There's a moment, right before the first cut, where the sail is spread out on the floor and the scissors are in your hand and you remember something important: there is no undo. Fabric from the store, you can buy another yard. A retired sail? There's exactly one of it. Cut wrong and you're not fixing it. You're explaining it.
Cutting my first sail was NERVE WRACKING. These were the five thoughts, on loop:
- The person who gave me this sail is going to ask for it back after I cut it.
- I'm not going to like the patterns or sizes I decided on.
- I'm going to mess up the placement of the cool features on the finished piece.
- Nobody is going to like what I make.
- The whole pricing thing.
Here's what actually happened.
One: nobody has ever asked for a sail back. Not once. And here's the honest part: most sails don't come to me in some big sentimental handoff. People give me sails because the alternative is finding a dumpster, and it's easier to hand it to me than to sneak a whole sail into one. Which, to be very honest, makes the fear funnier. I was braced for someone wanting back the thing they were relieved to be rid of. It hasn't happened yet. I don't think it's going to.
Two: I have absolutely picked patterns and sizes I didn't love. Has happened. Will happen again, but maybe less (🤞🏻)? The tradeoff nobody tells you about flat patterns is that sailcloth is not flat fabric with a fun backstory. It has shape built into it. It has seams and reinforcements and spots that wore thin doing their job. Sometimes the piece I planned is not the piece the sail wants to be, and I just go with it. The sail usually wins, and it's usually right.
Three: feature placement is a real way to ruin a good bag. The insignia lands half under a seam. The numbers end up somewhere weird. It's always a bummer, but it's also where the interesting stuff happens. I get creative and go a different way, and some of my favorite pieces are the ones that refused to follow the plan. A cut panel is a constraint, not a catastrophe. (Mostly. There have been words said at the cutting table aka my floor.)
Four: the jury is still out. JK. I have relatively decent turnover. But here's the part that still gets me: I still have pieces from when I started, the early ones, the ones I was so sure nobody would want. And every now and then somebody picks one up, turns it over, and says "MINE." Gives me a little more faith in myself.
Five: pricing. I could write an essay about that. I still don't have great answers and I still don't feel great about it, and anyone who sells things they make by hand and tells you they've solved pricing is selling something else too. My general philosophy, the one I try to stick to, is to pay myself $60 an hour. I like to think it averages out. It probably does not 😳. Some pieces take forever because the sail fought me. Some come together like they wanted to exist. Some pieces are just a certain size and I can't justify charging the actual time it took to make it. (Also I also haven't figured out how to take money from my biz account… I'm scared of taxes - but the amounts would be so little 🤦🏼♀️ I don't think Uncle Sam would really get too bothered? I dunno, I need an accountant, recommendations in the comments please!).
So, now that you've made it this far…
TL;DR: I feel better about cutting old sails. I'm improving, the fears got smaller or turned out to be useful, and everything's gonna be ok.
It's just sewing. 🪡⛵️💕
~Coco