COVID brought me back

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It was the momentous day that I am sure we will all remember years from now. Where were you when the Government ordered the entire populace into shutdown? I remember watching the evening news and learning that it was forbidden for anyone to leave their house without a mask and only for the sole purpose of gathering food or seeking essential services. The next horrified thought was “we have been living in denial and don’t have masks”. Furthermore, there was little to no food in the house. I mean what a poor job of planning for the end of the world we had done.

With that, I dug (and dug) into the attack to retrieve my sewing machines. How they got there and why, I will cover in another post as that tale truly deserves its own space. With machines set up and the sacrificial offering of a bed sheet, we soon had face coverings. I won’t really call them masks as there was nothing elegant about them. Crisis averted!

Now, with a bit of breathing room (pun intended), I set forth on the mission to find the perfect pattern and fit. I spent hours, since the world was in lockdown I had the time, pouring over the Internet and YouTube. Finally, I landed on a video by “The Fabric Patch” see below. Freshly armed with a pattern that fit like a glove, I started to ponder cogitate, consider, contemplate, debate, deliberate, entertain alternatives, kick around, meditate on, mull over, and just flat out think about how I could continue to flex the sewing muscles and do some good while filling the idle hours of quarantine. That is when the embroidery hoop hit me. I had owned the machine, Janome Memory Craft 10001, for close to a decade but had never tried out the machine embroidery function. I quickly realized the canned embroidery files which came with the machine were not going to allow me to express myself in the way I desired. Learning the art of machine embroidery will be a good place to start the next post.

To bring this home, it only took a worldwide pandemic of COVID and the mandatory lockdown of society to motivate me to get behind the sewing machine again. Once there, I have remembered the joy it brings me and the gratification that comes with watching something unique and beautiful come together. Now at more than a year later, I have dedicated a room to my craft and have dusted off many skills. It is amazing to me how far the tools for home-sewers have come. It has become a happy coupling of my technology/engineering side with the artistic side.

So long for now, happy sewing!