Sew What?

What’s wrong with me? Every time I’ve set out recently to purchase any flat, textile-based item (i.e. table runners for the wedding or curtains for the baby’s room), I’ve come home not with the item in question but with a vast swath of fabric and a nagging feeling of resentment towards myself. Because, the thing is, I don’t like sewing. I like things to be pretty, and I like things to be homemade, and I like making things, and I like having made something, and I like being surrounded by things I’ve made. I also like fabrics and textures and colors and patterns and often get turned-on just by being in a fabric store—even a giant chain with dirty linoleum floors and harsh fluorescent lighting. You might think that all this, combined with the fact that I’ve been sewing various projects since I was in junior high would add up to “this woman likes to sew”—but you would be wrong. Very, very wrong.

I hate to sew.

I also hate to knit and, to a large extent, I hate stringing tiny beads onto wire, even though I’ve made most of my own jewelry and a significant number of wooly scarves.

Something about these endeavors leave me feeling like Beth March in Little Women—cooped up and sickly and destined to die a virgin.

So why is it that I, 39-weeks-and-five-and-a-half days pregnant woman, came home from Ikea this afternoon not with a pair of curtains for the guest bedroom but with a piece of fabric—a piece of fabric that will require washing and ironing and cutting and measuring and more ironing and sewing and, gah, my head hurts just thinking about it.

One answer—the one I gave my husband—is that the curtain options were all ugly and not as inexpensive as I’d hoped and would have required hemming anyway whereas the fabrics were interesting and vibrant and downright hip—not to mention less than ten dollars.

But the real answer, clearly, is that I’m a masochist. And a slave to aesthetics. I’m all, I’ll be damned if the tables at our wedding reception are decorated with shiny, tasseled crap made in China. And, For the love of all that is holy, I will not purchase one more pale green or yellow item for my gender-not-yet-determined baby’s room. And today, Oooh! Lookit that pretty, pretty fabric! Must have!

So I’m sitting here hoping I’ll go into labor right now not just because I’m tired of not being able to properly digest food or walk up the stairs without getting lightheaded or see my own private bits without the assistance of a mirror but because going into labor right now would be just the excuse I need to not have to sew those motherfucking curtains.