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This, then, was when the problems hit. I'd sew a nice long seam only to discover, once I neared the end, that the top piece of the fabric was pulling with a different tension than the bottom piece of the fabric. The rather vexing result was that the slipcover soon began to skew and bunch in a rather alarming fashion. Corners were even more of a nightmare, a veritable leap of faith as I drove the fabric towards the needle in what I hoped was the proper curve. I swore, I yelled; I broke two sewing needles in the process. And when I wiggled the sewn slipcover back onto my sofa, the damn thing, not surprisingly, didn't fit. It bubbled up in one corner, and stretched too taut at another; the seams arced and gathered where they should have been straight and smooth. All that work and my slipcover looked terrible. I did the only sensible thing: threw a hissyfit and cursed up a storm, spitting invectives at my poor defenseless couch.

The next night I sat down, and reassessed the situation. I began slowly, slowly, tearing apart ugly seams, then re-pinning them back into the proper place. And again, I wrestled with the sewing machine, and again, the sewn-together cover sat slightly cock-eyed -- but this time, the mistakes were smaller, less noticeable. I was making progress. So again, I repeated the seam-ripping and re-pinning and re-sewing. And this time, when I struggled to slide the slipcover back onto the sofa, things looked a-ok. Not perfect, mind you, but pretty damn good -- and as my boy admitted when I gleefully yelled at him to come over and take a look, much better than he'd anticipated even. My seams weren't entirely straight, sure, but the cover fit so well that you could barely tell it was a slipcover, and clad in the new dark gray fabric, the sofa finally looked fully at home with the rest of our living room furnishings. I was giddy with happiness -- both because the project had turned out so well, and because I could now slide my sewing machine back into storage.

So I don't get it when people say they craft for fun. I spend nearly as much time directing buckets of loathing at my sewing machine as I do feeling thankful that I have one; I mutter "I suck!" in between hurling insults at inanimate objects like a needle, the thread, a pair of scissors, a length of fabric. Fun? As a trip to the dentist. No, for me the fun comes later: when I have a comfy sofa to kick back on, settle into, relax… and all the while I feel just the tiniest bit of pride in knowing that yeah, this pretty slipcover? I made this.

o

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