Pajama Shorts Part 2 (AKA Pattern woes)

I bought a pattern and some fabric (you can read about it in this post here) in order to make some pajama shorts.  Today I woke up excited to finish the whole project in a few hours.  I definitely need to work on being a little more realistic when it comes to what I can accomplish right now--I've always been bad at estimating the time things will take me but I'm not usually this far off. And with that note I'll give you a quick tutorial of what I did:

First I opened the packet took everything out and stared at it completely lost for a huge amount of time (if I was to do this again, I would take this step a bit faster). I ended up spending a lot of time looking up how to read a pattern, I found this video especially helpful. 

After I was done feeling completely overwhelmed and lost, I started by cutting loosely around the pattern I wanted. 

They said you should iron the pattern pieces--and I really tried but my iron sometimes leaks water which I was afraid was going to ruin the pattern. That's what you get from a free iron I guess. In the future I'll have to buy a nicer iron that won't ruin things. 

After looking at the pattern for awhile I realized that to get to the size I needed I'd have to cut off all the larger sizes, ruining any option of using a larger size.  I got stuck again for awhile trying to decide to do. I cam up with the idea to try using wax paper, I had to tape two long strips together to be able to fit the whole thing.

It worked pretty well--I'm not sure if there's a better way to do what I did but this worked well enough for me. I transferred all the inner markings on as well. Then cut the whole thing out.

Next I put my fabric facing the right way and used my ruler to line up the grain line with the fabric grain. This is important because it lessens the chance of fraying and helps it fall in the right way.

Next I pinned the wax paper in place to the fabric and started cutting. I used my rotary cutter and ruler for the long straight edges and my scissors more on the curves or the trickier, little spots. 

After getting it all cut out, I transferred all the markings from the pattern to the fabric using my water soluble pen.  I cut out the pattern for the waist band and followed all the steps--cutting, pinning, cutting, and marking.

For the spots in the middle of the waist band I poked needles through the pattern and fabric so when I flipped it over I could mark where they were.

See? So ingenious if I say so myself. This is as far as I decided to go for today.  It really shouldn't take very long but it took me a huge amount of time to get the courage to start because it seemed horribly daunting.

This was the day where my enthusiasm got lessened a bit when I realized that despite my good intentions and excitement I really have no clue what I'm doing currently.  I still really want to finish this project and learn how to sew I think this was the first moment where it struck me that this is going to be hard, like really hard.

So far I have still been very motivated to learn and patient enough with myself so when it takes a lot longer than expected I keep moving forward. I hope I can keep this patience with myself long enough to get good enough that I don't ever need to be this patient again!

Those of you who sew: do you do anything like my wax paper invention? Any one have a similar feeling of dread when you opened your first pattern packet? How do you keep your enthusiasm for sewing alive?