Comment by armagon | Hacker News Reader

Comment by armagon | Hacker News Reader

I learned to sew.

I suppose the biggest thing that got me interested was I got a book on making costumes from a Humble Bundle. Keeping me interested, though, was a desire to do something that was not on a screen during the pandemic.

I probably read through 15 books from the library in my spare time, honestly, over the course of several months. I asked me wife some questions, and read through the manual for her sewing machine -- and then watched enough YouTube videos and did things tediously slowly until I understood what I was supposed to do. I found books aimed at kids especially good for beginners, and re-read things as I understood better.

I borrowed some patterns from my aunt, and made pyjamas for my four year old. (I figured something small would waste less fabric). It took me five weeks, on and off, to get them made, and involved a lot of learning, but they turned out really nicely and my kid wore them every night for quite a while. Since then I made some Hallowe'en costumes. (Making pyjamas for everyone for Christmas would've been nice, but I haven't been able to make the time.)

Why this instead of something else?

    - I didn't know how to do it
    - I could do it at home
    - We had the basic tools

+1 to this. I did the same, learned to sew. My motivation was to make a particular costume for conventions, and since then I've made several more. Agreed that having something to do that's not on a screen is really important. (I started before the pandemic, but it's definitely been a fresh thing to do.) And the skill is versatile; I've repaired plush stuffies for friends and nieces and nephews, repaired and altered some of my own non-costume clothing, and recently made a couple pieces for myself too.

I was lucky enough to have my experienced mother to teach me, walking through how to use a sewing machine and some basic hand-stitching. Doing one seam is like in 3d programming where you get one triangle to render on the screen, and everything else follows from there.

I don't have the patience to watch instructional videos, and so I do a lot by trial and error. But I also learned that there's no objective standard of "doing it right" -- if it looks acceptable and holds together structurally, then it's not wrong. Sewing doesn't have technical debt like programming - you finish a piece and you're done, you're not worried about its architectural fit with a mess of other components.

Sewing is great fun.

I started sewing last year while planning a bike packing trip where I wanted to finally switch from tent to hammock. Finding proper underquilts for hammocks in Europe is... a mess.

In the end, I decided to borrow my sister's sewing machine and give it a try.

I ended up sewing not just the underquilt but also ultra light bike bags, an ultra light hammock, a tarp and a bunch of smaller bags for storage.

I never thought the technical side of sewing would be so much fun - I spent hours researching fabrics and composites for a project in order to fulfill 'your' specific needs.

My sister never got her sewing machine back.

Making clothes seems like such a useful, thrifty, and enjoyable skill. In a world of fast fashion you now have the choice to opt out in some sense and save many scraps from the heap. You've got me a little bit inspired to finally patch a small hole in my jeans.

Give it a go -- the nice thing about fixing something broken is that if your fix doesn't work, you are no worse off than you were before, and if it does work, tada! the thing is fixed.

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