French seams and Pepper Pots

I started looking forward to Monday evenings. The secret knock on the shop
door and down the rabbit hole into a world of colour and chaos.
Roz would always be behind her desk with a big smile, sewing away at
something or other. Fairy wings for a dog one week, felt dolls in cute
‘60s shift dresses another. Is it freaky to covet the clothes off a
doll's back? Surely not. How could you not want a mini-dress the size
of a pepper pot?!
The next week’s class was all about seams. Open seams, closed seams,
French seams. Not the sexiest part of sewing, but as I've discovered,
you need the basics to build on. Otherwise you end up with the hat.
Maybe one day I'll understand the nuances a little more, perhaps it’ll even become instinctive but right now it's all part of one big jumbled puzzle that needs to be worked out. Every day a new piece of jigsaw slots into place which is exciting but also worrying; sooner or later I’m going to get stuck on the sky.
Valuable Sewing Lesson Number Three. As you sew, so must you iron. I’d had a horrible feeling that might be the case when I saw the ironing board in the corner of Roz's workship, the iron always switched on.
I hate ironing. Never seen the point of it – so what if clothes aren’t entirely flat? The world isn’t flat either.
Unfortunately, in the case of sewing, it would seem that flatness is desirable. Hems, seams, cuffs, all have to be prepared properly before being sewn, and that means being ironed - often many times over – during the course of the making. Fiddlesticks.
So it was to-ing and fro-ing, iron and machine, practising our seams before finishing the edges neatly with the trusty zig zag stitch, getting into good habits. The bits of calico we experimented on we took home to jog our memories the next time we had a mental block about what, alors, is a French seam.
Then onto the fun stuff. The two girls who’d done the course before had told me it was coming. The draw string bag! I haven't laid eyes on those since I upgraded my PE kit into a rucksack, sometime in the last century. Surely this was even more exciting than a pin cushion. Until Roz mentioned the H word. Homework? Aged 34?
Our mission, should we accept it (one of the joys of being an adult: choice) was to make a design for our bag, to be appliquéd on. It could be a flower, a pattern, an animal. Whatever it was, it shouldn’t be too complicated. I mulled it over as we packed away our scissors for the night. Then, perhaps inspired by the precocious little pepper pot dolls, I had a brainwave. It would take some preparation. But then preparation is what sewing is all about.
See… I’m learning.