Thing Five: Sketchy

So, like I said in Thing Two, I've been sewing for a very, very long time now. And, unsurprisingly, I design a lot of my own stuff. And some of it is, if I do say so myself, quite good. My Halloween costumes are epic. They usually involve using other people as props. (It doesn't make sense to be a Queen of Hearts without an Alice and a Mad Hatter, so I cajoled my friends Jennie and David into letting me make them costumes. They are not the only ones who I have convinced to do this kind of thing.)

But, as I implied in Thing Four, where I complained that I will never win Top Chef: My House without a decent omelette, I watch a lot of creative competitive reality tv, and oh MAN do I want to be on Project Runway. Y'all don't even know. But the thing is, just like how you can always count on Restaurant Wars on Top Chef, you can always, always count on some kind of challenge on PR where the designers have to sketch something and present it to someone.

And I cannot sketch to save my life. Seriously, the people who play Draw Something with me already know this, but my drawings are terrible. Nothing's in proportion, all the people have the same basic bodies as the characters from Peanuts, and, you know, I love Lucy van Pelt deeply, but that little dress she wears is not going to be impressing Michael, Nina, and Heidi, to say nothing of Tim Gunn, who would obviously be "concerned".

It's interesting - I can visualize something in my head, and I can draft the pattern pieces to make that thing, and the thing in my head and the thing I end up with are almost always the same thing, but the step in between? Where I show someone else what I'm thinking? That part is unfortunate. And the thing is...unless one is going to make everything on spec, and then just hope someone buys it, sketching is really important.

So I've decided it's time to practice my drawing skills. This whole brain-to-garment thing is holding me back.