Kind of Really Impressed with Myself

July 24th, 2008 is a day that will live on in infamy. Probably. If my first attempts at sewing with my Confidence are any indication of the leaps and bounds in progress I will be making over the years in this particular craft.

The first night I had her, I wasn't able to do anything much aside from take her out of the box and gaze lovingly at her. I paged through the instruction manual and quickly realized from this experience that I had NO idea how to sew. This thing comes with 5 different presser feet (!) and does so many stitches and so on . . . I don't know. I'll tell you what, it's no Stylist. So I was quite intimidated by it but very excited to dive in. Then my in-laws arrived at our house with ice cream and toppings.

The ice cream won.

Then on Friday, I decided after the fam went to bed that it was time to try 'er out. So I threaded her up and threw some fabric in and off she went. At the end of that evening, I had this:
I recovered the throw pillow that resides on the guest bed (which is also in the Little Miss' room). I had leftover material from her headboard project and the remaining two panels fit perfectly on the pillow. So there you have it. This morning she saw it for the first time and got so excited about the caterpillar that she aimed and landed on his face for a big kiss. Did I mention we are big Eric Carle fans at our house?

I should interject here that I have PLENTY of projects that have been put on the backburner since right before the move. This was the first sewing I had done since then (3 1/2 months ago!) so I wanted to do something I could accomplish *quick* and *super easy* to boost my confidence in my ability to tackle my other projects.

The caterpillar pillow did the trick nicely.

As is always a fantastic move, tackling something you have never remotely attempted the night after your *quick* and *super easy* project, I decided to dive right into my first legit paying commissioned sewing job. Boo-la (Abuela aka my mother-in-law) decided a few months ago that she wanted to have her couch recovered. For those of you who have not seen her house, let me explain that she grew up in Mexico and raised her kids in the Dominican Republic. Her house is quite reflective of the Latin flair . . . she LOVES bright colors! So after we had searched around everywhere for some bright, upholstery grade fabric that she could purchase to do the job, I started ripping her couch cushions apart to try to figure out how one would go about making them. I have to admit, tearing the stitches out of her cushion covers made me very nervous as I have no experience with anything like this and had some doubts about how my version of the couch covers would turn out. Boo-la is a pretty laid back person, and she assured me over and over again that they didn't need to be perfect or have zippers or whatever, but I surely didn't want to give her *crap* so I was setting the bar high for myself. I mean, if she is going to insist on paying me, then I better make something worth being compensated for, right?
Well . . . tonight was the night. Here's how it went down:

I ripped the seams apart on the old cushion cover, salvaged the zipper, and used the pieces as a pattern for cutting out my new fabric (which incidentally is not *the* fabric for the final project, but the same type of fabric in a color that she decided was way too light once she got it):

Pinned and puzzled and sewed and sewed until I came up with this:

Yeah . . . I even figured out how to put in the zipper (I had never done that before!):

I guess this the machine is giving me some kind of *quantum confidence* that enables me to complete tricky never-before-sewn (by me) projects.

I'm just as surprised by this as you are. I mean really, who knew?