Organising My Making Ideas: The Everyday Wardrobe Journal pt. 1

I have long been obsessed with the idea of the Everyday Wardrobe - the idea of spending my making time on items I actually wear. Over on my Patreon, I have devoted no less than 16 entries to the art of thinking through what we wear, how we wear our clothes, and what we choose to wear, but today I’m back here on my blog to share my Everyday Wardrobe Journal with you. It’s a relatively new tool to me, but I’m so excited to show you my thought processes.

The aim of setting up an Everyday Wardrobe Journal? It’s to guide me through my making year: it’ll help me remember what I need in my wardrobe and what I definitely do not need. My making time is finite and I have decided to spend it more thoughtfully and mindfully.

Caveats before we get started:

• I dress-make as well as knit, so I do include my dress-making in my journal. However, it’s easy to customise to just include your craft of choice (and also help you purchase the right shop-bought clothes instead of those pesky impulse purchases!).

• I work as a knitwear designer, so I include my design plans in my journal. That means rather than you getting pattern names to possibly hunt down, you’ll see places in which I write OWN. It just means this is a pattern I need to design/work out.

This is the basic set-up. On the left, I have a page devoted to my colour palette and personal style (these things will be familiar to Patreons) and on the right I have a sort of “wish list” breakdown where I analyse what I want, what I need, and what I make. I’ll break down what these two pages mean today and next week I’ll show you how I organise the rest of the Everyday Wardrobe Journal.

This is my master page.

This page sets out what colours I usually wear, and also tries to explain my personal style in a way that’ll help me assess whether a project is right for me or not. It might look fun, but what’s the point of making something if I’ll never wear it?

Colours: I have divided my wardrobe into Neutrals, Contrasts, and Accents. Don’t worry too much about the Main/Secondary categories - I get a bit finickity about colours and not everybody is like me!

Neutrals: I have chosen navy and brown as my neutrals. These are the basic colours in my wardrobe that go with everything else and which I tend to use for most of my core clothes.

Other people’s examples might be greys, creams, tans, black, or even dark, dark green.

Contrasts: I have chosen mustard yellow and hot pink as my contrasts. They’re the everyday additions that I love adding to my outfits. I would have added teal too, except I have teal hair and it’d be a bit much to have teal-on-teal! I tend to use contrasts for my big makes such as shirts, sweaters and cardigans - though occasionally I’ll add some summer culottes to the mix (as you can see from the header photo).

Other people’s examples might be purples, blues, navy (one person’s neutral is another person’s contrast!), moss greens, wine reds, etc.

Accents: These are the pops of colours I add to an outfit. Earrings, bags, hats, mitts, belts etc. I have added teal and rust as my main accents. When I dress-make, I love fabric that’s either one of my neutrals or my contrasts but which also has one of my accent colours in the pattern.

Other people’s examples might be pink, neon, red, periwinkle etc. It all depends upon your personal style.

You can probably guess that I wear my Catterline sweater a lot!

Then we come to style which is harder to explain briefly. I have narrowed down my style preferences in a way that helps me understand what I should make: 1970s-meet-Bauhaus. It’s not super-accurate but it helps me. Having a shorthand style mantra makes it easy to decide I should not make a cute 1950s tea dress nor should I design a neon-coloured brioche sweater dress. My note on materials>ornamentation also reminds me that I care a lot about the materials I use and that I’m more inclined to wear something which showcases the materials rather than obscure them with sequins, ruffles, or textured yarn/fabric.

Trying to figure out your personal style and making style takes time, but it’s worth it as you’ll stop using your Making time on things you’ll never use!

Now for the “wish list” page which is one that I use to figure out what I should be spending my time doing! You might think of it as a matrix.

I have three boxes: Want, Need, and Making - and then a fourth box that contains my current stash obsessions.

The things I want are not necessarily the things I need, and vice versa. You can see that I need two cosy trousers for the Scottish winter, but I want a cropped navy sweater. Those things are not the same, so some decisions need to be made. I also have my stash that reveals I do indeed have the perfect fabric for some navy cord culottes - so that project is moved into my Making box.

I constantly refer to the Want and Need boxes to figure out what should be next on my making list, and it’s especially helpful if I already have the materials in my stash. Rather than having one page of just Wants or Needs and my stash notes elsewhere, I can jump back and forth to balance my making plans.

Next week I’ll share more details from how I make the leap from Want, Need, Stash to the actual Making part, and I’ll share more spreads (including one of an actual project page).

Hope you found this interesting and maybe something that helps you in your own making journey!

Material History: Making A Cotton Shirt

I thought I’d share my latest makes with you before I continue with quite a serious topic. I have been using making as a way of therapy these past few months. I’ve mended blankets and pullovers, I’ve knitted, and I have been dress-making. This is the Willamette shirt from Hey June Handmade and I’ve made six of these shirts of the last month. It’s been intensely therapeutic to stick tiny needles into fabric and end up with something wearable. I squeezed this shirt out of 2 metres of handprinted Indian cotton and the result of one of those makes that feel intensely me.

But clothes do not happen in a vacuum and textiles are particularly important to this moment in time. The following post is an amended and abridged version of a piece I wrote for my Patreon followers (I discuss wool and linen in that post too).

So, let’s start by saying that cotton is not an innocent material.

I grew up reading Regency romance (and I still love these books as a rule). One of my early favourites was Caroline Courtney's Love Triumphant in which country mouse Harriet is whisked away to London to keep her cousin Sophy out of trouble. In the book there is an enchanting scene in which Harriet and Sophy are taken fabric-shopping by Sophy's mother. They avoid the expensive boutiques and instead head to a fabric hall frequented by merchants. Here they coo over expensive silks (some scandalously smuggled from revolutionary France which dates the action to mid-1790s) but eventually decide to buy metres of cotton which is much cheaper and thankfully very much in fashion. 

There is a lot to unpack here. 

After centuries of elaborate dress, the upper echelon of society finally embraced simple dresses around the 1790s. Marie Antionette arguably started the trend when she set up our own pretend-farm and walked around in ‘peasant garb’ but the trend continued long after her death. It spread across Europe and penetrated most social classes.

Cotton fabric was incredibly cheap thanks to cotton plantations in the colonies which relied on slave labour. Plain white was a firm favourite at first as it was seen as a mark of gentility (let’s just take a moment here to ponder that statement in context of where and how the fabric was produced) and was also reminiscent of the Greco-Roman sculptures that were fashionable at the time. Yet soon block printed fabric became de rigeour for fashionable ladies. Block printing was a technique that was immensely popular in another colony, India, and white cotton was the perfect material for this practice.

In fact, block printed cotton fabric became so popular that by the 1810s other fabrics began to imitate it. 

A few years back I was lucky enough to have a private viewing of the collection of tapa cloth held by the University of Glasgow. Tapa cloth is not a woven material, but made from beaten barkcloth by Pacific island cultures, and it is beautifully decorated with stencils or stamps. Most of the collections held by Western museums today are the remnants of what European travellers brought home from their 18th and 19th century travels — often missionaries or merchants — but tapa is still produced today throughout the Pacific. You might enjoy this Living Heritage site which gives voice to contemporary tapa makers.

I was struck by a particular sample from Hawaii dating to around 1810. The design was unusual and unlike any other tapa I had seen. The curator explained the tapa (or kapa, to use the Hawaiian term) was made to imitate the then-fashionable block printed cotton fabrics made in India and the Caribbean. It struck me as one of the saddest things I had ever seen: here was an example of a fabric that was so beautiful and exquisite, yet its maker sought to distance themselves from their own culture by imitating a fabric so deeply embedded in brutal colonialism. 

Cotton is one material that I cannot separate from its troubled story and as protesters take to the streets in jeans and tshirts, I see history in the making in more than one sense of the word: I see the East India Company importing calico and linen undermining domestic cloth production in the 18th century, I see the Industrial Revolution fuelling cotton plantations in North America and the Caribbean, I see slave ships sailing across the Atlantic fattening the wallets of European merchants, I see the indigo dyeing which was a major slave plantation crop in North Carolina, I see textile factories in Bangladesh collapse upon their underpaid workers instruments as they worked to bring Westerners cheap clothes. 

And so nowadays when I read my Regency romances or watch yet another Austen adaptation, I think of where the cloth for the dresses came from and how its wearers could afford them. And when I make a shirt out of handprinted Indian cotton, I recognise the layers of history I am wearing.

Textiles are so embedded in all this wretched history and as we wear clothes or make clothes, I truly believe it is important to understand the context within which we are doing these things. Who are we and what do our choices say about us?

The Red Jumpsuit & Other Things

What a year 2020 has been so far. I hope you are safe and that your loved ones are okay.

I’m writing this after almost two months from self-isolation. I continue to work from home, but all of my teaching engagements are cancelled/postponed. This is a tough time to be self-employed. My good friend Woolly Wormhead has written a long post detailing how the ongoing pandemic is affecting her. It is a very good read, and her observation about how the pandemic affects those of us with inabilities and disabilities really hit home. Right now my Patreon is keeping me afloat and I cannot thank people enough for their ongoing support. It makes such a huge difference both financially and also creatively. Thank you.

During the past two months I have had plenty of time to think about making and the role it plays in my mental health well-being. I find that making things gives me a sense of agency at a time when I might feel I have little or none. It is not the first time I have felt this, but I feel it very strongly right now. Making grounds me in the here and now: I feel my hands working with materials, and I see patterns and textures emerge. It is easy to feel one day is bleeding into another (this is an excellent article about memories, time, and the pandemic) but I can measure out my life by the things I make.

Right now I’m making a navy jumpsuit and I am in the middle of a major mending project. I still knit, but knitting requires concentration and focus on another level as it is my job. On the days I cannot conjure up any focus, I mend and dress-make.

(Now that I cannot head out for glamorous photo shoot locations, you get my backyard garden instead.)

Here is my slinky red jumpsuit.

I’ve long admired the Zadie Jumpsuit by Paper Theory Patterns. I took the plunge, printed out 55 pages and painstakingly stuck them together. Then I whipped up a toile in some ghastly polycotton I had kicking about and adjusted from there. The first Zadie I finished I made from some pretty Makower cotton fabric that I stashed back in my tea-dress wearing days. The end result looked and felt like fancy pyjamas, so I took another look in my fabric stash.

And this is where the red slinkiness comes in.

I found 2.5m of slinky red viscose with a very subtle woodgrain pattern. I’ll be honest: the fabric terrified me a bit as it was enormously slinky, drapey and silky. I also did not know if I had enough fabric. I was making a size 18 with a few adjustments (more on that later) which called for 2.80m of fabric. Paper Theory Patterns tend to be extremely conservative with fabric consumption and I’d read that people had been left with very little fabric.

So, I went outside on the landing where I could spread out all the fabric and play Tetris with the pattern pieces. Leaving off the long sleeves meant I should be okay, but I still had to be ingenious and make sure the fabric wouldn’t slide around on me. I ghost-traced all the pieces on the fabric with yellow chalk and then went inside to my tiny kitchen table where I spent the next few days carefully cutting out the various pieces.

Zadie is a really good sewing pattern. It has relatively few pieces, it comes together quickly, and it looks incredible on a variety of bodies. I just had to fight my urge to rush through the cutting process as I knew I needed to take time with my fabric.

I made adjustments between the toile and the fancy pyjamas version, and I used the same adjustments for the slinky red one:

• I raised the crotch by 3” both front and back

• I used light interfacing to stabilise the neckline (others suggest stay-stitching it before doing anything else, but my fabric was so slippery that I wanted extra stability) and also the top of the pockets.

• I lengthened the belt by 6” (which obviously made the fabric consumption extra fun — I opted to piece the extra length together from scraps)

Sewing the jumpsuit was a good learning experience. I was still terrified by the fabric, so I basted a lot (using the longest straight stitch on my sewing machine), pinned even more, and stitched the pieces together slowly. I opted for as much control as I could possibly get, though I never needed to pull out all the stops. I found the fabric beautiful to sew and the drape worked wonderfully with the pattern.

The only real snag I hit upon was the bias binding around the neckline. I’ve done bias-binding before on both quilts and on other dress-making projects, so I didn’t think it would be a major issue here as long as I pinned and pressed like a woman possessed. However, the fabric had other ideas. It simply did not want to be made into bias binding. No amount of cajoling or pressing helped. I did not have any fabric leftover to make facings, so instead I improvised (after consulting on Twitter). First I stitched the refusing-to-stay-pressed strip RS against RS, then I turned the strip over so it looked like bias binding and basted that %&^$£! piece of fabric in place. Stitching in the ditch kept the bias binding look on the RS and secured the fabric stitch on the WS.

Et voila! One slinky jumpsuit that fits like a dream. It is a date night outfit rather than something I’d wear everyday (a new & exciting addition to my wardrobe) and I’m proud of myself for using fabric that terrified me when I first saw it in my stash. If I recall correctly, I bought the fabric around 2011 in a sale for around £3 a metre, so that was a great purchase. Well done, past me!

I’m now working on a navy version of Zadie, using a heavier cotton/viscose mix that still has a lot of drape but which will also work as an everyday wardrobe staple. The fabric has a very slightly different RS and WS which has meant I’ve only been able to work on prep during daytime. I’m in the sewing stage now, though, so it should work up quicker now. I’ve lengthened the legs as I’m long-limbed and also drafted facings for the fronts which I think will work better in the long run. Patreon readers will know about my obsession with the everyday wardrobe and I’m thinking strategically about my dress-making even if it will be from my eclectic fabric stash.

I’ll be documenting my various makes here, so do stick around. It’s all terribly old school but I rather adore that. It’s a way of keeping myself sane during a period of time that is anything but sane. Let me know in the comments what helps you get through this extraordinary time.

Almost Time: This Thing of Paper Wraps Up & An Everyday Make

Behind the scenes work may already have commenced on This Thing of Paper, but the campaign still has a few hours left. If you want to pledge your support, be aware that one reward level has gone and only a few slots remain on others. People have asked me how I am feeling - it is difficult to explain but I will try once I have summed up what a most extraordinary community has achieved.

Thanks to people:

• This Thing of Paper will go into print!
• I will have a small, awesome team of people working on this project.
• The overall quality of the printed book has been enhanced.
• Sample knitters will help me cut down the production time of the book.
• I am able to apply to be a vendor at key UK knitting shows.
• We will have book launch parties in Central Scotland and in London, UK with periscope feeds.
• We will have a trunk show with Q&A in Manchester.

Isn't that incredible? When I launched the campaign, I hoped we could achieve the first two action points, but we've managed seven!

Answers to a few queries:

• LYS owners will be able to preorder This Thing of Paper approximately one month before publication.
• I already have a small army of sample knitters assembled, but thank you for thinking of me!
• I already have a technical editor and a copy editor onboard, but (again) thank you for thinking of me!
• You will see me less over the next six months or so, as I have a book to make! I am currently fully booked in terms of events and workshops until April 2017.
• If you weren't able to pledge support for This Thing of Paper, the book will be in print next year (estimated date: April 2017).
• Unfortunately I am not able to accept pledges outside of Kickstarter.

So, how do I feel? I keep going back to that word: overwhelming, but it fits. The whole experience has been very overwhelming. People have been so kind, so supportive, so generous, and so lovely.

The financial side of things is obviously fantastic (as you can see above!) but the emotional support has been equally amazing. And I think that's what you get from a crowdfunding effort: you get the emotional support too. And the emotional support is equally important to creatives like me who forget sometimes that we are not working in a vacuum. We are connected to a community of extraordinary people who like what we do - and something like this campaign has really brought that home.

Thank you so, so much. It means a lot as you will be able to tell by the next section.

One night last week I sat up late reflecting. The world has been a terribly bleak place of late, and my thoughts were swirling around the fact that my tiny, tiny corner is filled with the most extraordinary people: you are makers, knitters, writers, artists, lovers, dancers, thinkers & doers. And so I asked myself : how can we spread the goodness and kindness I experience in my everyday life? I don't pretend to have any answers, but I believe that we need to carry on being good, kind and open-hearted people. We need to challenge hate and fear when we see it - and to do so with love and compassion.

And then I went off to make myself a dress because I needed to create a space where I could refocus and recharge. Making stuff means that to me.

The dress is New Look 6262 - pardon the awful photo! It's a very straight-forward make, and I added pockets plus lengthened the sleeves. I used cotton lawn I had purchased from Abakhan when they had an excellent post-Christmas sale. I had three yards  but despite longer sleeves and pockets, I found I only used around 2.5 yards - with the fabric costing me around £3 per yard (I've seen it for sale elsewhere at triple the price!), that must be said to be quite a bargain!

Having said that, I don't find my lifestyle lends itself particularly well to cotton lawn dresses. Scotland is probably a bit too cold for this dress to be entirely practical and I nearly had a tear in the fabric when the brooch in the photo caught the fabric. I tend to get caught on stuff, so I'll be wanting to use slightly heavier fabric in the future.

The dress itself is fine, though I'm not crazy about gathered skirts. It was a quick make and it went together without a hitch. I opted to make fancy-pants facings, but that only took about fifteen minutes extra.

Would I make this pattern again? Probably - it is easy to wear, easy to make, and doesn't take much fabric. It is not the most exciting project ever, but that's okay. Sometimes you just want to make stuff and lose yourself in the process.

Cardigan is Hetty by Andi Satterlund knitted in Cascade 220. Everyday wardrobe for the win.

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Making & Doing: Shawl, Skirt & Teaching

Happier times ahead. We had a photo shoot yesterday for this asymmetrical shawl knitted in three colours of Ripples Crafts BFL 4ply. I'll be writing much more about this shawl later (including my source of inspiration, why it's the next instalment of Authors & Artists, and how it is constructed) but for now let's glance downwards..

Hello skirt! This is one of the first things I've whipped up since I started dress-making again. I made this skirt in just a few hours and it worked perfectly for the photo shoot.

I use the super-simple Burda 6682 and made View B. The fabric is a slightly stretchy cotton poplin I found in a remnant bin in Glasgow's Mandors. I had around 0.75m and still managed to eke out a knee-length skirt. The construction couldn't be simpler: darts front & back, side & back seams, zipper, waistband, hem, done. I had never inserted a regular zipper before (it's always been invisible zips until now) but even that went without a hitch. I'm not entirely happy with how the waistband was attached - it was easy but looks a bit sloppy on the inside - so I'm going to try a slightly more fiddly waistband next time. I think my perfectionist tendencies are rearing their heads again..

.. but the skirt is super-comfortable and fits well. Its no-nonsense style makes it a good, basic pattern that I can see myself making again and again. Well, I am trying to make an everyday wardrobe, after all! The next skirt will be made of a medium weight denim that I picked up at the same time as the pattern. I have a bit more fabric to play with this time, so I might add a bit more length.

I'm off to Manchester this weekend for the Joeli's Kitchen retreat. There are going to be all sorts of amazing people there and I cannot wait to see everybody.

Next Wednesday I am going to be at Kendal's finest wool establishment, Williams Wools. I'm teaching a class on colourwork and how to design it yourself. I know people have lots of ideas in their heads, but it can be difficult translating those ideas into a project. I'll also talk about how to find the right colour combinations because that is probably one of the questions I get asked the most!

Then Saturday the 6th I am back up in Dundee's Fluph Shop doing c-c-cables in the morning (sorting out those C2R, CNB, and T3R abbreviations!) and Shetland lace shawls in the afternoon. It's never dull teaching at Fluph and I expect a fair amount of difficult questions flung at me!

I'm late updating my workshop page due to Life Happening, but hopefully that'll whet everybody's appetite! I'll return with more details about the new pattern and some Edinburgh Yarn Festival lowdown!

The Joy Of Making Stuff

Oh, but the joy of making.

Recently I have begun dressmaking again. I had previous forays into dressmaking around 2011, but I have not been seriously sewing clothes since I was a teenager. This time around I have discovered how relaxing I find the rituals and processes of dressmaking. Casa Bookish is fairly petite, so I do my sewing on the dining table which presents its own challenges. Despite a pressed schedule and lack of space, I am really enjoying myself.

Which brings me to this outburst:

LET'S MAKE STUFF and make the world a more creative, imaginative, happier, more colourful, and enjoyable place.

Some times I worry we overthink the act of making.

We swathe it in mystique (all those "15 Things You Need To Know To Unlock Your Creativity" pieces).

We become consumers rather than creators ("You cannot do origami unless you buy authentic unicorn paper from this off-shore Japanese monastery").

We are tourists rather than inhabitants of MakingLand (spending more time browsing Pinterest and blogs rather than make all the things we pin and queue).

LET'S MAKE STUFF and make the world a more creative, imaginative, happier, more colourful, and enjoyable place.

I know that a full-time job and family life leaves us with precious little time. I know it'd be amazing to have a whole weekend just making stuff. I know time is a scarce resource.

But if you have 30 minutes free every Sunday, you too can make stuff! Don't feel you need to have tonnes of free time. Make when you can! Make when you are on the train! Make in your lunch break! Make whilst the pasta is boiling! Make whilst watching TV!

LET'S MAKE STUFF and make the world a more creative, imaginative, happier, more colourful, and enjoyable place.

So, I'm dress-making.

A) I feel really happy when I wear something I have made.

B) I have become increasingly aware of my making needing to reflect my everyday wardrobe.

C) I want sewn clothes that fit me as well as my knitted items do.

My main reason for dress-making is wardrobe, so my main focus is to find a basic dress pattern that I can make over & over with a few tweaks. I wear dresses all the time - occasionally skirts - so I am not to bothered about keeping up with what's the latest trendy pattern to make in the sewing world.

I spent a bit of time on a disastrous pattern which I nicknamed The Apron Dress. I had seen some pretty versions of the dress on various people I know, but the fit was so, so awful. The lack of any actual structure (i.e. darts, supportive seams and shaping within the pattern itself) means that I was wearing a cutesy apron dress in which my bust looked to be extending outwards! The overall effect was not good. Fortunately I was just making a toile using cheap charity shop fabric - lessons gained and no beautiful fabric lost.

Moving on, I have been playing around with the Emery dress pattern by Christine Haynes which comes with beautifully clear instructions and structure. I've really hacked'n'slashed the Emery bodice. I've added extra coverage for my bust, moved the darts, and I'm about to alter the waist a tiny bit too. The first toile was almost spot on - I just had to move the bust apex a bit, lower the waist darts and .. well, I am having fun. when I was dressmaking as a teenager, I had no notion of fit but this time around I'm geeking out.

And there is knitting too, but I am in the midst of 'stuff' that will be unveiled at a later date. There is nothing more frustrating than some very pleasing things I cannot discuss. Fortunately there is always, always making stuff.