Alabama Chanin suggests binding the arm and neckholes of garments with bias strips of jersey, which requires a rotary cutter. Can you hear the excitement in my voice? I get to buy a new thing.
After I brought this kit home from Stitches, I realized I’d been tricked. Duped. Suckered.
This thing is covered in math. Angles, grids, numbers, not one but two linear measurement systems.
SEWING IS TRICKING ME INTO DOING MATH.
When I was a kid I absolutely hated math. I was terrible at it. (Funny how we tend to hate the things we’re bad at. Go figure.)
My parents, being the good parents that they were, tried to figure out all sorts of ways to get me to like Math.
“But you love music, and music uses math.”
“Do you want to help me bake this pumpkin seed cake?
You know, baking uses math.“
It didn’t work too well, to be honest.
Bless their hearts, they did their best, but I was a difficult case–
I even convinced myself I was allergic to math.
Every morning when we had math warm-up I would develop a case of the sneezes.
I seem to remember my parents trying not to laugh when I told them I was allergic to math, and being affronted that they didn’t believe me.
Anyway, don’t you know, I’ve done it, I’ve gone and gotten addicted to sewing.
WHICH IS CHOCK FULL OF MATH.
See? Girls can do math.
Any other math strugglers out there?
Your own personal horror stories about math?
I’m encouraging such a discussion NOT to trash math,
but to maybe examine some of the feelings we have about the subject,
especially as females.
My school asked us to read a book over the summer called,
“What’s Math Got to Do With It?”
(Cue Tina Turner song that inevitably gets stuck in my head for hours every time I read that title.)
It was all about why we grow up not liking math,
how it’s being misrepresented in school
so that what we’re doing in math isn’t actually the study and practice of
mathematics,
which is a collaborative enterprise that has nothing to do with worksheets memorizing rules and everything to do with real creativity.
Our school also brought in a nationally renowned speaker to talk to us about how most students–and adults–in America today are innumerate,
and how what is being taught today in American classes is not
mathematics,
but rather, Math History.
We learn about all the old math people did, and then memorize it, regurgitate it for “the test,” and then promptly drop it from our hard drives because it has absolutely no purpose in our everyday lives.
The real math we do in our lives, with baking or sewing or taxes or administering medications,
these are typically done mentally by people who learned mental calculation strategies and never once use a formula or a calculator.
That’s numeracy (like literacy).
Anyway, to bring this all back to sewing,
the book I was reading talked about the problem of girls hating math or society thinking girls are bad at math. Neurologically, they aren’t. Their brains are as suited for math (or in some ways better) as boys’ brains.
Where the gender gap starts to widen is when math in the classroom
is taught as separate, unrelated skills or tasks to memorize and perform repeatedly,
that have no apparent bearing on daily life,
or any usefulness in performing daily tasks.
All of which is to say,
I don’t understand most of the marks on my rotary cutter,
but I’m sure I’ll pick it up over time,
as projects demand new skills and insight.
Math as a tool for making art.
Tools manipulated to ease the task of creating beautiful things.
That’s my kind of math.
And somewhere in this post is a seed being planted in my brain, and growing:
What if I worked with kids to teach them how to sew?
I think I’m going to start a sewing group with a couple girls in my class,
as a trial run.
Filed under: fashion, the quarter-inch press
