I’ve always been an artistic person, but over the weekend, I decided to start a particularly ambitious sewing project.

Even though my sewing skills were a bit rusty, I did my research, planned out and sketched (to scale!) the pattern, and made a mock-up that fit, if I do say so myself, perfectly. When it came time to cut my pattern pieces out of the fabric, I quadruple-checked (if not more times) the dimensions of my fabric pieces before cutting the fabric.

All of this to say that I most definitely did my due diligence. I should also point out that I’ve been sewing for almost six years now, so despite it being quite a few months since I’ve properly sewed something, I have a decent idea of what I’m doing.

And yet, a million different things went wrong as I started my project.

First and foremost, even though I knew for a fact that my fabric was cotton (I’m starting to doubt this now), it was a lot more slippery and stretchy than it should have been. This meant that my cuts weren’t straight lines: I instead had a bunch of ragged edges that formed something that only remotely resembled a rectangle.

The second challenge? Sewing my fabric to the lining. For some reason, even though I used the same exact measurements (and checked everything a bajillion times), nothing lined up and everything started bunching really weird near the neckline (bye-bye, perfect v-neck…).

Then there were the uneven straps and the lopsided armholes and the fact that it might not even fit.

Finally, I got to the “fun” part. I taught myself how to gather fabric, painstakingly got the fabric to gather just the way I wanted it, pinned it to the top with (way too few) pins, and sewed everything down.

It looked perfect! Except for the part where it was on the wrong side of the fabric and the seam was exposed…

Yeah, I spent the next thirty minutes trying to carefully take the stitches out, got annoyed and ripped everything out, and ended up 1) undoing all my gathers and 2) making a teeny tiny (but still visible!) hole in the finished part of the top.

All this to say that even though I followed all the instructions in the video I watched to the T (and even though I had a pretty good idea of what I was doing), I still messed up a hundred and one times and my top is definitely not going to look perfect.

It is going to look done though.

And that’s what I wanted to talk about in today’s article (I guess I kinda buried the lede there): the fact that all we see online is the highlight reel.

There were so many mess ups, so many challenges, so many startovers, so many unexpected obstacles that came up as I was working on making this top and in my (if I do say so myself) extensive experience watching craft videos on Instagram and YouTube, I have never seen a creator make so many mistakes.

I’ll be completely honest: at multiple points, I questioned if I was even doing things properly to start with and if I should just give up, instead of wasting fabric, time, and thread.

I didn’t though and I’m glad for that.

I feel like too often we compare ourselves to someone else’s highlight reel, to someone’s curated, carefully edited, and perfectly posed stories or reels or posts and we forget to remember all the practice and trial-and-error that went into it.

Social media has an eerie way of making us feel and seem imperfect because we never get to see the imperfections and flaws on the other side of the screen.

So the next time you get inspired by something online and decide to do or make something, remember there is 100% More to the Story than what you are seeing. So go easy on yourself and celebrate the small wins!

I however, will, be celebrating on the weekend when I’m (hopefully!) done with this (super annoying) project.