Recently in my senior project experience, I had covid which was good and bad for multiple reasons regarding my project. I was able to have all the resources I needed at home to work on my project and a bunch of time. For example, all my sewing materials are at home and I had easy access to components of my bibliography. What I realized though, is that staying inside all day makes it very hard to be productive. I found trouble sewing for long periods of time during my experience with covid. In addition, I was not able to attend my senior seminar which limited what I could work on at home. 

While originally I wanted to focus my project on creating half items that were upcycled and half items made from scratch it’s hard to do that when I have little experience sewing with items from scratch and I have not had access to my senior seminar where I would get that help. Since I have become aware of this I have shifted my thinking towards my project and asked myself a question recently: How can I incorporate skills that will help me with sewing from scratch and learn new skills through upcycling when I am home. So far I have accomplished this by working on a pair of pants where I took in the waist and bagginess of the pants and then upcycled them by sewing pockets on the outside of the pants. From that project, I was able to learn new sewing techniques such as taking in a waist and adjusting the size. Now I am working on sewing sleeves on an old shirt. I have begun to shift my thinking toward this mainly because I have not been able to attend my senior seminar. 

Shifting my thinking has made my goals for the project become more defined and specific. Instead of my goals being focused on creating items as a whole and how many items I will create I now am focused on learning specific skills and techniques that will help me with my sewing altogether. I have been able to learn new techniques through online tutorials. I have found them to be helpful but it’s definitely not as easy as being taught in person like in my senior seminar. 

I think that I’m proud of my project so far even though I had covid and couldn’t attend my senior seminar for two weeks. I am proud that I was able to teach myself new skills from home and incorporate them into my project. I still feel that in the last two weeks I was able to gain experience in terms of sewing and my project. I would however like to get back on track with sewing items from scratch because although I am ok with how my project has shifted I still want to sew a good amount of items from scratch. So I am very much looking forward to my senior seminar again.