The Great British Sewing Bee and the "Easy Button"

Bee!

The Great British Sewing Bee is back!  It's one of those shows I love to hate - it does everything wrong and yet I enjoy watching it every week (though mostly to yell at the screen about how they're DOING IT WRONG!).  I've been getting increasingly frustrated with it this time around because my favourite section of Waterstones in Cambridge has disappeared - this may seem a bit tangential, but trust me the two are connected for reasons which will become clear.
The main reason GBSB annoys me is because it announces itself about being about the best British sewers and about how much they learn every week as they are forced to do the various challenges.  These people may be learning some bits and pieces, but trust me: they are not the best sewers and they are not learning in any kind of meaningful sense.  We have a fantastic heritage of sewing in the UK and these people are not good ambassadors for it.  Don't get me wrong: they do some pretty cool stuff, and under pressures that are kind of insane, but that just doesn't compare to the centuries of artisan sewing we have in our culture.  To have a "children's week" where they do three challenges and that's it on children's wear?  Being able to do those challenges does not mean you can make children's clothing.  It means you can think and act fast under pressure and have a handful of basic skills and that's about it.  There is so much more to learning about how to design and draft and construct clothes and infinitely more work that's needed to be truly skillful.  I consider myself a rank beginner next to even the apprentices of Saville Row and they will spend their entire careers becoming masters of only one type of clothing.

Generic sewing image - because sewing is just needle, thread and fabric right?

This has been particularly getting me down recently because with the new series comes the new book.  It's full of projects from the series that you can do at home! Yay! Be just like the sewing bee'ers!  Buy yet another book of sewing projects where you'll maybe get around to starting one or two, maybe finish one, and have a pretty book on the shelf that you mean to get around to doing honest.  It's not even that most people who buy the book won't make anything from it - it's the fact they they're not teaching you how to sew, they are setting out steps for you to follow to make very specific items.  This is fine and dandy, but there are a million and one of this type of sewing book available - we really don't need any more and certainly not a new one every series.

You can actually buy this button from Staples from your home or office....though no one knows why....

I was reading a post on Modern Retro Woman (totally awesome blog about taking the best bits from the lifestyle of mid last century.  I wish I had the confidence and energy to try more of these ideas) lately on "How the Easy Button Hurts Us".  If you're not interested in reading the post it basically goes into how getting sucked into the mindset that you can do anything in "three! easy! steps!" encourages us to make grandiose plans with no real idea of how to get there and then when we hit road blocks we give up because our resilience has atrophied.

"For example, before I could make a tailored blazer when I was working on my custom sewing certificate, I needed to learn how to do things like, sew a seam, do pad stitching, roll a collar, master bound buttonholes and pockets, etc.  Each of those skills were tedious to learn but they were necessary for me to get to my final goal." - Modern Retro Woman

This perfectly illustrates my problem with the whole of GBSB and the project style sewing books.  It's the mindset of "follow these steps and you'll have this gorgeous thing" without any of the knowledge or skills to back up what you're doing.  For someone who has the knowledge and skills they're mildly entertaining, but not something you're going to spend any time or effort on because the projects have been specifically pitched to casual sewers.

Just a needle thread and some fabric....right?

So how do you learn those real fundamentals and build your sewing knowledge through to intermediate and advanced work?  There aren't college or university courses for sewing - fashion, yes loads; sewing, no, at least not in any coherent fashion.  The best I have been able to find are courses dotted around the country: creating a skirt block here, bra making there, couture finishes somewhere else, but no coherent path through learning how to sew at all.  The only way to get better at the skills of sewing is through teaching yourself with books or the internet.  The down side of that is you're still picking up odd bits of information here and there, never really even knowing what you should be looking for.

And that's why I'm annoyed at sewing bee and Waterstones.  Cambridge Waterstones was my favourite bookshop because it actually had a decent sized section on books that taught you skills rather than had steps to create projects.  And now it's gone: squeezed out by more three! easy! steps! books and a much much bigger fashion section.  Amazon exists to buy books once I know what I'm looking for, but it was so useful having a section to browse.  It was there that I would find books that made me realise I haven't even begun to scratch the surface of what's possible in sewing.

I don't want to use the easy button, but sometimes it feels like the world is conspiring against me.