Sew a piece of clothing.

“After 3+ years working in a textile testing lab, I finally gained enough courage to stay late and sew myself a dress! Everything is self drafted/pure trial and error. Biggest take away was how different sewing is when you’re sewing textile samples for testing vs. sewing actual clothing. For starters, I’d never had to care about the color of the tread, so I stupidly sewed the first half of this dress with neon pink threads thinking those seams would be in the inside and not show through. Which ended in me going over all the seams in black sharpie trying to camouflage the threads that poked through at the end. I also traced my “patterns” in silver sharpie, which definitely showed through on the inside of the skirt which was a single layer, so I (again) had to go over the lines in black sharpie to try and hide the mistakes. All in all - I’m very thankful for sharpies and that I chose an opaque black fabric, I had fun, and I learned a lot!”

“But at thirty years of age I had never made any of those things myself. I had never sat at a sewing machine and felt anything other than abject terror and the absolute belief that in this particular battle between woman and machine, I was destined to lose. [...] So, on my latest trip to my mum's place in Spain, I travelled armed with some fabric that I liked and an idea for a skirt. I armed myself too, with a big dollop of patience. It was perfectly possible that the sewing machine was going to try and take this opportunity to vanquish me once and for all. Tears of frustration were likely to well up several times [...] Mum later confessed that the first wave of fear and doubt washed over her when I asked if we seriously intended to attempt to make the skirt in one day. In my mind this was a week-long undertaking, in mum's it was going to be done, dusted, and hanging off my hips in four hours. As usual, mum was right.”

“i borrowed my mom's sowing machine today and made this out of an old bedsheet. it's not perfect. none of the seams are straight and my thread broke quite a few times but o cannot belive I made something that resembles clothing on the first try.”