Columnist Susan Snyder: Sadly, we’re not sew skilled

Tuesday, Oct. 26, 2004 | 8:16 a.m.

Just because a woman owns a sewing machine doesn't mean she knows how to actually do anything with it.

Consider the cell phone with five functions I still haven't learned to use, or the Palm Pilot that is nothing more than a calendar with a pokey thing. And let us not forget the food processor has made nothing but salsa since Santa dropped it off three Christmases ago.

Anyone who knows me, knows that if it plugs into the wall or uses batteries, it had best not have more than one function. But Mother's e-mail suggestion that I use my sewing machine (Christmas 2001) to make potholders for holiday hand-out gifts made it sound so easy.

"All you need are outrageous scraps of material cut to size, bias tape, batten cut to size and yarn bits to tie through the finished product," she wrote.

"Batten?" And what about talent? She forgot to mention talent. It does not run deep in our gene pool where the sewing machine is involved.

Now, before Mother fires off that e-mail about my poking fun at her domestic skills, I need to mention the Cotillion Dress Project of 1971.

By the time she finished it we both were weeping, and the long sleeves had been abbreviated to ruffles over each shoulder -- fine, except it was February.

In Indiana.

In home economics class two years later, she did try to steer me away from the gray wool plaid from which I insisted upon making my slacks. Matching the plaid at the seams would be too challenging, she warned.

Not so. I matched the plaids just fine. However, I sewed the legs together in front and back -- fine stitching, if I'd been making a sleeping bag.

By the time I got the thing ripped apart, the plaids matched again, the legs sewn properly and had ripped-out and re-sewed the zipper three times, my best friend Mary Yocum had made slacks, a skirt, a coordinating vest and a Volkswagen.

OK, I'm lying about the Volkswagen.

Anyway, it is appropriate that the upcoming holiday is Halloween because The Potholder Project of 2004 turned into the little night of horrors.

For $2.99, I could've bought a holiday potholder. And I would have had clean laundry and enough sleep come Monday morning.

Instead, I spent about $10 on materials, including some kind of iron-stuff that, upon reading the wrapper again at home, apparently has no use whatsoever for potholder-making (and is not a substitute for said "batten").

I then spent most of Sunday evening learning that the "tension" setting refers to the thread, not the seamstress; "bobbin" is another word for "hidden, knotted-up mess"; and one must leave an opening if one hopes to turn a potholder right-side-out after it's finished.

Well, no I didn't use a pattern. We're talking about a simple 10-by-10-inch square.

At least it started out as a square. By the time I ripped out the tangled wads of thread along one side and turned it right-side-out, it was more of a trapezoid. (And I got a worse grade in geometry than in sewing.)

"It's not that hard to make a potholder is it?" The Other innocently asked two hours into the project.

It's OK. He'll heal.

But apparently you're supposed to take the pins out before throwing it.