My Public Shame

I've mentioned before that I'm not a craft person. It's not so much that I don't like crafts. It's more like they don't like me.

I actually minored in Home Ec in college. I figured it was appropriate since I was going for an MRS degree. I took a decorating class, and the project was to create a small decorated item for your future home. Most of the girls did some sort of cross stitch project, but with no ability in that area, I bought a latch hook kit and made a Christmas pillow. But I really didn't understand all of the directions. Unfortunately when I was done, you could still see some of the matting around the edges, and you could even see some of the masking tape the instructions told me to use to bind the edges of the matt. The teacher actually laughed at it and commented that it wasn't much of a project. Maybe not for a college class, but I'm pretty sure it would have been great for fifth grade.

Since I got my MRS degree early, I didn't finish college, so I didn't learn to sew until years later. Even then, it didn't come naturally to me. Most of the time the directions seem to be in another language and I can't make heads or tails out of what they're saying. Once I ended up painstakingly following directions for pinning the pattern together, only to discover that I was pinning the pockets to the knees of the skirt instead of at the waist. The problem was, no matter which way I turned the material I couldn't get the pockets up where they were supposed to go. I finally had to call a friend to come over to my house to help me.

I can crochet, but it took me four years to finish an afghan. And I never did quite get the border done. And by the time I finished it (except for the border) I had changed colors so it didn't go with anything else in the room.

With all this failure in mind, you can imagine how my heart sunk last Sunday night when it was announced that this Saturday, all the ladies were meeting together to sew costumes for the upcoming Christmas pageant. Those that are talented in this area assured the rest of us with comments like, "It's just sheets. We only need to sew straight up and down seams."

But they don't know me. No matter what I do, my thread gets tangled and breaks. My sewing machine needle breaks. My machine refuses to work. I was not made for this type of creativity.

Still, I can't get out of it. My children are all in the pageant. Plus, I'm the pastor's wife. It would be noticeable (to say the least) if I don't show up. I can't seem to get anyone to realize that this project would truly go faster if I weren't there.

When I tried to explain this, one woman pointed out that, if I couldn't do machine sewing, there was also hand sewing that needed to be done. Her tone implied that even an idiot could do that.

Well then perhaps I still qualify.