Get To Ten Thousand Hours

Yesterday, I made fridge soup. There were five fresh but aging tomatoes and some left over roasted potatoes, carrots, and yellow peppers along with an organic chicken carcass. I boiled the carcass and pulled off the meat, pureed the vegetables into the broth, and threw in some lentils to cook. When there was enough of a base, I divided half into the freezer and half into a pot, put the meat back in and added sauteed onions and carrots, leftover dilled corn, a small amount of rice, salt, a generous portion of herbs de Provence, and a touch of soy sauce. And then I played until the flavours were the way I wanted them.

We had company coming for dinner. Fridge soup is always a gamble. You need to know enough about flavours to be able to pull it back from the edge of too much of one and not enough of another. I'm comfortable enough to make fridge soup for guests because I understand the chemical reactions and details like the difference between biscuits and scones is sugar and I know how to make sweet and sour and hot and spicy and... and... and...

I can cook. In fact, I can cook well and I'm not just making that up because there are numerous ways to say thank you for the dinner without saying wow, that was fabulous and I've had enough wow, that was fabulous comments to know that my cooking is good. Even so, I am not a cook. Cooking doesn't engage me.

Lorrie wrote - Your cooking experience made me laugh. It's funny. When I cook I'm like a fish in the ocean, in my element.

I am never like a fish in water. The soup making experience had elements of the loaf making experience. All of my cooking is that way. In contrast, I have been in Lorrie's kitchen and it's like watching a ballet. All the while she carries on a conversation, she's floating here and there and making it look truly effortless. Lorrie is passionate about cooking and passion seems to be the magic ingredient between good and great.

After I'd hit publish on yesterday's posting, I just knew that someone was going to call me on it because cooking for someone else is the exactly the same as sewing for me. Lorrie could just as easily tell me how much my cooking would improve with daily practice as I might tell her how much her sewing would improve. And it's the same with all sorts of creative formats - like knitting.

I knit really really well. My tension is near to perfect. I understand gauge and how to form the stitches and even how to design knitted garments from a skein and two sticks. My knitting is good enough that my knit garments receive compliments and other knitters ask for the pattern. It's good enough that more than once I've contemplated writing a knitting book but I only knit. I'm not a knitter like Kristen who has a particular spark and passion about knitting.

What's particularly interesting about Kristen knitting is that she didn't used to knit and she thought she couldn't knit and she thought I was crazy when I thought she could knit and I kept sending her a gazillion links to how to knit videos because I just had a feeling that knitting and Kristen were going to go together well and now, it's quite possible that she likes to knit as much if not more than she likes to sew. For whatever reason, when Kristen picked up a set of needles, it ignited a spark and she was off and running. It was when she found a particular way of knitting.

I was like that with writing. Until I started to use a computer, I never even contemplated writing and once I realized how easy word processing was compared to long hand or typing, a whole world of writing possibilities opened up for me. I like to write almost as much as I like to sew. Writing the blog is a particular highlight of each day because it combines the best of both worlds - writing about sewing.

Cäcilia wrote - cooking takes experience as does creating a new textile piece... ... if I remember correctly a minimum of 10,000 hours of work.

Your comment tickled Cäcilia. I learned to cook when I was twelve and for a couple years I cooked dinner for my family and for a couple more years I babysat for a woman while she worked evenings and Saturdays and I cooked for her kids and then I moved out on my own and have cooked for me and mine every since. I also learned to sew when I was twelve - in the same home economics course - and yet cooking and sewing have taken vastly different directions in my life. Your comment had me wondering how many hours have I put into each?

Cooking is the easiest to calculate. I've been cooking for 38 years. While some meals have been more complex and while there have been periods when I've done more involved things like canning and making jam or baking freezers full of cookies, overall my cooking is simple and my baking non-existent - let's say 38 years x 5 days a week x 52 weeks a year x 45 minutes a day = 7,410 hours

Sewing is more complicated to calculate. I have sewn both as a hobby and as a business. From age 12 - 26, I sewed about 2 hours a day. From age 26 to 31, I sewed about one hour a day. From age 31 to 46, I sewed about four hours a day. And, from age 46 to present, I have sewn about six hours a day. These are low estimates because I often sew seven days a week and it's not unheard of for me to sew eight to ten hours a day BUT... for the sake of calculating... that is 14 years x 5 days a week x 52 weeks a year x 2 hours per day = 7,280 hours + 5 years x 5 x 52 x 1 hour = 1,300 hours + 15 years x 5 x 52 x 4 hours = 15,600 hours + 4 years x 5 x 52 x 6 hours = 5,200 hours for a grand total of 29,380 hours.

It's no wonder that I'm far more competent at sewing. It's the thing that engages me. With cooking, it's unlikely that I'll get to 10,000 hours any time soon. With sewing, I've surpassed that marker almost twice over.

Perhaps it's passion - or maybe it's stubbornness - that keeps me trying different ideas. In stash, I have a gazillion meters of snap tape which seemed like an easy closure for a sweater coat except I only had this one foot that would sit on the tape while bypassing the snaps and it worked fine in one direction but pushed the tape around in the opposite direction creating a lumpy bumpy look that wasn't neat enough for me. If you know how to sew snap tape on by machine, I'd really love to know how.

Instead, I turned under the 5/8" seam allowance and then sewed a 1" width of grosgrain ribbon on top to finish the edge and stabilize the knit. It seemed a child might yank on their buttons and strong and sturdy would be a good idea which is why I also interfaced underneath.

On the front, there are two rows of top stitching and then I hand stitched on five snaps and...

... seven buttons. There was no point putting snaps under the two bottom buttons since it's such a long coat but if the mother wants snaps, she's welcome to add them. Five was enough for me - LOL. The buttons have square holes. I really liked that and tried to buy more but they've been discontinued.

One thing I need to be more aware of with this kind of work is how the parts of the garment overlap each other and about the disappearing seam allowances. That's not a factor to consider in textile art. I'm not unhappy about how the front looks but I think there will be ways to do better. Tomorrow, I'll show you the finished coat.

Talk soon - Myrna

Grateful - almost 30,000 hours of sewing experience and - a quick calculation - approximately 16,640 hours of writing experience

P.S. Judi thanks for mentioning the primrose oil. Up until the end of June, I was taking Omega 3 and then just stopped. I got tired of swallowing pills but I've started again and we'll see if that makes a difference.