The Start

Me

Hi, I’m Fraggle and I juggle my time between work and family, sewing in my spare time (yeah, right!) I’ve sewn all my life, but never enough to really know what I’m doing. This is my journey, from inexperienced to hopefully more accomplished seamstress. A lot of the sewing blogs out there are fabulous, and I really enjoy them, but I haven’t found a lot of blogs that are from people like me, all seem to be from people that know what they’re doing!

My aim for this blog is to share my journey, the good, and the bad and most probably the ugly too, so that for anyone starting up, they don’t need to worry that they’re not producing perfect items; that they have to unpick seams several times; that they don’t know what the difference is between all the technical terms. I don’t know the difference between a lawn and a poplin,

Four different cottons
Lawn? Poplin? Quilting Cotton?

I don’t know when you should use different stitches for example, I can’t tell you what a welting foot is for. (What on earth is welting? I thought a welt was an injury!) I’m also hoping that someone out there will eventually read this, and be able to tell me the best way of doing things, when I’ve just been hacking my way through with a way that works, but isn’t very good / efficient / pretty etc.

Assorted sewing machine feet
Feet, glorious feet!

Basically I’m relying on the effect that the best way to find out how to do something on the internet is not to ask a question, but to show the way you’ve done something so that people can tell you just how wrong you are! I have also decided that everything I make should now be a challenge to myself – to test my sewing skills in some way that I haven’t done before. These challenges can be big or small, just something that I’ve not done before, a new technique, a new material, a new tool, anything as long as it’s not resorting to the same thing over and over again.

I am learning; I’m not going to be one of those bloggers that posts a new finished item every week. I’m also not going to be posting tutorials, but I will post “this is what I did, and this is what went well, and these are the problems I found with this method” in the hopes that it helps both myself, and others, learn from my mistakes. I hope you enjoy joining me on this journey, I am really hoping you can smile at my successes, have a little chuckle at my failures and maybe learn from them yourself, and finally, I’m hoping that you can give me the pointers I need to improve my skills.