Monthly Musing – January 2026 – We are the champions

I bought some fabric to make myself a t-shirt today.  I’ve been thinking about it for a while as I have a t-shirt that I really love to wear, but I’ve never seen the same style again in the shops – and as a maker, the obvious thing to me is to make it myself!

Now, this sounds simpler than it is.  I am a fearless knitter because I’ve been practising for years.  I am not fearless when it comes to material, and that’s because I stopped practising in an early high school year when a teacher said that I wasn’t actually that good at it.  I was devastated.  I’d been able to use a sewing machine from an early age, and I was confident in what I was doing – but those words from someone I had up until that point liked and admired, stopped me in my tracks and I looked at any future attempts to make any clothes for myself through different eyes.

I am not alone in this, and it’s not just making clothes – I’ve spoken to lots of people over the years who have had similar experiences with knitting, crochet, cooking, driving cars – you name it and someone has, maybe intentionally or maybe not, said something that has stopped them in their tracks and the world will never know whether they ever would have been any good at it, because they never try again.

What a waste!  Who knows what could have happened if all of those people had understood that people rarely speak without an agenda of their own and it might have suited them to put someone off doing something?  If only someone had said that 11 year old me.  Now that I’m grown up and I can see that I let myself be affected by words that teacher probably forgot as soon as she’d spoken them, I promise that I will never put you or anyone else off the thing that I can show you what to do – knitting socks.  I will always be your fiercest champion, and I will always cheer anybody on who picks up their knitting needles and wants to make socks.

Yesterday, I found a champion of my own; a friend I’ve known for some years now who makes her own beautiful clothes and talks about the fabric she buys and the dresses she makes with such confidence and joy that it’s hard not to be inspired.  “You encourage people to knit socks,” she said, when I asked her about whether it would be foolhardy to re-start my on/off sewing adventures with a t-shirt, “and I encourage people to sew.  Why shouldn’t you make a t-shirt?  Here’s what I’d recommend …”

And just like that, we were chatting about sewing as if it was an everyday conversation for us.  She told me where to look for fabric, she told me which needles to buy for my sewing machine, and she told me that she would always be there to help me if I got stuck.  It suddenly seemed as if sewing a t-shirt was the most natural thing in the world.

I’d like to suggest that this is something that we can all do.  It doesn’t matter what we’re good at – whether it’s knitting socks, sewing t-shirts, washing windows, growing vegetables … we all have something that is a special skill in some way, and we can be someone else’s champion – and they can be one for us.  We can’t promise that we’ll never say words to upset someone, but we can know that we can do something to put it right.

I’ll be making a start on that t-shirt this week – and you?  What would you try again?  It might not be as far out of reach as you think.