What Exactly Am I Doing Here, Anyway?
I have a lot of fabric. I mean, A LOT of fabric. It is a ridiculous amount of fabric. A while back I was listening to an episode of the “Love To Sew” podcast about fabric stashes. The hosts were talking about how they really have too much fabric-enough to sew a garment a week for a year or two. I did some mental math on my own fabric stash. I don’t have exact numbers, but I estimate that I have significantly more fabric than they were talking about. I may have more fabric than I can conceivably use up in my lifetime. It is possible, and you won’t hear this from many sewists, that I have too much fabric.
I love vintage fashion (especially from the 1940s and 1950s, super original, I know) and have wanted for a long time to wear vintage style basically all the time. Wearing actual vintage is mostly not an option for me because finding decent quality vintage in my size is near impossible. Fortunately, there are several companies doing vintage inspired and vintage reproduction clothing, sometimes even in various levels of plus size. Yay! I have, of course, purchased several items from some of these companies but it would be financially irresponsible of me to purchase every wardrobe item I want. In addition, some things are almost as difficult to find in my size as true vintage. Vintage style jeans for example.
I love to sew. To clarify, I love to sew for myself. Like many people, I made some attempts to turn this hobby into a money-making endeavor and what I have learned is that I hate it. Sewing for clients just super stresses me out, and I really feel uncomfortable asking for the amount of money that I should, so I would often end up essentially making no money. Aside: If you want something custom made for you, please be willing to properly pay your artist, sewist, maker whatever.
Due to a variety of circumstances, I have a fair amount of free time on my hands these days. All of this leads me to my personal project idea. I am challenging myself to use the fabric (and patterns) I already have to create the vintage style wardrobe of my dreams. The aforementioned podcast episode hosts talked about making a garment a week. That seems like way too fast of a pace for me and the way that I like to sew. I think that I could manage one every 2 weeks, which would result in 26 new garments and a respectable dent in my excess fabric by the end of the year. Realistically, I probably won’t do the full 26 garments, but I am committing to do AT LEAST one garment a month, for a minimum of 12 projects in 2022. I will document the journey here, and in less detail on Instagram (@knowmedesigns.) I realize that blogging is pretty much a dead medium but being comically late to the party is absolutely on brand for me. I don’t expect to get a lot of views here in this process, but the writing part is mostly for myself. If you actually read all of this, welcome, thank you for being here and congratulations on suffering through my ramblings.
