For Jen: My tale of wadders

Ah wadders. Those humble pie reminders that my sewing skills are often nowhere near my ability to imagine how an item might look if I sew it out of this fabric with that pattern.

I'm not the only one to have wadders instead of successful sewing projects. You can read here, here, here, here and here. There are more examples in the big wide world of sewing blogs, those are just from the first page of search results. And here are my entries:

• The grey skirt made of fabric that has symmetrical designed embroidered on it in the same grey. I love the tone on tone look, but the pattern I chose really needs a far crisper fabric than the lovely, drapey grey fabric. So I decided to interline it. Now it’s in the box, partially assembled. I can’t bring myself to do any more work on it since it’s almost certainly not salvageable, nor can I bring myself to throw it away.
• The coat made of the lovely pinky-corally tweedy material. That one I did to myself. The pattern calls for fabric with at least X amount of stretch (where X equals I don’t remember and it doesn’t matter because my fabric had no stretch). Yeah, I got the back and the front sewn, stitched on the sleeves at the head and then realized nope, it might fit my granddaughter in a couple of years, but no one else I know could wear it.
• The shirt made from a lovely cotton. I have not yet mastered the full bust adjustment and this shirt is proof of that fact. But gosh, my collar and stand were gorgeous.
• The pleather skirt—my newest entry in the hall of wadder shame. I made it from the ponte knit that looks like leather. The pattern (the Mabel from Colette) is close-fitting and reviews indicated you should most definitely believe the measurements and that you should use a heavier knit. So I chose the size that would fit my hips and I thought this knit was thick enough. It is not and the nearly finished skirt will never ever ever see the light of day. 

Those are just the ones I haven’t yet ditched and can remember off the top of my head. There are more, plenty more, and Kent’s had at least one or two.