Me Made May has come and gone and I am so happy that I participated for a 2nd year!
If you don’t know, Me Made May is an annual sewist event where makers from around the world challenge themselves to wear more of their handmade clothes and show off their outfits on Instagram – #MeMadeMay2019. Each participant makes a pledge for their own activations during the month so they can grow in their own sewing journeys. Here were my goals:
- Explore styling my handmade wardrobe to define the brand codes of my personal style
- Sew through my fabric stash to add colorful and fantastic lewks for spring and summer
- Take more and better pictures of my sewing makes
Simple goals, right? Well, I think that I did a pretty good job of sticking to them.
For starters, I reorganized my wardrobe and put all of my handmade clothes in one closet while other clothes were relegated to suitcases and side cabinets. This helped me focus on choosing handmade first. In the closet, I mixed and matched my pieces to find new ways of styling the garments and it was clear that my handmade clothes include a lot of bright colors and busy patterns that don’t pair well. For future sewing I want to focus on seasonal color stories so I can create collections and capsules that can be mixed every which way.
I also made some major progress on my sewing list in May, working down my fabric stash to make a pair of black linen pants, a cognac colored jumpsuit in Tencel twill, a cheetah print shirt to go with matching pants, two pairs of McCall’s M7726 wide-leg pants, and a colorful slip dress. I *mostly* avoided buying any new fabric, though there was one or two impulse buys when I had to go out for notions. Stay tuned – there’s posts to come for all of those new makes!
And then, the pictures! Most of my photos were taken by friends when we were out in London as well as plenty of selfies in the bunch. I am trying to get better skilled at fitting my super tall self into the 4×5 photo frame with poses that show off the lines of the garments I make. Some percentage of this goal is technical photography skills. An important, and perhaps larger percentage, is simply feeling more self-confident in front of a camera. There’s something about a camera held in front of me that makes me clench my jaw with nervousness. Alas, my entrepreneur journey demands my public image so I am constantly challenging myself to roundhouse kick fear and just go for it.
In my final days of May I made a big transition: I packed up all of my things and moved from London back to the US. As I boxed my clothes I realized that for the first time – maybe ever for this tall girl – I feel fully satisfied with my wardrobe. It’s finally composed entirely of pieces that I love and that fit me well. And since the most sustainable clothing are pieces already in my closet, I am feeling even better about my goal to completely stop shopping for clothes! Afterall, isn’t that the goal of a handmade wardrobe?