In Case You Wanted to Sew Yourself a Raincoat…

First, please read my mother’s advice to Katie:

Dear Ms. Berg,

It has been brought to my attention by a fairly reliable source that you are obsessed with the notion of sewing your own rain coat.  Under normal circumstances, I am highly supportive of the youth of today when they endeavor to take on new challenges – especially in the sewing realm.  As a life-long sewing enthusiast myself, I can certainly understand the value of seeking to expand one’s own sewing horizons as a part of an enriching and fulfilling life.  At the same time, my sewing expertise and experience as an educator tempers my judgement towards this particular project, and I feel compelled to offer you some advice…

…DON’T DO IT!…it’s only going to bring you heartache…and you’re gonna want to just throw the fabric away after a very short time…but you won’t be able to do that because it will have cost you SO much money to buy it in the first place…cuz you know you’re gonna have to order it online because you live in the land of no real fabric stores…and yeah, they might have some yellow raincoat fabric at WalMart but do you really wanna buy it there?…I’m pretty sure you don’t…it’s an OK place to buy your Easy Mac and tampons for cheap, but not so much for fabric……and then you’ll realize that it’s REALLY hard to pin pattern pieces down to raincoat fabric because it gets all full of holes and stuff…and then you’ll be SO frustrated by the time you get the thing cut out that you’ll want to just barf…and nobody really likes to barf…but you’ll make yourself keep going anyway, cuz you’re a little crazy like that…and you’ll realize that you need to have a special needle to sew on that God-forsaken fabric…and of course you haven’t got one so you’ll have to drive to WalMart again for like the millionth time…but they won’t have one, of course, and you’ll have to go on-line and order it and the shipping will probably cost more than the flippin’ needle does…but you’ll keep imagining that this will be the most awesome raincoat ever…but it’s not going to be…not even close…not by a long shot…none of the seams will be flat…they’ll be all puckered up…and there won’t be a darn thing you can do about it cuz it’s a rain coat and you can’t iron the seams…at all… or they’ll melt…and that would end up looking even worse than this train-wreck of a project already does…and then you’d have to buy a new iron, too…if I were you I’d just flush the money I was going to spend on this project down the toilet and save myself a whole lot of time and frustration…or maybe just buy a raincoat instead…cuz I’m pretty sure they sell them in the stores…and they probably even come in yellow…and if you want a longer coat you could probably look in stores that sell clothes to tall people…the salespeople might look at you funny when you come into their store (cuz you’re not really very tall)…but you could scream something like “short people need tall yellow raincoats, too” at those salespeople…then they’d figure out that you’re not just un-tall, you’re a little crazy, too…and they’d work real hard to find you a tall yellow raincoat in a big hurry so you’d get the hell out of their store…and then you’d have your yellow raincoat…and life would be good!

That’s just my opinion of course…if you decide to make your own, I wish you the very best of luck!

Sincerely,

Cheryl’s Mom