133 days

(Soundtrack to this post: Josephine – The Story – Brandi Carlisle)

 If you know anything about sewing, the idea of making a dress in 133 days is ridiculous. 133 days, in sewing years, is like having a 10 hour soccer game or extending a night out to 5 days of non stop drinking. 133 sewing days is 1,000 in human days. 133 days is a life time.

 At medium speed a person can cut, sew and fit a simple dress in a day, 3 if it’s a complicated one. A mildly skilled person can make 100 dresses in 133 days, not 1. Even a particularly slow sewer, a beginner with no technical skills or experience who one day decided to buy a pattern and see if it works out, could make a dress in a week even if he or she had to learn how to thread a machine…even if she had to go shopping for the damn thing! Not even the slowest of sewers would need 133 days to make a dress. In fact, the only possible scenario I can think of someone taking 133 days to make a dress is if that person was in fact cutting it with nail clippers and sewing it by hand with a needle made of a tooth pick.

 I’m a medium skilled sewer and I already have a sewing machine. So it should take me one day or two to make a dress, three or four if it’s complicated, a week if you count the days spent in finding the right fabric, maybe two or three weeks if the dress in question has special ‘embellishments’. But not 133 days.

 But the thing is I can’t spend the whole day sewing…even if I would love to (and who wouldn’t? Women’s liberation my behindy). The problem is I need to work. And I know many people have to do it and I know it’s unfair and childish to call it a problem and I’m not complaining because I know there are many, many people who can’t find a job… but no, wait, I am, I am complaining about having to work because I sincerely and utterly hate it. If you’re reading this and you don’t have a job, I’m really sorry, but when you’re, like me, allergic to work then having one sucks as well.

 Anyway…so because I have that little problem — which I would like to summarize as ‘working leads to eating’ — I will only be able to sew once a week. I’ll only be sewing on Saturdays…and why Saturdays? For no particular reason except that even God rested on Sunday.

 There are 19 Saturdays from here to June 20^th and in those 19 days I plan to make a spectacular dress to go and celebrate my 30^th Birthday.

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