A couple years ago I came across the Seamwork classes called Design Your Wardrobe and immediately fell in love with the concept. You basically follow their weekly steps through email, engage with their forums, and use their building blocks to come up with a general sewing plan for items that you might actually wear and love for years to come.
I find this process extremely helpful to center yourself especially in a hobby like sewing garments where you can sometimes feel excited to create something extremely colorful and beautiful, but not very wearable and useful. So with sustainability in mind, becoming more thoughtful about the creative process when making wearable and durable pieces is extremely important. Side note: there are some other similar services offered by other sewing/designing companies, this is just the one I have used. And I’m sure you could come up with your own parameters and guide yourself.
I decided on some vibes to focus on like cozy, warm, and homemade. I generally hate the winter as I get cold very easily so I want to be cloaked in many cozy layers. I’ve also been very into natural fibers, natural dyeing, and historical fashions. I ended up with Cozy Grandmacore.
At the same time as this project I was reading The Conscious Closet by Elizabeth L. Cline, a very fitting addition, and it helped pinpoint the objects wasting away in my closet, as well as finding the core pieces I was lacking. I then centered my design process around sustainability.
Mending and alterations have become an important aspect of my closet (check out Mend! by Kate Sekules) and I wanted to include elements of patchwork and visible mending/embroidery. I also have far too many weird scraps and bits and bobs of quilting cotton from friends and family and I’d love to get into scrap quilting. I also just love the idea of playing with color within my own color palette which would allow me to have kind of whacky pieces that still go with most of the rest of my clothes.
After much brainstorming and research, I ended up with the following guidelines in groups of threes.
Tops: burgundy shirt with statement sleeves, black or white historybounding shirt, see through shirt
Bottoms: black trousers, a basic pinafore, brown culottes
Layers: a long cardigan, winter coat, fall weight quilted jacket
Accessories: wool mittens, wool slippers, wool hat
To be honest, I made these plans a couple months ago and am already pretty far into it. I’ve made some decisions about some of them, made a few, and am still pondering whether I still like some of the others. Halloween definitely slowed me down (as it always does, you’d think I’d plan around it) but as I’ve decided to make less homemade holiday gifts this year I think I can make enough pieces to get closer to my vision and at the same time get rid of the pieces that no longer fit within my parameters. Later this month I’ll post an update and expose how well I can stick to plans. 🌼
Dropout Daisy 