My Dear Hard Drive

In our version of junior high I swore I would never ever do anything related to sewing or anything else girly. I would become a rock star, and if not a rock star then maybe a carpenter, but definitely not a seamstress of any kind. I didn’t even take classes in sewing, but took classes in wood and metal work. (Yes sir, I know how to weld and bend iron.)

When I finished the upper secondary school with a lot of rebelling against the whole system (I still hate the very idea of that school) I decided to learn how to sew. Just for my own amusement, I decided, because I couldn’t find anything interesting in the cloth shops. I had to learn how to make my own, starting from the patterns as the ready made ones are shall we all agree… Uh… A tad stay at home mother style most of the time, and certainly not the groovy party 3-4 times a week type of clothing I wanted. Anyway, I ended up at a dress makers school.

This school was the only school I ever woke up for looking forward to it. Even if I had been out and got home at 4 or 5 in the morning, I was at the school by 9 am. Sure I skipped a day or two of textile education, but when ever there was fashion design or practical sewing, I was there unless I was seriously ill. (I mean like bad flu or a stomach thing, I never drank and got hung over.)

I never intended to get a profession out of it though. I hated filling orders and sewing for customers (because they always asked for something completely different to what I would have put on them) so I had to go against my nature a lot. I still have a bag of fabric I got from my auntie to make her two skirts, I finished the other one, and thought that has to be good enough. :p

For the last few weeks I have been preparing myself to get back into it. Designing wedding dresses and of course, sewing them up. It has been quite interesting, as I have started to remember things I thought I had already forgotten. Like why didn’t my own wedding dress sit as well as the other dresses I made? I wondered that for 3 days when finally last night I remembered making an adjustment to the pattern that actually should have left unmade. I can tick that one off the list of things to learn. Techniques have started returning back into my mind when I have been wondering how will I do this or make that into reality, and bit by bit my confidence has returned. I can do this, still.

I got my degree in 1998, and after that I have gradually stopped sewing altogether, apart from an odd wedding dress every now and then. So there are a lot of things to remember, now that I want to challenge myself again, to go crazy with the designs and create things that I can be proud of. Not like the horrid polyester wedding dress I was forced to make last year… *shudders* So unlike the most dressmakers I decided that I won’t take orders. I will design and make them and then hope someone of the right size will like them. Keep an eye on the development here: www.sebastyne.com

Well, that’s it, I have to go now to work on the basic pattern that will help me create designs that will be wearable by various size of women. That’ll be a task and a half.