Revelations and Resolutions

Can we all just agree that, in the sewing community, we all make our “New Year’s Sewing Resolutions” in June, just after Me Made May?

It makes much more sense!

Here’s some of my Me Made May 2019 action:

And some more…

Although Me Made May is the very reason that I know how to sew, this is only the second year that I’ve participated . You see, somehow, for the first five years or so of my sewing life, I didn’t know what instagram was and didn’t actually realise there was this supportive community of fellow sewists out there.

Once I discovered this online world, my first Me Made May (2018) was filled, mostly, with excitement to be participating.

My second Me Made May, well that’s another story altogether.

The Curated Closet

It just so happened that, during this Me Made May, I picked up a copy of The Curated Closet by Anuschka Rees.

This wasn’t a conscious “I need to reflect about my wardrobe habits moment”. More an impulse “this-could-be-interesting-why-not” purchase…

Aren’t I a good little consumer…

So I started to work through some of it’s activities and idea. And Me Made May is a great time to do this because you’re already thinking a little harder about what you’re wearing each day anyway. And maybe you’re already taking helpful photos!

Curated Closet: Version Lite

Now, I’m the first to admit that I’ve only done a ‘Curated Closet’ lite here. Cuz, let’s be honest, I’m a full-time working Mum who’s still trying to carve out some time to actually sew.

I don’t have an afternoon to find inspiration, an afternoon to go to the store and try on clothes, an afternoon to clean out my closet…

There just ain’t that many free afternoons in my life!

But, regardless of my lite-version of it, ummm, the Curated Closet still kind of blew my mind.

By making me realise a few things about my wardrobe and sewing practice which, well, should have been bleeding obvious!

My starting point

I always had zero interest in “fashion”.

Whatever that is.

As a nerdy, bookish, overweight kid who was entirely uncomfortable with her body and had no idea how to dress it, I almost deliberately cultivated a belief that clothes and fashion were frivolous as a defensive mechanism.

So, it came as a shock to me when I fell head over heels in love with sewing.

And with textiles.

And realized how wrong I had been.

The idea that the clothes I wear can genuinely bring me excitement and joy was a wonderful revelation.

But, at the outset, I always felt like I started my sewing journey a bit behind the 8-ball. I didn’t know what I liked or what suited my body or what was a knit fabric or my boat necks from my crew necks.

But, stumbling across The Curated Closet this Me Made May, it dawned on me that while, over 6 years or so of sewing, my knowledge of garments and textiles has grown by several magnitudes, I feel as though I’ve made very little progress in building a wardrobe that makes me feel stylish.

Personal style

Of course, having a “personal style” is entirely an “extra”.

No-one needs it. It likely doesn’t amount to much. And it’s perfectly possible to love and enjoy clothes and dressing and sewing while not giving a toss about cultivating a personal style.

And perhaps the entire concept of a “personal style” is useless, unnecessary, derivative, whatever. What would I know?

All I do know for sure is that I am craving more coherence in my wardrobe.

Big time!

This Me Made May made me realise that I am fortunate and privileged enough to have a closet filled with individual garments that I mostly made with my own two hands and that I genuinely adore.

But, and here’s the bit that surprised me, a physical wardrobe filled with individual garments that I love, doesn’t necessarily lead to a ‘wardrobe’ that I love.

To the contrary.

I look into my wardrobe and I feel overwhelmed by choice and colour and print.

And underwhelmed at the same time.

Because nothing makes me feel ‘stylish’.

I’d glance in IKEA catalogues at those minimalist “show” wardrobes of 8-10 garments in colour coordinating perfection and feel my heart soar.

Then I look at my own wardrobe explosion of every colour and shape and style imaginable and my brain hurts. A wardrobe stocked so full that it doesn’t matter if a garment falls off its hanger, the pressure of the garments around it will squeeze it from the side and keep it where it is, defying gravity…

I hear other people talking about ‘go to’ garments that they can always rely on to make them feel at their best. The kind of clothing you reach for at least once a week, if not more.

Me Made May brought home for me the fact that I own very few garments like that.

Despite 6 years of home sewing.

And 2 years of documenting that sewing on this blog.

F-

And, frankly, at first, all these realisations made me feel like an enormous failure.

Despite the hundreds of hours I had committed to building a wardrobe with my own two hands, I didn’t feel great in much of it. I didn’t open up those wardrobe doors with a smile and sense of possibility (cuz, that’s what we’re all aiming for at 0630am, right?)

I devote hundreds of hours to sewing clothes but it never crossed my mind before to take 3-4 hours to think about how I dress and what kinds of things I feel best when wearing.

What the????

I hope I’m standing alone here and that you guys have all doing this whole sewing shazam in a far more thoughtful way than me!

But I guess encouraging these kinds of thoughts about our sewing consumption is exactly what Me Made May is about.

The opposite of style

And looking at this explosion of a wardrobe, I felt as though I have been getting swept away by a consumerist tsunami of fabric and new patterns …

I was the ultimate kid in the candy store.

How could I possibly be reasonably expected to identify what kind of candy suited me best when it was just all so tooth-achingly delicious.

So, I have invested some much-needed time into thinking of what kind of outfits take my breath away when I see them. And how I could dress in a way that makes me feel confident and myself.

And, so, yes, I was pretty surprised to realise that, even though I have a wardrobe that’s made up of 80% dresses:

What was it that I kept pinning as favourite outfits on Pinterest?

Separates, separates and more separates…

And, yes, I was surprised that, for someone who thought they loved prints and colours, all I kept wanting to look at were solids.

Fairly muted ones at that.

(Don’t worry, though, not all is lost, I am undoubtedly, unashamedly and wholeheartedly still in love with all form of stripe)

I get knocked down…

So, at first, I was feeling pretty down about all this, but now I’ve moved on to re-invigorated.

I’ve finally got the chance to think about this properly. Better late than never!

When I sometimes think “damn, things could have been different if I’d discovered the joy of sewing during the first 30 years of my life”, I like to remind myself “well, it could also have been different if you never discovered sewing at all”.

So I’m going to try to use the same mind set here.

So, just on the off chance that you’re in any way interested, here’s my Pinterest board of the kinds of things that I wish were wearing every day.

The Curated Closet suggests that it’s useful to try to define your style, although that definition doesn’t have to make sense to anyone else other than yourself.

I guess I think of this as “Slightly preppy minimalist en vacances à Paris“.

As I said, it doesn’t have to make sense to anyone but me…

Silhouette me up

The Curated Closet provides you with a few tools you can use to think about and organise your closet.

An obvious one is in terms of a colour palette, which I’d already thought about before. Here’s my ideal colour palette:

(Represented in linen samples from The Fabric Store, which is pretty much my ideal fabric palette!!)

But what I found most useful and new to me was thinking of my wardrobe in terms of silhouettes.

I would say that the silhouettes I am most attracted to are:

• statement dress (with not much else in terms of accessories);
• high waisted wide-legged pants/culottes with looser fitting tucked in tops;
• more tailored pants (high-waisted or otherwise) with button-down shirts and blazers
• Midi-length skirt with cropped or tucked in tops.

Thinking in terms of silhouettes brought about a few revelations.

For example, I often feel that I don’t have a stylish ‘outfit’ because even if my ‘inside outfit’ is nice, I have to wear some kind of jacket/outerwear on top and that lets me down…

Cuz it’s cold and rainy in the Netherlands.

Almost always.

Well, looking at that list of silhouettes, it’s mostly all high-waisted. Yet, I don’t own a single piece of outerwear that is more cropped in order to complement that silhouette properly.

Duh!

And here I’d been for years buying and making expensive coats, only to have them make me feel frumpy.

This is just one example of how I feel like a light has been turned on…

Thinking of silhouettes really made me realise that much of what’s in my wardrobe is out of proportion to what I want to be wearing. Coming of age in the era of low-rise jeans, I haven’t been able to escape the mind-set that tops and sweaters are supposed to be hip length. Making them look very, well, not at all properly proportioned, with the high-waisted garments I prefer to wear today.

Sometimes one-at-a-time ain’t best

But, by approaching my wardrobe and sewing practice one-garment-at-a-time, I just wasn’t seeing these kind of obvious-in-retrospect details.

Why didn’t someone tell me that there was a better way to be building a wardrobe????

In all seriousness, this is how bad my one-at-a-time approach had become. I’d sewn a garment that didn’t really work and that I felt a bit “meh” about it. So I thought to myself, “maybe I’d like it better if I had the perfect pair of black skinny jeans to wear with it”. So then I’d set out to sew those skinny jeans.

Not because I needed it or that it filled a gap or coordinated properly with the rest of my wardrobe or cuz I really like wearing skinny jeans all that much but just to try to make myself dislike the previous “meh make” a bit less.

Talk about the woman who swallowed a fly!

At least I’m stopping before the horse.

I hope…

Glass half …

So, the bad news – I’d say I feel that about half of my me-made wardrobe has me feeling totally “meh” right now.

(My husband is secretly doing a happy dance – he never has to look at another floral ‘party’ dress again!!! Speaking of which – am I the only one who feels that their sewing journey has gone like this over time: from (1) Skirts as a gateway drug to (2) Party dresses that my 8 year old self would have loved to (3) I want to dress like Heather Lou of Closet Case Patterns to (4) well, who knows, as this post shows, it’s a definite work in progress!).

Still, the good news, is that about half of my closet is entirely consistent with the personal style I want to express and has the kind of coherence I am craving.

Even better, plenty (although not all, cue the crocodile tears) of the fabrics I’ve been hoarding of late are entirely consistent with this idea of building a stylish new Beck.

Taking stock

So I’m now really trying to take stock and critically assess my sewing queue. Which means that I’ve been rethinking the fabric/pattern pairing I had planned for a lot of my stash.

For example, this fabric had been slated to become a Meridian Dress from Papercut Patterns.

But, now, I think I will get more wear out of it as a pair of high-waisted tailored trousers which I could then pair with a range of blue and cream toned button-down shirts or tops.

I had planned for this gorgeous fabric to become a Sapporo Coat.

But, looking at those silhouettes above, no matter how much I love the idea of the Sapporo Coat, I don’t see it working with these silhouettes without adding to my dowdy coat dilemma. The silhouette where I really see the Sapporo Coat coming into its own is with skinny jeans. And, while I have some cuz, you know, I live on Earth, I don’t really like to wear them.

The Curated Closet has made me realise that I don’t have to…

So instead of a Sapporo Coat, I want to make a dramatic big skirt with a matching cropped top. Worn together, with heels, I’m ready to party. For the one time each decade that happens.

But worn separately, each fits into those silhouettes set out above and can be dressed down.

At least we sewists have a massive advantage over the general population. All I’m really having to do is re-think how I want to use my already existing fabric stash to achieve the results I want. I’m not having to actually ‘buy’ a new wardrobe from scratch. The constituent elements are right there.

And we can re-fashion too!! Expect to see some cropping of existing wardrobe items in my future.

And there are sewing revelations too…

And, you know what, it hasn’t just been wardrobe revelations.

The Curated Closet and Me Made May has also given me revelations into my sewing practice.

About “how I sew”, not just “what I sew”.

As I was wondering why it is that I don’t feel that I have that many garments that I truly love and want to wear all the time, I noticed myself reaching for my denim Audrey jacket but then pulling back, thinking, “no, the top-stitching is all wonky on that one” or reaching for a dress and thinking “no, I messed up that collar so there’s a little bit of the over-locking visible when the top button is undone”.

The entire time I’ve been sewing, I’ve actively prided myself on not being a perfectionist sewist. On embracing the errors. I’ve been firmly in the “near enough is good enough” camp.

Don’t worry, Beck, you made it, so you’ll love it anyway.

And this is true.

To an extent.

But I’ve now realised that once that initial love-at-first-sight adrenaline- fueled rush of finishing a new garment wears off, those little things that I swore to myself I would never even notice, can actually start to bug me.

And, over time, they even stop me from wearing the garments.

So, I need to actually make a conscious effort to not be quite so “near enough is good enough”.

That’s not to say that I will chase perfections. Cuz that’s just not realistic.

But that I need to realise that a little bit of unpicking or re-cutting now when things go wrong will give me months or years more wear in the future.

And I may even start muslin-ing potentially tricky things – like new pants patterns, for example!

So, yeah, I’m gonna work on all that.

The overlocker is not my friend

The other thing I’ve realised is that, in order to enhance the longevity of my me-mades, I need to think more carefully about how I finish my garments.

This one is connected to the fact that my weight fluctuates dramatically. It always has. It likely always will. I just go through multi-year cycles in which I will manage to maintain my weight, then I will become stressed or overwhelmed by something in life, which will lead to the gaining of 10-15 kg, then I will manage to get in a healthier head space and eventually lose most of it. Then I’ll hover for a few years until the next challenging moment in life sets me spiralling again. I’ve been through this cycle over 3-4 years intervals about 5 times in my adult life now.

I know a pattern when I see one.

The point of all this over-sharing is to say that the garments in my closet often span 2-3 size ranges. Obviously meaning that I don’t fit into all of it at any given time, but I’ve always regretted it in the past when I’ve thrown away clothes that were the wrong size at the time but which, eventually, I always end up needing again at another point in the cycle.

Now the advantage of sewing is that it’s supposed to give me some flexibility to take things in and out and make changes to account for this.

Right?

Well, it’s not easy, if you’ve been taking lazy sewing shortcuts.

Like me.

Sometimes, I just serge my seams to join them instead of sewing them and then finishing them. Even with wovens. And I serge every seam allowance together, rather than separately. These habits make it pretty much impossible to unpick seams to add in a bit more wriggle room into garments.

So, from now on, I promise I will sew my seams on my sewing machine and finish all seams separately, so that it is actually feasible to unpick seams and make a few minor modifications to add ‘wriggle room’ in the future if need be.

Do you “sew everything”?

The other lesson that I’ve taken from Me Made May and looking at my wardrobe with fresh eyes is that I don’t have to sew everything.

Despite, as mentioned above, the fact that I’ve been comically ignorant of the kinds of coats which best fit the types of silhouettes I want to be wearing, I own a lot of coats. I’ve sewn quite a few too: the Hemisferic Coat, the Rumana Coat, the Opium Coat, the Veste Eagle.

Yet, on these garments, more than any other kind, I feel that they each have problems that mean I don’t really want to reach for them. On my Rumana Coat, I messed up the buttons. The finishing of my attempt at bound buttonholes looks very home-made and, it turns out, my buttonholes are too big for buttons, so it’s really hard to keep the coat closed. The hems on my Hemisferic Coat look the opposite of crisp and the wool has pilled quite heavily.

Coats are a huuuge time suck as a sewing project. They involve especially expensive fabrics. If I feel that, despite my best efforts, I’m not actually getting results that I am satisfied with out of this kind of project, I’ve realised that it’s actually OK to simply buy my coats and use precious sewing time for other types of garments.

Granted, after my awesome Jasika Blazer #blazerofglory :-), I may have developed enough skills that I can do much better at this type of project in the future, but if that’s not where I prefer to devote my sewing time, that’s entirely OK.

Ummm, ok, so, this has been quite a long-winded reflection…

Sew, where does this leave me?

I guess I’m at the beginning of a journey.

An awakening.

I’m going to try to build myself a more careful wardrobe. One which is considered enough that it will actually last the years and years that the kind of high-quality fabrics I sew with should be able to last. One that co-ordinates and cohesively presents a look that feels stylish to me.

Cuz, really, the only person ‘personal style’ matters to is yourself.

And if you see me trying to sew another coat, please shake me until I come to my senses.

Or send me a link to this blog post.

Whichever’s easier…

Oh and, finally, a little P.S! If you like to get your blog hits through Bloglovin’, feel free to follow me over there: you can find me here. And you can find me on Instagram here.