You Can't Make an Ugly Pair of Pants Without Breaking a Few Hideous Fabrics.

This fabric, for sale on etsy.com, is a near-exact replica.

When I was a senior in high school, I took a class that was somewhat optimistically called "Fashion Design." Having spent over three years in the school, I was more than a little surprised to find it among the course offerings, and downright shocked to learn that our school boasted a room full of sewing machines. There was even a teacher! She came complete with denim dresses and espadrilles.

The entire situation raised several pressing questions: Who was this teacher, and why was she never seen outside of the fashion design classroom? Why did no one else know about the sewing machines? Given the retro nature of both the machines and the teacher, were we, in fact, entering a space/time wormhole of alternate reality every time we went to class?

I never got an answer to any of these questions, or figured out whether I am a "summer" or "fall." I did, however, learn how to sew, a fact which renders Fashion Design one of the top 5 most useful classes I ever took.

The first garment of clothing I ever made was a pair of drawstring pajama shorts. These, I thought, would be stunning in a lovely black fabric sprinkled with a subtle bowling motif.

Needless to say, the project was somewhat doomed from the start.

However, I sat down with my pattern and my pins, my scissors and my fabric, and got started.

If you've ever done this, you know that, initially, your fabric, to which you have painstakingly pinned little bits of brown tissue paper, looks less like an article of clothing and more like the kind of puzzle people have to do in corporate team-building activities. None of the individual shapes look anything like any clothing you've ever seen before, and it's nearly impossible to keep track of each of them, let alone to have any idea where they're going to end up in the final product.

At one point, sure I'd done everything wrong, I very nearly threw the stupid thing in the trash.

But something happened as I started pinning and sewing each of those pieces together. Suddenly, where before I'd had a pile of junk, I now had a leg hole. And then a waistband. And then another leg hole. And then the single most hideous pair of bowling-themed homemade drawstring pajama shorts ever to grace the planet.

And you know what? I actually wore them. I was that proud of myself.

That moment, when I looked down at this mess in my hands and realized it was becoming something, was a revelation. Where before there had been parts, now there was a whole. And, as ugly as those pajama shorts were, they were greater than the sum of their parts.

Sometimes we get the sense that creations land in artists' laps, fully formed, delivered on a silver platter from Muse Central.

But creation, artistic or otherwise, involves work, time, and at least one moment (if not many) in which you look down at the pile of crap you've been sweating over for days and think, "I would be doing the world a favor if I burned this and became an accountant instead."

But, if you perservere, you may just end up with a masterpiece. Or a pair of shorts that makes your ass look huge and saggy.

-Lex