The Flamestitch Blog

Some of the 134 letters, numbers and shapes I made this week.

This week (plus five days), I made 134 fleece letters, numbers and shapes.  That’s a lot of work: cutting out the upper and lower case patterns, cutting out two sets of each, sewing Velcro to each and every letter, machine sewing, stuffing, and then HAND STITCHING each and every damned one.  That’s right, I hand-stitched all those sonsabitches. But we’ll get to the desperation the hand-stitching produced in a minute.  Let’s talk first about how I came to have such a colossal job.

I took the job where I needed to turn a fold-out, wooden-cased ironing board into a giant pink tongue.  Fours days before Christmas, I took the job sewing twenty-five chenille cushions.  I made the black silk wedding dress with the vampire collar.  I made a basket-ball hoop mouth for a gorilla.  Four times.  The fabric kept wearing out, from kids throwing balls at it.  I’ve sewn clothes onto CPR dummies, and made eighty water-proof sandbags.  I have sewn seventy-five vinyl seats for Outback Steakhouse, and made puffy pink cushions for Victoria’s Secret.  I made a Jeep top out of Sparkly pink Naugahyde, for a stranger I met on the internet.  And none of this even scratches the surface of the shit I’ve made for my own children: the Midna costume, from Legend of Zelda, the show-stopping, sparkly Union Jack messenger, seven hours before school started.

Let’s just say that people call me when they have a project that no one else is dumb enough to take.  I take it.  Not because I’m desperate, but because I know I can do it.  No matter what it is, I say yes.  Even if I’ve never made what I’m being asked to make.  If it can be sewn, I can sew it.  And so I have a pretty impressive resume.

The letters were part of a project I’d been working on for a few weeks, for a local industrial design studio.  I’d made air-cannon targets, that flutter when they are hit, and the above-mentioned sandbags.  I sent the sandbags, and they started to leak under the water, so I made them again, out of heat-sealable nylon.  The nature of this business is to remake things.  That’s just how it goes.  The letters were added in early on, but then removed, because the client said that she could make them.  I knew better, because just looking at pictures of this job, I knew it was a pretty big asshole.  So I waited, and when everything was done, and installation was a week away, the client said they needed the letters.

I started right away, but this shit was tedious.  I searched the font they wanted, and I found a blog post where a woman was whining about how much work it was to make her daughter’s name out of stuffed letters, because her daughter’s name had ten letters.  Right.

Hours were gone, just cutting.  I didn’t start sewing until Wednesday night, and they had to be ready by Saturday.  I stayed up all night, and I sewed the entire time.  I got my kid up for school, and kept sewing.  By Thursday night, I was pretty loopy.  I kept sewing.  The hand-stitching took the most time.  I begged my kids to help me, but they refused, because they aren’t stupid.  Then I called my mom, and she said she would help me, because moms are stupid, myself included.  I worked through Friday morning, with no sleep.  I had promised my kid, and her art teacher (my sister) that I would help drive their class to the cemetery, to take photos.  So I had to walk around the biggest cemetery in Columbus for four hours, with no sleep, while teenagers took photos of dead bats.  But I still had work to do.  Friday night, my mom came over to hand-stitch.  My oldest daughter decided she wanted to help, and we taught her how to button-hole stitch around the letter she had.  She quit.  By Saturday, we were halfway done.  I sent the letters that were done, and I’ve spent the rest of this week finishing them.

When my daughter started to sew her letter, she got halfway done, and she asked, astounded, how we could handle having so much to do.  My mom, herself a veteran of horrible sewing projects, just said, “There’s no choice when you have a job this big.  You just keep going until it’s done.”

It’s done.