What I've learned from zucchini

It's an interesting title. It was meant to catch your eye so you don't overlook the AMAZING and emotional synopsis that I am about to tell.

So there's this 5th grade Thanksgiving play. It will be filled with talking and singing gourds and poultry. Some of those being zucchini. I, being of a pretty creative capacity, had signed up to make a few...ok, not a few, it is way too many, costumes to replace the ingenious butcher paper squash and turkeys. The old costumes were falling apart. Elmer's glue can only hold for so long. New costumes needed to be made to last for the rest of the life of the play. I had some material in my rafters. I have a sewing machine, I also have a mom and mother-in-law that have some knowledge of sewing.

My mom did interior design and professionally made quilts, coverlets, chair covers, curtains... She also made most of my wardrobe while I was in elementary school (that is, until I got too fat and had to start wearing my Dad's t-shirts to school)....I guess I was thinking that I'd have an innate ability to sew. I spent many hours in front of her sewing machine making scrunchies and odd-shaped pillows. I even had my own Cabbage Patch sewing machine when I was 10.

Here's what I first learned. As soon as I sat down to make new patterns, I quickly realized that I just didn't have the sewing knowledge to make any complicated design. The turkey costumes were put aside because they were just too difficult for me to create in my mind as well as in felt. Wings and tail feathers for 8+ turkeys...all under budget (pretty much $0) was not an easy task.

I moved onto something that looked a little less complicated. The zucchini. 2nd, I learned that a zucchini can look a lot like a pickle if you choose the wrong color and size. I didn't want people to think that I was a failure by sending pickles to the Thanksgiving play. 3rd, I learned that a zucchini is not only green. It has many other shades of white and yellow. I had to make sure to protect the integrity of the "Cucurbita pepo". I used fabric paint to recreate the natural beauty lines and spots along the deep green flesh. 4th, I re-learned that I can't sew like my mother. Maybe it was because I wasn't using her machine (I don't think that was the case) or maybe it was that I had broken the foot pad that keeps the fabric from moving around while the machine stitches (I don't think that was the case either). I think it was because I am an amateur seamstress...I was gonna write "amateur sewer", but we all know that "sewer" is also, like, the thing that our poopies go to after we flush...LOL!

Yes, that was lesson 5. Sewer and sewer (one that sews) are the same word.

I'll end with this. I greatly admire the craftiness of the person that made the construction paper costumes. I also have great respect for parents that volunteer at my boys' schools. They take on projects just like this one all of the time. A little stressful and a little frustrating at times, but I know that my kids, as well as future 5th graders, will long for the day when they can be the zucchini in the school play because the costumes are "Totally RAD" (as a boy in class yelled out when I took them in to show them off).