I Hate To Sew

I was reminded of this fact today while suffering through my latest knitting project:


A mohair bag

The bag is adorable, in my opinion. A cinch to knit. I was finished in two days. But because it had no lining -- in the strap or the bottom part -- my teacher from the evening “adult education” knitting course that I’m taking at the local high school suggested I put ribbon on the inside of the strap to keep it from stretching and sagging. (Hey – can I put some ribbon on me, too??)

Always the over achiever me, I decided to not just reinforce the strap – but to add some lining inside because, come on, how cute would that be?

Cute. But the process? Suck, suck, sucky.

I was born with the gene to hate sewing. It runs in my family. My mother hates to sew, too. When I was about 10 years old I joined the Brownies. That’s what little girls did in the 70s. We joined the Brownies, then graduated to a Girl Scout so we could sell boxes and boxes of cookies to make somebody else a bunch of money. Do Brownies even exist anymore? They weren't the ones selling the cookies so who knows.

All I know is that I got kicked out of the Brownies. Really. I did. And you know why? Because my uniform wasn’t hemmed by the deadline for hemming. It was stapled. You read that right: Stapled. There I was, standing in the gymnasium with all my other little Brownie friends, and it was time for “hem checking” for all new recruits. (Of which I was one.)

Dum duh dum dum. “What’s this?” one of those old bitty troop masters said when she got to me. “Come over here!” she bellowed to the other bitty troop master.

Bitty #1: “This uniform isn’t properly hemmed. It’s STAPLED!! Who did this??”

Me: “Um, my mother.”

Bitty #2: “Stapling is NOT in the official Brownie Guidebook.”

Bitty #1 “Sorry kid – but your days as a Brownie are over. Stapling your hem is NOT permitted. You’re out.”

And that was it. Bounced. From the Brownies. Because my mother stapled my hem instead of sewing.

My mother. The first recipient in the family of the “hate to sew” gene.

Which brings me back to my mohair bag. Sewing this lining is torture! Partially because I don’t know jack about sewing. And partially because I just HATE it. I hate it, I hate it, I hate it.

How can I spend 2 hours in the middle of a beautiful sunny day knitting on the couch and not mind a bit that I’m killing the day, but think that every minute spent with a sewing needle in my hand is nothing but a complete waste of my time??

It all goes back to something my grandmother said when I was little. She was teaching me how to sew (having long ago given up on my mother…clearly). I kept wanting to put the longest thread on the needle, so not to have to re-thread it mid-project. And she said to me:

Ma: “You know how you can tell a bad sewer?”

Me: “How?”

Ma: “They make their thread too long.”

Even back then my grandmother got it: Second recipient in the family of the “hate to sew” gene. Me.

Does anyone have a stapler I can borrow to finish this lining?