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Life Lessons From the Sewing Table

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I’ve been sewing for 21 years, and it’s something that I can almost do in my sleep it comes so naturally to me. Still, we all have days, and not everything works out every time. I had a little hair-pulling moment today when I was “whipping up” a hoodie for myself, and it made me a little introspective.

First, I was watching my friend’s kiddos today because she took a much-deserved day out with her husband for her birthday. (If I’ll watch your kids, you know that’s true love. Mwah!) For some dumb reason, “babysitting” is different in my head than having the exact same kids just “playing over” for the exact amount of time. I have no idea why that is. Maybe because I know that I can’t send them home at any moment if they all start to bounce off walls. Which they inevitably do. My kids still had to do school, and it’s never a good time trying to convince them that schoolwork is a valid use of their time when friends are around. We got through it with minimal whining, though, and I sent them all downstairs to watch TV while I finished sewing. Because, OBVIOUSLY, the perfect time to NEED to get a project done is when you’re juggling 3 children’s school books along with 3 spares. Go big or go home! (My craftiness seriously takes on a life of its own. I either haven’t sewn for months or YEARS, or I’m eating/sleeping/dreaming/breathing it compulsively. It’s just how I roll. I do this with my other crafts as well. My husband is incredibly tolerant of and used to that side of me after 22 years. Heh.)

After I got the kids settled down doing something other than vegetating in front of a movie like I’d planned because they couldn’t find the remote, I started putting my hoodie together. This is a pretty quick process, generally. There was a little more detail work because there’s both a hood and a front pocket, but I was plugging along. After pinning the hood on, I basted everything together (because unpicking is the devil. Ahem.) and checked. to. make. sure. it. was. right. before proceeding. And, OF COURSE, it was FINE. So, I jumped over to my serger and went on to firmly attach the hood on BACKWARDS. Yes, indeed. Upon turning my hoodie right side out and moving onto ironing the hem, what would my wondering eyes behold but the back of the hood nodding at the front pocket. Wah, wah, wah! (Did I mention unpicking is the devil?) But, I did unpick it. Because this was nice fabric that I had a vision for. So, I painstakingly spent about as long as it took me to actually sew it picking out stitches so I could turn around that stupid hood.

I have no idea why our brain does things like this. I’ve spent a lot of time exploring cognitive dissonance in the last while, and it’s amazing how we see things exactly how we want or expect to. It’s nuts, really, but we get used to things and start filtering out everything that doesn’t match that vision – like hoods that are looking backward despite the fact that there was A POCKET to mark the front. I rarely make mistakes like this period and almost never when I’m working with something new or different because all the possibilities are open. I’m not going to wax eloquent about the deep meaning there – I’ll leave those conclusions to you. But, it did make me stop and think, and maybe you’ll find some aha-moment in it yourself. I find those in the oddest and most assorted places when I just notice.

P.S. After all that trouble, I don’t love the hoodie. Waaaahhhhhhhh! I think I should have broken up the floral, it seems slightly short and because I hemmed instead of doing a bottom band, the kangaroo pocket is sitting too low. Jerk. Maybe I’ll throw it in the corner of the closet and reassess next month when I’m less mad at it in general. You know, with fresh eyes, it might seem okay after all.

 

 

Adult Acne Should Be Illegal

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Do y’all do Influenster? You basically fill out some quizzes and answer some questions, and you get matched with free products to review. I’ve gotten a lot of cosmetic items as well as several general “mommy” type boxes that include things as varied as hair ties, pens and coupons for free sour cream. The trick to getting matched is ticking any box that might fit you, so if you have thin, oily and color-treated hair, tell them all that in the event that the one product they’re targeting fits one of those demographics. Make sense? Well, I think I need to tone down that approach with anything that’s potentially a skincare item.

When I was in high school, I had an AP English class where the teacher had everyone write positive things about their classmates. I’m pretty sure I still have these papers in a file somewhere. I, uh, didn’t fit in during high school. I was “smart” and got good grades, but my family were outcasts in the dominant religious culture, and I happened to grow up in a town with a lot of bitterness about the religious history that made that happen, but I digress. I had a small handful of friends that I ate lunch with, none of whom ever came home to my house or hung out with me after school. (I stopped inviting school friends over in middle school after we had CPS called on us for having too much unfolded laundry in our house. My mom was in college trying to earn her teaching degree so that we could escape poverty and was terrified for months that her efforts would cause her to lose all her kids. True story. Seriously, people, offer to help.) So, having people say nice things about me, even if they technically *had* to for a grade was fun. From what I remember, a good half of these kind words were about how I had great skin.

Had being the operative word. Heh. Because, as soon as I started having kids, adult acne introduced herself, plopped down on the bench and made herself SUPER comfy. She’s pretty much been there ever since. Which sucks. Because, once you hit your 20s, you think you’ve dodged that, right? That’s a teenager thing. Wouldn’t that be nice? (I legitimately once had a BIL ask me if I had chicken pox when I wasn’t wearing makeup. Nice. Nope. Just freaking, stupid, *$&%^ acne!! It’s worse when I was pregnant, so I felt fat and sloppy and like I was walking around with chicken pox face. Good times.) At 41, my skin is stupidly picky about what it likes, and changing that up can cause outbreaks of cystic acne. Yay. However, being that I am, uh, 41, it would also be nice to, you know, work on firming and combat wrinkles.

Thanks to Influenster, I know that is a hard no. Every single time I get something that is targeted to aging, I regret it. Number one, they all smell like a grandma, and not a hip one, I might add. And, they cause break outs every. single. time. Grrr. A few weeks ago I received a Perricone firming face serum. I’m sure this thing is ridiculously expensive and it probably even works amazing, but it’s a hard no for me. My skin has been clearer in the past few months than it has in years. (Like, I’ve only had about one blemish at any given time, and they were healing at a decent rate.) I tried this thing ONE TIME, and, I kid you not, I had FOUR new blemishes within 24 hours of applying it. No. Just no.

So, it looks like I need to stop applying for skincare products, or at least only tick the boxes about having acne prone skin. In case anyone is curious, my go-to skin products are either Origins Foaming Face Wash or Harry’s exfoliating Peppermint Face Cream as well as the Origins Gin-zing Moisturizer. All my peeps with acne go shop for those amazing products (if they were on Amazon, I’d link you up, but, alas, bad skin has expensive taste. Try Sephora. You can get Harry’s at Walmart.) while I alternate between rocking in the corner and reading all the notes from my high school classmates about “what nice skin I had.” I guess the good news is that I naturally have okay aging genes, so I don’t have out of control wrinkling or sagging for my age. I’ll take the consolation however it comes.

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