I’m sure you remember your first sewing project. You stumbled, you struggled, and after blood, sweat and tears… you got there somehow.

The next outfit was better, and the next even better, improving in baby steps every time. But those baby steps seem still to be so small. You aspire to be great at this, but how long will that take? How much money will you spend? How much frustration and how many failed projects will you endure? How do people get really good at sewing?

Long, obsessive practice? We haven’t got time.

Books? Books are expensive and often too basic or too advanced, with only occasional gems amongst their endless pages. The Net? Information is so widely dispersed and so unreliable; surely you’d have found it by now if the information was there for the taking.

We need a way to get to the fun and enjoyment faster, to skip over the schooling, the books, the expense, the time and the stress and realise a condensed form of learning for our modern world. Wishful thinking, perhaps? Actually, no.

I’ve done it the slow way, picking things up as I went along, making mistakes, taking wrong turns. What I’ve learnt about learning is that you need a model, an ideal to aim for.

I don’t just mean cutting out pictures and using them to inspire you – personally, I’ve just used them to pine away for what I can’t yet do. No, you need to find people who are doing what you want to do and find out how they did it.

Take another pastime – take cooking. The first meals you ever cooked were very simple and, although palatable, they weren’t exactly gourmet cuisine. But you persevered. How did you improve?

Practice, of course, played a part. You couldn’t have got any better without it, but on the other hand, practice alone wouldn’t have got you anywhere fast. If you’d gone by practice alone you’d still be boiling the pasta, warming the tomato soup, depositing the former into the latter and serving it each night – you’d just be doing it faster and getting the pasta perfectly al dente by now.

So what did you need? Variety. You went to the store, you bought kits and packets and began to follow instructions, and after some practice, you had yourself a reasonable repertoire with which to feed yourself and your household. And that’s a serviceable solution for many of us with busy lives and better things to do.

But what if you really admire the food you eat in restaurants or see on TV? What if you want to get really good? What if your mother/boss/date makes arrangements to eat at your home and you want to impress them?

That’s right, you’ll look further. You’ll buy a book or trawl the Net to find the perfect recipe, and for the first time you’ll buy the very best raw ingredients. You’re pretty freaked out by fresh herbs and words like “marinate”, but you make your best attempt. Perhaps the meal doesn’t come out quite right. But you try it again and again, you get more confident, and now you have your One Special Recipe that you wheel out on all special occasions!

If you’re enjoying yourself, you try other recipes. If you really go for it, you’ll build a repertoire. Over the years you’ll begin to notice similarities, guiding principles in cooking and baking; you may begin to experiment a little. But progress comes over many years, many meals and many, many pounds, euros or dollars spent at the supermarket, grocery store or farm shop.

Can you see the parallel with sewing? You start by piecing clumsy shapes together with the cheapest materials; you progress to patterns and kits, and you may even vary the details for variety.

Most people stop there, but if you want to get really good you find yourself online or in the bookshop, soaking up more information and more unusual patterns and design ideas, considering coutil for your corsets and wondering what the big deal is about silk organza.

But here’s where the parallel stories diverge. Cooking is a majority sport. If you’re cooking, you can get recipes online for free, see TV shows on which experts give you countless tips, you can buy books packed with hundreds and hundreds of recipes to try. You can afford to try something new, because the ingredients are affordable and eating is an essential expense, and its necessity gives you multiple opportunities each day to practice.

Sewing, however, is unfortunately a minority sport in the present day. Books can be bought, but because they have short print runs they’re expensive, and not only that: it’s hard to come by useful sewing books when half of them are “Make 10 Crazy Easy Kids’ Costumes In An Afternoon” and the other half are “Ecclesiastic dress, 1579-1623: a detailed study.” Free online patterns tend to be in the former category (too easy), you’ve worked out by now that commercial patterns are sized by blind monkeys and the information available online tends to be widely dispersed, incorrect, incomplete or closely guarded in forums (“Can someone please tell me why silk organza is so great?”) By the time you’ve learnt something useful you have a headache, your mouse hand has a repetitive strain injury and the last thing you want to do is sew!

But let’s not be negative: after a few months online or in the bookstore picking up what you can from forums and websites, you finally get the idea. You have a project and you’re ready to buy supplies… but oh my word, buying good quality ingredients in sewing is like being expected to buy caviar and hen’s teeth in a grocery store. One’s too expensive and the other is impossible to find!

Over those many years that our cook is trying new recipes, experimenting twice daily and getting better and better, the seamstress is stuck hunting for information and saving up for good fabric. How can she ever get to the point where she’s gathered enough information and afforded enough fabric to even have a chance of becoming as good at sewing as our cook is at whipping up dinner parties? I can tell you, I’ve spent a heck of a lot of time and money getting to the place where I could see the common guiding principles in sewing and have the confidence to innovate and experiment. I’m a great designer and seamstress, but I still wish I’d had the time or the chance or the money to make twice as many garments as I actually did in my first decade and a half of sewing.

So what’s the answer? How can we get to the enjoyable, professional quality sewing experiences without spending years and shelling out thousands of dollars beforehand?

The popular answer is “practice” – but as we’ve seen, the cook didn’t get better on practice alone. She was still on the pasta-in-tomato-soup stage, just doing it really well, after a lot of practice. Yes, you need to practice, but the idea that putting in the hours alone is going to make your work professional is a myth. What you need is inspiration and some very focussed information.

If the lady with the pasta and tomato soup wanted to cook a fabulous dinner party in a week, what would she do?

Ok, yes, panic… but what else? Imagine that she successfully made it from the soup to the dinner in a week. What got her from one to the other?

That’s right… someone helped her. And not just anyone, not just Auntie Jean. If that dinner party is world class, then she’s had a world-class chef watching over her shoulder and giving pointers. Not cheap in this case, but effective.

If you want to get better at something, you need a teacher who’s more experienced than you are. If you want to get better at something quickly, you need to get the best teacher there is – or even better, a range of teachers who can each advise you on different areas of your craft. One for fish, another for cake baking, another for wines, teachers who can cut directly to the chase and teach you the really good stuff.

And that’s the reason why I’ve created the Masterclasses and online magazine that you’ve seen advertised on the website, bringing together a range of sewing experts from around the world to look over your shoulder and give you the tips and shortcuts that it’s taken them years to learn or work out for themselves. By seeing through our eyes, your game is immediately raised, and you get all the focussed information and inspiration you need in a single place – for the price of a monthly magazine.

So stop struggling and stop telling yourself that practice is magically going to make you into a pro by the time you’re eighty. It won’t. There are plenty of grandmothers who have survived on “practice” alone, sticking to the same pattern they like over and over – I say that looking at my own childhood photos, in which I wear a vast range of cotton dresses in different prints but the same design!

If you are content to dabble in sewing, then carry on as before. If you want to take your own breath away at what you’re capable of, then you know what to do. One way or the other, get yourself the best teacher you can find.

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general advice