Beautiful Miters

I taught myself how to sew. I didn’t have the wise hands or words of a more experienced sewer helping me along.  I learned what I can now do from books and from making lots of really stupid mistakes.
Many skills that others learn in home- ec, or in a moment from someone more experienced have been mastered by me, only after banging m,y head against the problem often and over a period of a decade or two.

Mitering, doing that lovely turn on a trim that ends up with a perfect diagonal line in the corner was for many years a skill that was woefully beyond me. I would have to stop at the corner, take a deep breath and then come up with a solution that wasn’t all that ugly and messy. I did the best I could.

I used to read and re read the directions in my various sewing books with as much care as I used to give to parsing a segment of Talmud. There are several different fail safe methods of achieving a perfect miter. I failed at all of the various method.


This latest batch of challah covers are all edged with trim. Each challah cover has eight corners to miter.All of the corners have been either perfectly or nearly perfectly mitered. I must confess though, I couldn’t possibly tell you exactly what my method is.

What I can say, is that each of the ugly failures that I have done in the past have more to do with my success than carefully reading  the supposedly fool proof methods.  It’s OK to fail and fail often. eventually, you will figure it out.