My Name is Petyr Baelish.

Grandma Lil's Secret Dress-Zipping Technique

This is Grandma Lil. Everyone say hello and don't you look fabulous?

She wore back-zip dresses from 1940 to 1960 while married to an Army officer who spent a lot of time away from her. She got good at zipping alone.

Okay, for Grandma Lil's secret technique, you will need:

One (1) safety pin

A piece of string that's about half as long as you are tall. (Or longer; I'm not your mother.) The type of string doesn't matter as long as you can tie it to the safety pin and tug on it without breaking it. Grandma Lil used heavy sewing thread; I use yarn; I've seen somebody use dental floss.

And now, the very secret technique. It starts BEFORE you put the dress on.

Tie the string to the safety pin. Make sure the safety pin can still open and close after.

Pin the safety pin to the zipper of the dress. I like to use the little metal loop at the end of the zipper pull.

Put the dress on and get ready to zip.

Thread the string forward over your shoulder so that the end hangs over the front of your body.

Gently pull the string forward (and down, if necessary) so that the string pulls the zipper upward. Go slowly at first until you get a feel for it. Hold the skirt down with one hand if you have to. Zip up your dress.

When you're done zipping, reach back and unpin the safety pin from the zipper.

Go have a fabulous evening at the Stork Club or whatever.

COOL BONUS STEP: The same trick works for unzipping your dress at the end of the night if you don't have anyone to help with that. 😈

And that's it! This is what a lot of grandparents and great-grandparents did to put on dresses without anyone else there to help them. A safety pin or a hook and some string. I keep one in my vanity, just in case.

Now go and be fabulous.

Okay so! The thing about fabric scissors is that they are literally made differently than regular scissors. For one thing, the angle of the blades is different to enable you to cut fabric better. For another, they are shaped differently. Here I've drawn on the photo of my fabric shears and my regular scissors to illustrate the difference, but to put it into words, the regular scissors often are shaped like a Y, with the handles both curving outwards to form a Y shape, whereas fabric shears the handle is angled so that the handle and blades form a flat line.

Fabric shears are shaped like that so that when you are cutting fabric, your scissors rest flat against the surface your fabric is laying on. This keeps your hands steady and helps you not wear out your hands so fast as well as keeps your cutting more accurate, which in turn makes the entire process of sewing easier and less stressful, because if you have jagged edges on your pieces and a small seam allowance, such as the 1cm or 3/8ths of an inch that most of the indie patterns I own use, keeping your seam allowance neat as you sew is going to be an absolute nightmare.

Here's a side by side photo of those two scissors laying against my sewing desk.

You can see what I mean by "lies flat against the surface the fabric is resting on." This helps keep your hand steady and helps with the aforementioned cutting inaccuracies and also not wearing out your hands super fast.

You want your fabric scissors SHARP because having well-cut fabric makes the entire process of sewing much easier. Which means

1. never use them on paper. Paper dulls scissors way faster than fabric does. I often introduce people to the concept of fabric scissors by saying "these are my fabric scissors. If you use them to cut paper I will stab you with them." When I was 8 years old and learning how to use a sewing machine, "NEVER use fabric scissors on paper" was one of the first things I was taught.

2. You can and should invest in a scissor sharpening tool. You don't need $50 scissors that have to be oiled and sent back to the manufacturer for sharpening. In fact, my fabric shears were like $20 but you don't even need to spend that much on scissors if you're going to be casual about a sewing hobby. The $12 scissors are literally fine, but IF you get the $12 scissors, you do also need a scissor sharpening tool if you don't want to live the struggle bus seam allowance life. It will prolong the life of your scissors. You don't have to get it right away, but once your cutting experience goes from smooth to frustrating, get the sharpener.

Now. I just for funsies decided to do an experiment and cut fabric, or at least attempt to cut fabric, with 3 different pairs of scissors I could find in my house. So here's some videos of me cutting fabric with my regular scissors, the kitchen shears that have been in my house longer than I have, and my fabric shears!

End result:

As you can see, the regular/craft scissors didn't cut the fabric at all, and the kitchen shears did two small jagged cuts despite the fact that I closed the scissors on the fabric more than once. Whereas the fabric scissors cut the fabric like butter with a neat edge.

If you don't know who that is, you can spin again. If you get the same character, they're multitasking c:

Sewing: It’s ok, the pattern is only suggestion! Ply around with if, make it your own.

Quilting: All good, you’re just gonna need to spend half an hour on the calculator and make another trip to the fabric store.

Knitting: Time to sob while you frog two hours of work.

Bobbin Lace: No one will notice that not, it’s only a glaring problem in the most delicate piece of work.

Early-C17th style blackwork embroidery on natural linen: First, we get out the magnifying visor, then we get out the lamp with the daylight bulb, and then we choose our blade very fucking carefully...

@animatedamerican yes EXCELLENT.

it is necessary instead to sit down and kinda try and quiet that voice, and then start with considering my physical needs, kinda mentally run through the maslow's pyramid from bottom to top as if I'm dealing with a little kid throwing a tantrum. like, did we sleep last night? have we had lunch? am I lonely? should I call my aunt? do I want to finish the book I've been reading? do I want to boil chicken bones today? what's bothering me? I'll then try out a couple of things that seem likely and while they may not be The Thing it's useful to build momentum anyways.

but like, if I give it space, the answer will float upwards into view and it's usually something I've been putting off for a long-ass time.

and it'll sound So Stupid to the Talking Mind, who has important tasks that it's trying to get done, but we're going to tell that voice that the kitchen will wait while we take down the Christmas tree, fold the laundry that's been in the basket for a week, sketch the idea, call my aunt, whatever it is, and inevitably the Linchpin Task will take about half an hour, and once it's done I can feel the weight lifted off my shoulders.

Linchpin Tasks are sometimes that it's time to deal with The Emotions At The Bottom Of The Pile, which is when a pile of stuff builds up to cover whatever is at the bottom being emotionally fraught. (letters, the shirt I wore the day my grandpa died, y'know, The Emotions)

I've gotten better at identifying when those piles are starting to accrete and dealing with them before they get bad, but like, you gotta be able to identify the pile of stuff your eyeballs keep slipping off because it feels too emotionally difficult to deal with right now, and like, learning to ignore the part of the mind that wants to assign task priority levels is a counter-intuitive way to get things done.