Wednesday, April 16, 2014

Me-Made-May '14

Since I started sewing avidly again in December, I've been looking forward to May for this reason. I think I stared at fellow sewists' MMM posts for 7 hours during a work day when I should have been doing other things like working, but that's neither here nor there.



So I took the plunge and signed up. I plan on weekly round-up posts and hope I can steal my mom's DSLR for the month to spare everyone cell phone mirror pics. I modified the standard pledge thusly:

I, Erika of Trial and Erika (http://trialanderika.blogspot.com), sign up as a participant of Me-Made-May '14. I endeavour to wear at least 5 handmade or refashioned garments for at least 3 hours each week for the duration of May 2014

Five days a week? At least 3 hours? What is this nonsense? Well, you have to understand that place where I spend 40 hours a week. I work in a manufacturing plant in an industrial park that, among other things, excels in producing dirt. Not dust, though it initially appears this way. It's straight up dirt. I can leave something out in the plant for 5 minutes and it's covered in a fine film of dirt. This dirt gets all over my hands, stains my clothes, and aggravates my allergies.

Also, my job requires sporadic bouts of manual labor. At any time on any day, I might have to climb mini pyramids of plastic rolls in order to fight my way to a sample (that is covered in dirt, of course). Just yesterday I ended up sweating my ass off moving heavy things from one side of a room to the other and then lifting them to hang from hooks. Did I mention the room is generally 85 degrees? It was the worst.

Oh, and did I mention that I am one of maybe 10 females out of over 300 employees who work in the plant? A large majority of our workers are on work release from prison. They make incredibly reliable employees and are always willing to work overtime, but the sausagefest of deprived convicts is not an ideal situation for a 24-year-old female.

So needless to say, fancy things are out. Dresses and skirts are definitely out. Garments that I've sewn that I'm attached to are worn with extreme caution. I've been known to go home at lunch and change into something more suitable to manual labor.

My Archers are on pretty much constant rotation, as are my Meissa blouses and Daytrippers (which I still need to blog). I wear jeans to work every day, so there will probably be lots of tops. Hopefully if it warms up I can wear some of the dresses I've made and plan on making (have you seen the weekly themes for this season of Project Sewn?).

Bring it on, May. Commence frantic sewing.

1 comment:

  1. The sausagefest of deprived convicts made me lol. Good luck with May :)

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