When you first start sewing, it’s easy to see improvement from project to project. Then there will come a time when your projects are not showing improvement as readily. You will still have wonky seams, wavy hems, and bowed corners. You will make project after project with new issues arising every time. It can be frustrating because it’s much harder to see progress when it’s not as dramatic as the early stages. A plateau in sewing skills doesn’t mean you aren’t improving anymore. It’s more likely that your critical eye has improved. You are noticing wavy topstitching, puckered hems, and lumpy facings that you wouldn’t have seen a month ago.
One of the best ways to combat this is to not just look at finished garments for signs of improvement. A dress or top is just too much to focus on at a time. If your seams are still off, try just practicing curves on some scraps of fabric. If you’re still having trouble setting in sleeves, try easing a sleeve cap to a sleeve hole on a scrap. This will give you a better picture of whether your skills are improving or not. Either you made that curve smooth, or you didn’t. Either that fabric fed smoothly, or it didn’t. That’s how you know you are getting out of the rut.
One of the big errors you can make when you feel like you are in a rut is to keep starting new projects in an effort to feel better about your abilities. You have a half-finished dress, so you start a new top. Then you have a half-finished top, so you start a new skirt. Soon you have a table full of half-finished garments. It feels like you’re doing a lot, but you’re not really doing anything. The solution to improvement is to sit and work on your problems. If you’re having trouble with zippers, sew a few zippers into scrap fabric before going back to your garment. If you’re having trouble with your hems, try a few hems on scrap fabric. Yes, it’s more fun to cut out a new dress, but it’s not going to help you out as much as sewing hems will.
One of the easiest things you can do when you feel like you’re not improving is to make a quick practice schedule. Take 5 minutes to observe one of your past mistakes. What is the number one thing that is making it not ideal? Is it your seam allowances? Your pressing? Your fabric handling? Take 10 minutes to practice that one thing on some scrap fabric. Take 3-5 minutes to evaluate your practice pieces. Take the first one you made and the last one you made, and compare them. Is there any difference? Be specific. My stitching is much straighter when I don’t pull the fabric. My hems are lying flat when I press them from the inside first. Etc. etc.
If you can get feedback from others, this is a good time to ask people to take a look at your work. But instead of saying “what do you think of this?”, say “can you help me figure out why my collar is sitting crooked like this?”. The former will likely not give you the information you need to improve. The latter will give you something to work on. If you don’t have someone to ask, you can still get feedback by labeling your practice samples, photographing them, and then looking at them a few days later. Sometimes distance will help you see what you couldn’t see in the moment. Sewing is very easy to get feedback on because the results are very apparent in the fabric, the stitches, and the shape.
Sometimes when you feel like you’re hitting a wall is right before something clicks. It’s not that sewing suddenly gets easy, but it does get easier to recognize when you’re doing something wrong. You will anticipate when you’re pulling your fabric. You will recognize sooner when your seams are off. You will know if your issue is with your cutting, your pressing, or your speed. That is improvement, even if it doesn’t feel like it. Learning to recognize that is part of learning to sew.