Girls Get Sew Empowered

 

Sewing machines were among the first power tools invented. Few people consider the sewing machine a power tool, but it was and is. As for the marketing angle, Singer wanted it to be considered an appliance so that the target market was well defined. Like the drill, once a motor was hooked up to the tool, things got very real and work got a whole lot easier.

As I see it, you can bet your money that old 1950’s Home Ec teachers surely didn’t want their girls to know that they could become badass makers by learning how to sew ‘outside the lines’ on those school-grade Singer ‘power tools’.  I know that a stiff and uncomfortable A-line jumper didn’t exactly light up many of my classmates to keep them sewing after 8th Grade Home Ec.  However, some of us did keep sewing and learned to look beyond the classroom projects to devise ways that this powerful machine could enable us to go off in all sorts of other directions; to become creators, inventors, makers, designers, etc. Being able to see the usefulness of the tool instead of the misery of having to go rip out a wonky seam separated those of us who continued to see the sew, and those who have never turned on the light switch on a sewing machine since. I learned that it was possible to  spin straw into gold like that little imp Rumpelstiltskin could do. If a horrid little troll could do it, so could I. I learned how to make things I wanted to carry, wear, put in my bedroom. It was magical.

When a mom of a young girl stepped to the door of my shop last week and mentioned how much her 8 year old wanted to sew, I thought, ‘Hot Diggity Dog! I can teach that’. The mom was ecstatic. She said she herself never learned, but that her own mom, the grandmother, was a fabulous seamstress. WAS being the key word. Granny was gone. Too bad this mom never had the rich experience of learning how to sew from her mom. That’s one of my very favorite memories of my mom.

So, I started searching online for kids online sewing classes. Guess what?  There’s a nice little niche in the market for teaching kids to sew. Well, it’s not really only limited to the sewing machine, hand sewing has it’s own natural dopamine producing benefits, including the most sublime meditative qualities. I love a good meditative handcraft.

Sewing has been such a huge part of my life. I wrote a LONG email to my subscribers about it. It’s been my saving activity through all kinds of life’s ups and downs. Thus, I need to teach sewing to young girls. I’ll teach boys as well. They have an entirely different spin on things, so that’s invigorating. The fist thing a parent needs to do is to get a sewing machine for this creative offspring.

Parent’s usually don’t have a clue as to what kind of sewing machine to get for this new activity. There are the old workhorse machines of yesteryear that still are chugging along; the fairly inexpensive and plastic hobbyist machines which work fine for a beginner; and the new plastic, lightweight machines billed as ‘Heavy Duty’, but are anything but!

I’m working on a Sewing Machine Throwdown video.  I’ll show you the good, the bad, and the ugly of the machines I have in my shop. Sign up for my email list, then you’ll be one of the first to know when the video is available. And, you’ll get all the latest on where to find all of the latest juicy sewing content. I love practical info. I won’t load you down with fluff.

With all of that being said–also be on the lookout for my upcoming online kids’ sewing classes. Custom designed for tweens and teens to make sewing sew exciting and sew empowering. (Boooooo!)