ACCOUNTANT BY DAY

There is a lady in my Weight Watchers group who teaches home economics at one of the local high schools, and offers sewing classes at Harper’s in Overland Park. A while back, when she found out that I had finally bought my sewing machine, she offered me a gift of one free class, which I attended last Friday. It costs $18 per session if you actually pay to go, and I think it would be fun to do once a month or so, but I don’t think I want to spring for that every week. I learned to do pleats and how to gather correctly, and a lady there showed me how to make a simple baby blanket, which I really want to make now, since I know a bunch of people who have had or are having babies soon. It looked like great fun and I don’t think it seemed too hard.

Anyway, as far as things go, it was pretty fun. I learned some basic stuff, and the lady figured out that I had been threading my sewing machine bobbin incorrectly, which explained why I couldn’t get the tension right and why I had all these little loops in my stitches that I couldn’t get rid of. I can never thank her enough for that!

She recommended a book to me when I saw her Saturday morning at Weight Watchers. It is called something like The Singer Illustrated Book of Sewing. Then later that evening, my boyfriend and I went out to Borders. I checked Half Price Books first and didn’t find it, so when we were at Borders I decided to check there. I started to look in their electronic catalogue, but something was wrong with the machine and a young clerk asked if he could help. “Sure,” I said. “I’m looking for a Singer book about sewing. Do you know what section I should look in?” He looked something up in the computer, then led me to a section with a lot of different books. The first thing I saw was a book called The Beginner’s Guide to Playing Guitar. I was extremely confused. Their system is nothing like Dewey Decimal, I thought.

“Well,” he said. “It’s…going to be all mixed up in this general section. Like, here’s one that might interest you.” He pulled a book about vocal conditioning off the shelf and handed it to me.

“Ohhh,” I said. “I didn’t mean Singer like singing, I meant Singer like the brand of sewing machine. Sorry for the confusion. I was actually looking for books about how to sew.”

He seemed really embarrassed, so I tried to act like it was no big deal at all. There is not that much reason, I guess, for a young twenty-something male to know what “Singer” is, anyway. I think he just didn’t hear me say the “about sewing” part. He directed me to the sewing section, and I didn’t find anything, plus Borders tends to be expensive anyway, so I wrote down a couple of ISBNs for books that interested me, and I’ll just look on Amazon later.

Amazon probably knows the difference between guitars and sewing machines!