sewing.. or, how I learned to quit throwing a tantrum and try again

Last Christmas, my parents gave me a fabulous sewing machine. I used their sewing machine a teensy bit growing up and I had lofty goals of making my own curtains and pillows and quilts. 

I started shopping around a bit for fabric for curtains and realized that it would be much cheaper to just buy curtains instead of making them. I think if I couldn't find a fabric/pattern of pre-made curtains I liked, it would have been worth the additional cost, but I digress.

At the end of June, I blogged about how I had finally picked out fabric for accent pillows on our sofa. I had grand plans of making the pillows in July while hubby was at JRTC. Alas, the fabric was packed up and moved with us, completely untouched, in August. 

Last week, I finally loaded up my bobbins and threaded the sewing machine.

On Monday, I figured what better time to start a project than right before we have friends over for the Virginia Tech vs Boise State game? I dragged out my cutting board and rotary cutter and cut out two squares of fabric. Then I put it all away. Baby steps, people. 

Yesterday, after getting home from the gym, I decided enough was enough. Baby steps are for babies. My first task on the sewing machine was to sew a zipper onto the fabric [because in my mind, you don't want to sew the three sides of the pillow and then have to awkwardly work around the sewn up pillow cover to get the zipper on!]

Yeeah. That was interesting. First of all, the instructions said to use a zipper foot on the machine. I said, pssh. I'll use the regular foot. I did one side of the zipper and dragged the fabric through because for some reason the machine wasn't pushing the fabric through.

I looked up zippers in my manual and discovered the machine has a zipper foot -- I just had to attach it! I thought that would be the easy solution.

Ohhhh no.

It worked, but it still wasn't feeding the fabric through. Because I was pushing/pulling it, the bottom part of the seam was all crappy and ugly looking. Hubby came home and had one of those immediate I-regret-asking-you-how-it-is-going reactions. My response was throwing the pillow cover on the floor and stomping on it in a complete temper tantrum. 

I got over it and went and had a delish yogurt and movie date with another couple. Out of sight, out of mind, right?

Today I sucked it up and went back to work on the machine. I left the zippers as-is and decided to sew up the other three sides of the cover. I started the first side and STILL the machine was not feeding my fabric. I had figured it had problems before because it was zipper-related. After looking up the troubleshooting guide, I realized the "feed dogs" were not all the way up. I switched the button over for it and VIOLA, my problems were solved!

I sewed up the three sides and popped the cover onto the pillow!

well, it was too big, so I had to sew another seam into it. haha.

my ugly/loose zipper seam handiwork, but I did do a bitchin' job of lining up the stripes in the fabric.. WOO.

[I think I'm going to start fresh with another pillow, see if I can do it right on there, and then fix this one]

TA DAH!

one pillow down, five more to go!

I'm actually pretty pleased with how it turned out. I'm even more pleased that I didn't take the fabric outside and light it on fire in my temper tantrum last night. I'll credit my husband with talking me down off that ledge! :)