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Handmade Bags, Judaica & Other Accessories
Many items featuring repurposed & rescued textiles
How Julia Child Taught Me To Sew
Oh, and other news …
Revised Craft Fair Dates
| April 12th | Bridgewater Dome | Bridgewater, MA | 9:00 – 2:00 |
| April 27th | Temple Sinai of Sharon | Sharon, MA | 11:00 – 2:00 |
| May 3rd | Mansfield Spring Fair | Mansfield, MA | 9:00 – 2:00 |
| May 10th | Lakeville UCC | Lakeville, MA | 10:00 – 3:00 |
| May 17th | Canton Heritage Festival | Canton, MA | (I will post times) |
| June 28th | Randolph Pride Festival | Randolph, MA | (I will post times) |
| Sept. 21st | Holliston Historical Harvest | Holliston, MA | 10:00 – 4:00 |
The Julia Child Convictions Walker Caddy and How She Taught Me to Sew
I was going to write a post about five hacks from my sewing room, but I lost my notes and strugged with the fifth hack. As I tried to draft something, I got onto suggesting you watch Julia Child. As I rambled, I realized that’s what I wanted to share with you.
So here we are.
A a few days ago, I sent out my prototype (dare I call it something so official-sounding?) for a Walker Caddy out to a friend for testing. Fingers crossed. An assisted living facility is interested in helping me sell these to it’s residents. That’s quite some progress from where I was years ago. Julia Child helped me get here.
I learned to cook my whole life watching Julia Child. To this day, I still struggle with genoise cake but her chocolate mousse is to die for. Oh, and popovers, try those. Easy peasy. Back to sewing, though. Because she also taught me how to sew.
While I’ve always been a Julia Child fan – I started making my own bread at fifteen – it was a dark time of my life when I started watching her PBS series regularly decades later. My career was dead; my time in the corporate world had been fraught with my difficulty in fitting in early in my career, and my age and gender later. Middle-aged women can’t code! It’s not like we haven’t invented it every step of the way or anything. I swore if I had one more crooked, ill-behaved middle-aged man-bro-boss who didn’t know high school math I was going to implode all over the living room wallpaper and it would not be pretty. Consequently, I was phenomenally understimulated, existentially and professionally.
You got to have developed what the French call je m’en fous: I don’t care what happens,
Julia Child
the sky can fall and the omelets can go all over the stove.
Enter The French Chef reruns. Over time I became such a fan, of her food of course, but moreover a fan of her. Her lack of pretension (in one episode she dances a whole chicken a little before working with it), her joy and passion, but most of all, her confidence. Not only was she confident, but most of all she wanted us to be confident. She didn’t want us just to cook good food, she wanted us to love cooking and to love ourselves while we did it.
Given seeds planted in childhood (I was a woman coming of age in conservative America in the 1980’s) plus some corporate world experiences, confidence was not something I possessed in abundance right then. Mistakes were signs of ineptitude. Complicated tasks were surely beyond my aptitude. Before one grabs their kleenex, spoiler alert: when people now ask “can you sew ….” I tell them “honey, I can sew anything.” So worry not.
But, prior to this newfound confidence, my sewing hadn’t grown for years. If I didn’t get a technique right the first time or two, I gave up: I didn’t want to waste money on materials, I wasn’t talented/smart/good enough. Blah, blah, blah … blech!
Julia Child, on the other hand, was not one for that kind of nonsense. For her, the key to learning to cook (or anything, she hinted) was courage. Not intellect. Not privilege. Courage. Determine for yourself: “I’m going to learn! I shall overcome!”
In searching for clips for this post, I was reminded how often she discouraged timidity: “if you’re going to have a sense of fear of failure you’re just never going to learn how to cook, because cooking is lots of it, one failure after another.”
Literally described as “burnt cheesecake.” Often.
Does anyone believe Basque Cheesecake happened on purpose? No, someone dozed off when cheesecake was in the oven, ate it anyway (cheesecake, what else are you going to do?) and said to themselves, paraphrasing Tim Gunn, “hey, I can make this work.”
When explaining a simple ingredient that is often intimidating (it takes timing and attention, but it’s not complex), sugar syrup, she said: “one thing I think that people are so scared of any recipe that says sugar syrup or caramel is … this awful American syndrome of Fear of Failure.”
If you made a mistake: adapt and move on. Just keep the guests out of the kitchen and no one will know. Is the recipe complicated? Here’s the demo: it’s a bunch of small, easy steps. Practise and you’ll learn it. Shaming yourself for “wasting” food (or fabric)? Nonsense. In the words of another favorite inspiration, Christine Schindler of Christine’s Home Affairs: “you’re never wasting material if you learned something.” With that, I was no longer stingy with my fabric, or my ambitions.
Along the way, Julia’s (and Schindler’s, honestly) courage rubbed off on me and followed me into the sewing room. Screw messed up fabric – know it’s going to get messed up the first few times on a pattern and get the cheap, ugly stuff to practice on. I have cheap ugly fabric that I hate just so I don’t mind cutting it up.
Here’s one of my walker caddy development pieces to show what I mean. It’s not pretty. The gray is a clearance canvas tarp from a discount store. The floral fabric as a gifted remnant. The mesh is an old, torn laundry bag.
Mistakes? Get over it. There’s a bit of hubris in striving to be the only person in the world who won’t make mistakes. According to the fountain of fact that is the internet, Jack Welch of GE once blew up a lab. His career survived.
There’s a mantra I use several times a day. I rediscovered the clip today, but the image is held my memory without it. Julia is facing the camera, holding a frying pan firmly between two hands, and she’s ready to flip eggs in a skillet. Trick shot, let me tell you. She looks squarely at the camera, pan in hand, about to demonstrate this culinary maneuver, and exclaims: “you just have to have the courage of your convictions!” At which moment she charges in like a general to victory: flipping those eggs in a flash of a moment. That magnificent confidence! That permission to dare regardless of success or failure!
Well, it’s Julia Child. For an expert like her, she pulled it off flawlessly, of course, right? Nope. She flubbed it. On national television. Did she cry? Did she blame herself? Nope. “Well, that didn’t go very well.” She turned it into a teaching moment for a nation of women who were being taught by corporate America to hate themselves: “Anytime anything like this happens, you haven’t lost anything because you can always turn this into something else.” I’ve got so many screw ups around here I’m waiting to turn into something else that I can’t even come up with a good punchline for it. Really.
Let’s remember, too, when cooking you can’t unbreak eggs or unbake a souffle, but you can rip out your stitches and try again. (Tip: if working with cotton, wet then steam press where the stitch line was. The holes in the fabric will mostly “heal.”) You can take your pieces and rework them to something else. Really, when it comes to sewing, aren’t those mistakes easier to hide anyway? I mean, we’re going to notice when someone forgot the baking powder in biscuits, but is anyone going to notice when your seam allowance is 3/8” instead of 1/2”? Unless you’re making couture ball gowns for Taylor Swift, no. So, I think Child’s advice is more meaningful when sewing.
So now, whenever I have that rotary blade in hand and I’m holding it above the gorgeous fabric, and anxiety creeps up over the horizon as I’m about to cut it, or when I’m daring to try – or design – a new pattern, I remember Julia and tell myself to have the courage of my convictions and charge. I’m not being abstract here. I can be heard, rotary blade inches from the fabric, saying out loud to myself: “C’mon girl, have the courage of your convictions!” The cats are used to it by now. When seeing something I want to make, I buy the pattern or even tackle it without one.
I doing so, I’ve designed a rather complicated piece, my second, over the past two weeks, a from nothing more than an Amazon picture, a used walker I borrowed and pure ego. I persevered, I gave myself permission to fu … ahem, excuse me … foul up royally. I dared to try gussets (never done that before) and a welt zipper (always wanted to). And now, I have a corporate client waiting for the final product while it’s in beta testing. Where a few years ago, my career was dead, I felt useless and obsolete, I have hope. I have people wanting my pattern and a business opportunity in selling my patterns. I have plans for a YouTube show one day. All because I channeled my inner Julia Child.
So, I offer this to you: go for it. Cut into the fabric (it’s only fabric), try that pattern that has a gazillion things you don’t know how to do … yet. Experience “what the French call Je m’en fous.” Have the courage of your convictions!
Great Julia Quotes Adapted for Sewing.
| “I’m going to learn! I shall overcome!” | I’m going to learn! I shall overcome! (Zippers, gussets, pleats, shirt plackets, sleeves.) |
| “The only way to learn how to flip anything is just to flip them.” | The only way to learn to sew anything is just to sew it. |
| “When you flip anything, you really, you just have to have the courage of your convictions.” | When you cut into anything you just have to have the courage of your convictions. |
| “I don’t care what happens, the sky can fall and the omelets can go all over the stove.” | I don’t care what happens, the sky can fall and the fabric pattern may not line up — I can rip those stitches and do it again. |
| “If you’re going to have a sense of fear of failure you’re just never going to learn how to cook, because cooking is lots of it, one failure after another.” | If you’re going to have a sense of fear of failure you’re just never going to learn how to sew, because sewing is lots of it, one failure after another. |
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