Sewing is for philanderers

Have you ever suddenly found yourself in a situation where you suddenly stopped and asked, what the heck am I doing?
It happened to me this week. I found myself at 2:00 in the morning, in my parent's basement, completely naked, completely drunk, trying to thread a sewing needle and talking to myself in French.
Like all good stories, it all started with a piece of turquoise silk from China. My mom was given this piece of fabric, and since she didn't like the color, bequeathed it to me. I decided that I wanted to show my domestic flair and that I was going to sew a dress out of it. (Why didn't I make a pillowcase? I don't know). I envisioned myself at my white coat ceremony next month, floating across the stage in a cloud of silk.
I went to the fabric store and asked for help finding a simple pattern for a summer dress. This one will be good, the sales lady showed me. Oh no, I said, I don't want anything with a zipper in it. I'm not a good sewer and I need it simple. Oh, this zipper will be easy to put in, she explained to me, and showed me briefly how to do it. You will need an invisible zipper, she said, so you can't see it after it's in. No problem, I thought, this is a snap! I can totally do it.
It took me about 2 weeks to figure out how to lay out the fabric and cut it out properly. But even then, the piece was a funny shape, so I had to mix and match a bit and skip a few useless pieces before I got it. Then I started sewing it together, ironing the pieces as I went.
The dress was fraught with difficulty from the start. I sewed the backing on backwards and had to take it out and start over. Then I realized I'd cut some pieces backwards and had to patch them together. Then my mom's sewing machine broke.
I had intended to finish the dress before I left for Antigua so a few nights ago, I decided that I just had to stay up as late as it took to get it done. I had just finished watching a movie with my sister and had the gas fireplace on and it was smoking hot in the basement. I was sitting there trying to pin and sew this slippery silk by hand and sweating bullets and I kept making mistakes and having to take out my stitches and try again. It was past 11 and I finally decided this was ridiculous, I had to take my clothes off or I'd get heat stroke.
I stabbed myself with a pin trying to get the zipper in. I basted the front inside out. Finally I stopped and decided that I needed to set up a system so that I wouldn't make mistakes. An appropriate punishment, I thought, would be to force myself to drink a shot of rum every time I made a mistake, since I hate doing shots. (I know what you're thinking.... Heather, what were you thinking.)
That darn zipper wouldn't go in properly. The shoulder seams were inside out. I accidentally poked the needle under my fingernail and it started bleeding. I sat there with a shot glass and a bottle and my sewing kit and all this turquoise silk and I started to mutter to myself in French so that no one would understand the bad words I was saying. I did not feel like a domestic goddess at all.
At 2 in the morning I put the dress on to see how it was fitting and I went into the bathroom to look in the mirror. I couldn't get the zipper up. It was hard to focus on the mirror as it was all blurry, but from what I could see, I'd have had to be an anorexic praying mantis to get the zipper done up. Not only that, I would probably need a whole other set of boobs just to fill the top out. And to top it all off, as I stood there blinking at my reflection, I realized that I hated turquoise.
When I couldn't thread the needle anymore I finally decided to go to bed. I lay in my bed and had just turned the light out when I heard the whine of a mosquito close to my ear. I turned on the light. There he was, on the ceiling. I got out of bed and climbed up on the arm of my armchair and thwacked the ceiling. Missed the mosquito, fell off the chair. Climbed up again, slammed my hand against the ceiling and killed him. Got back into bed, and then remembered the ceiling was the floor to my parent's bedroom.... then I heard the whine of another mosquito. I turned out the light, got up, but this time I couldn't stay on the arm of the chair. I climbed on the counter top and held onto the curtain rod to steady myself while I tried to lightly thump the ceiling where the mosquito was.
To keep things brief...it was 4:00 when I finally went to sleep.
I should've given up there on that dress, I'm telling you. But tonight I decided to finish the job and hem it. My Dad had politely suggested that I make a belt for it, a wide belt that covered the 'invisible' zipper. My Mom suggested an exercise routine to build up my pec muscles. My sister suggested padding.
I laid the dress on the carpet this evening and began to trim off the uneven bottom of the skirt so I could hem it. I'm still not really sure how domestic goddesses trim their hems, but I'm pretty sure there must be a better way to do it, because I kept trimming and the more I trimmed, the crookeder it got. I took off 4 inches and there was a 4 inch difference from side to side. So I evened it out. By the time I had taken 8 inches off, Alpha suggested I could just sew those pieces back on and it would be the right length.
I'm going to wear this dress, I told her, if it kills me. She started to laugh and I kept trimming the hem to even it out. By the time I had taken off 10 inches I was beginning to sweat bullets. I envisioned myself wearing it over jeans as a long shirt. It looks sort of even, Alpha said, except for those long bits hanging down.
In the end I took off about 12 inches before it was even. I started to pin it in place and stabbed my leg with a pin. I searched valiantly for an appropriate expletive and finally resorted to 'foozball!' Alpha hadn't stopped laughing.
Well, let me tell you, I am going to wear that dress if it's the last thing I do. If I can figure out a way to hold my breath long enough to zip it up, I'll take a picture and post it. Otherwise you'll just have to wait to see the pictures of my white coat ceremony. These days I'm trying to learn from my mistakes and I realize I made a number of significant ones through the course of this sewing experiment. I should've called Yvette in Kelowna and begged her to sew it for me. I shouldn't have tried to put in an invisible zipper. I should've cut the pieces out like the pattern said, not how I thought it should be done. And I probably shouldn't have tried to sew at all while drinking rum.