my thumb, and gold thread so delicate I was afraid of breaking it.
Between lack of practice and declining eyesight, these projects were as frustrating as they were interesting. I kept losing my grip on pins and needles and spent half of these sessions with my glasses off just to see what I was doing.
I’ve hand sewn since I was a teenager. I assumed I was good at it and always would be. Turns out my skill is not as permanent as I thought it was.
I can re-learn hand sewing – bright light, magnification, and practice, practice practice! Still, discovering I’m not as good as I thought was a bit of a slap to the face.
On another upside though, I finally figured out what to do with my author’s Instagram! I don’t have any research trips coming up but I do have some sewing projects planned so I’ll be updating that more often.
*Re: The Book: I’ve devoted most of my writing time to book reviews and short stories over the past few months, but I’m getting back on the Fool’s Gold wagon. For the first time since winter I can stand to look at it and make the continuity tweaks I’ve been avoiding. More news forthcoming.
I’ll agree that dark brown would have been eye-kinder than black for your hat. That said, I’m looking very forward to seeing the finished headgear.