Encouraging to the last, Lorna Daly makes no comment on my dress that’s frayed, cut jaggedly and more closely resembles a potato sack than the cute summer mini I was aiming for. “I think maybe we could fit in a dart here,” Daly says. Darts are essential for turning two-dimensional fabric into a three-dimensional shape that actually fits a body. In my many hours of self-taught sewing, darts were something I fearfully avoided. With a triangular ruler, Daly uses blue tailor’s chalk to mark in the darts she instinctively knows will work. “Sew from here to here and here to here,” she says, before moving off to help someone else. I run the fabric under the machine following her blue chalky lines. Two darts appear. The sack is a dress. After four months of solo sewing with only online tutorials for guidance, I’ve come to a drop-in class at the When Poppy Met Daisy sewing school on Dublin’s Capel Street. The rooms are bright, with all the accoutrements of an atelier: fabric draping, scissors hanging, irons steaming and thousands of tiny metal pins in neat boxes. At one sewing station, Anastasiya Fedoruk is constructing a delicate bodice in a maroon polka dot fabric. This is her fourth sewing class. Beside her, Tuyen Tran is working on a tie-back midi dress in a ditsy floral print. Tuyen tells me she always felt too intimidated to make her own clothes, but after a six-week dressmaking course with Daly, she has fallen in love with the process. Daly, who graduated from the Grafton Academy of Fashion Design, worked in the industry in London for a few years before returning home and founding When Poppy Met Daisy in 2011. “There was nothing like it in Dublin at the time, where you could dip your toe into fashion design without having to do a third-level degree,” she says. Lorna Daly at a sewing class with Adie Clarke. Photograph: Alan Betson/The Irish Times