Overly ambitious beginner

Last winter L. announced that she wanted to learn to sew. When I asked what she wanted to see, she finally settled on jeans, because finding jeans that fit the way L. wants them to is becoming increasingly difficult. Jeans are not really considered a beginner's project, but since I rarely start with appropriate beginner's project myself, I took a deep breath and ordered a jeans pattern. It would be really fantastic if we could get a jeans pattern to work. 

Last month, using this pattern, 


L. got a practice pair all cut out. The practice pair is some phenomenally ugly fabric that somehow made its way into my stash. This is very much the best thing to do with it. Things have been going swimmingly until this afternoon. 

Today we tackled... or attempted to tackle... the fly front zipper portion. Now, at one point when G. and L. were babies, I took a class all about putting in zippers. I kept my notes and still refer to them when a zipper comes along. But it's been a very long time since learning to do a fly front. The steps in the instructions were not very clear. Even after ripping some out and trying again, we had a zipper, but still didn't have a fly front. Since there was a zipper installed, we left it to move into the next step. We just need L. to be able to try this pair on. I said I would do some research before attempting this particular step with the actual fabric. 

After we had closed up shop, it occurred to me I had a very good sewing instruction book.


If I had remembered before we had begun, we might have been more successful. When I looked later, here is the heading we needed.


All with very clear step-by-step illustrations. Oh well, I think we practice a few more time before we make the actual jeans. On the plus side, L. has now had experience seeing in a zipper, even if we didn't get it quite right. And maybe if you begin right away with a tricky zipper, then there is not much else to terrify you in terms of sewing. 

And since I'm sort of talking about fiber, I wanted to show you my first sampling of Fred's and Clark's fleece. The black is from Fred, the white is from Clark, and the grey is a combination that I combed together. 





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