Readers,
There is something Jack and I say to each other at dinnertime some nights, when we’ve cooked something that’s filled the kitchen with a delicious smell most of the afternoon, like a potato, leek and cabbage soup that feels perfect for a snowy January evening.
As we ladle soup into our bowls with rising anticipation of a satisfying meal, one of us may say,
“This will never make it onto the magazine cover.”
Which means, This may smell good, taste good, and nourish both body and soul, but it’s lacking in the looks department, so many people will pass this up. The joke is on them. Look at what they’re missing out on!
I thought of this little scenario as I contemplated this past year of getting things sewn: 2018 will never make it onto the magazine cover.
No way.
Because it was a very potato-soup kind of year:
Spectacular? No.
But nourishing? Yes.
For me, 2018 was hardly a stellar year for sewing production. From January to November I sewed all of three sleeveless blouses, from the same TNT pattern, for myself (and posted about only one); one shirt for Jack; and…I think ten placemats.
Woohoo.
And yet–developing a TNT blouse pattern so I could concentrate on improving my construction was progress.
Designing a shirt for Jack from the same yardage as my blouse , but different from my blouse, was a fun design challenge.
And figuring out how to make beautiful, useful placemats from my irreplaceable souvenir fabric was very satisfying.
2018 was the year of sewing pants muslins. I lost count of how many I sewed. If you save the fronts of a pants muslin, rip out the backs, and cut and sew on new backs, is that a new muslin, or not? By anyone’s count, I made a lot of muslins from January through September. Dozens.
Then I took lots of photos of myself in these muslins–front, sides, back–printed out the photos, scrutinized every drag line, read lots of pants-fitting advice, and tested methods of improving the fit. Sometimes I did make progress but never got to a satisfactory result on my own.
In 2018 I spent hundreds of hours studying, experimenting with, and documenting pants-fitting. This morning I pulled the binder of notes I kept, curious about how much it weighed: more than 2 1/2 pounds!
If only there were a direct relationship between the number of hours spent and the quality of the result, I should be able to claim a high level of expertise and sport a closetful of beautifully fitted pants. I did make three wearable tests with varying degrees of success after meetings with two sewing and fitting experts, as I wrote about in November. Then I took a break from pants–
–and sewed something completely different: living room draperies. November into early December the sewing room was a drapery workroom. What a wonderful project. I will write about it soon.
2018 was the year of the Goodbye Valentino Ready-to-Wear Fast, in which I was one of about a thousand participants. I steadfastly refrained from buying any ready-to-wear, which was not that difficult for me because most ready-to-wear clothes don’t fit anyway, so it was hardly a sacrifice.
However, merely stopping browsing and buying clothing did not turn me into a clothes-making maniac.
First of all, I had decided it was time to confront my bête noire, pants-fitting. That kept me occupied for months. I kept thinking I was awfully close to a decent fit and that soon I’d be fitting a handful of other carefully selected core-collection patterns for wardrobe capsules for every season. You know the rest of that story.
The RTW Fast was a way to nudge sewers toward realizing their clothes-sewing dreams, and many sewers did just that in 2018. Me? The value I gained was considerable, but not, as Jack and I would say, something that would rate magazine cover status.
Over the course of the year I wore the same clothes (plus the three summer blouses I made) again and again. And again.
In 2018 I gave myself no recourse to a temporary fix from one of my favorite consignment stores to tide me over till I had something I really liked. The results of limiting myself were:
- I wore more of what was in my closet, out of necessity.
- I created new outfits, out of necessity, and realized that some clothes were more versatile than I’d thought.
- I wore things I didn’t much like, just to avoid total boredom.
- I understood better than ever before what I didn’t like.
- I began editing down my wardrobe more decisively than ever before, based on condition, comfort, or style.
- I resolved never to have certain wardrobe items, like scratchy wool sweaters, ever again. I would just have to come up with alternatives that suited me.
- I noticed more than ever how certain colors were downright unflattering, or fell short of flattering, and decided to replace them only with colors that work for me and work with each other.
- I recognized even more I had put a great deal of effort into sewing garments that were technically good but wrong in proportion, color, pattern, or style and had created wardrobe orphans. This had to stop.
Over the course of the year my wardrobe grew more sparse, and much of what remained were simply placeholders till the day I sewed or bought things I liked and that went together.
But–what do I like? What does look good on me? What things do work well together in outfits and capsules? 2018 was a year I puzzled over these questions afresh.
2018 was also a year I thought a great deal about designing and managing projects. In January I wrote about Jon Acuff’s book Finish: Give Yourself the Gift of Done. I am not as sure as the author is that it’s perfectionism that stops people from finishing their projects.
I was probably still trying to figure out a better explanation than perfectionism when, in February, I wrote a behemoth of a post listing every factor I could think of that went into project design. It turns out there are a lot!
I am convinced there’s no one-size-fits-all process for getting things sewn because different people have different talents, experience, work styles, learning styles, aversions, and ambitions. Each of us has to work out our own path–possibly strewn with dozens of pants muslins–to determine the processes that work best for us. It may take longer than imagined, but it’s time well spent.
That conclusion might not get approved by the magazine cover committee–but they don’t know what they’re missing, do they?
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