oh hai blog

Hi friends. Happy New Year! Happy goal setting month, happy arbitrary but often useful fresh start for big dreams and reflection and (hopefully) new inspiration. We traveled so much over Christmas, from here in NC to both families, to Atlanta and Nashville and I feel like the new year is already way back into the swing of things overall. It’s exciting! It can feel overwhelming, too, but I’m choosing to lean into what Elise Joy talks about in her Love to Sew podcast episode and rather than get overwhelmed by all the possibilities of all the things - get excited about the fact that there are SO MANY THINGS to be inspired by and want to take on this year.

I’d love to say that making this blog a more relevant part of my online presence is a goal of mine (and back of my mind, it definitely IS), but no promises friends. 2018 brought on a new job for me, a new workout routine that I love, a new schedule for my husband and his work, lots of travel and I honestly don’t see any of that really changing much in 2019. Except for hopefully the new job thing, because I am in a really good place with my work. :)

At the same time, the end of the year brought on quite a few new personal things for me in the way of tackling a LOT of anxiety about my stage of life, what I am accomplishing and what makes a meaningful life. Right around that time I also read this incredible post from The Craft Sessions about the meaningful work of making. I clapped, I exclaimed, I cried a little bit. It is so good y’all. If you are a maker in any capacity, I highly encourage you to check it out. And maybe bookmark it for those days when you get discouraged by just another individual being bewildered by your passion for anything that they consider to be “just a hobby”. I know I have.

So I do have some intentions that I’d like to share with you all at this beginning of the new year. I find this to be much more helpful and doable than putting a number on specific goals when I’m juggling quite a few things. It includes the excitement and the motivation for the new year while removing the potential guilt of not meeting some arbitrary number of things that I decided in the dead of winter to do.

• The first is to document more of my work in an intentional way. Not sure yet whether that will mean this space, Ravelry, doing more general posting in my Instagram feed or perhaps collections of Instagram stories? At the end of the year I was trying to go through and get a full collection of my finished works for the year and discovered that while my making was very much a regular practice in my life, my documentation was not.

• Don’t buy any new fabric. For how periodically I sew, I have a really good size stash of fabrics and I’m ready to figure out which patterns they want to be and go for it. This was clarified after a recent incredible fabric sale at the Scrap Exchange and an amazing workshop on planning a handmade wardrobe by River Takada-Capel at Freeman’s Creative. Although there is some pretttttty incredible silk noil on Blackbird Fabrics that is reallllly calling to me right now…

• Go beyond the boxy top. 2018 was my first year with a really amazing sewing machine (I love my Janome Magnolia). So, I made a jacket and a pair of pants and felt like a badass (Note, I am still actually pretty far from being a sewing badass by my own estimation, but the feeling was real great). AND - all of the early sewing projects that I tackled, some variation on the basic boxy top, are not things I regularly wear. When I consider what makes me feel confident, I definitely still come back to waist-defining or some sort of fitted garment so that’s ultimately what I need to be sewing as well! Some ideas that are percolating in my head are the Adria top, Hinterland dress (yay Durham!), Tea House dress, and the Scarborough Fair skirt or something similar. I would also love to make another pair of Winslow culottes in a longer length and elastic waist and an unlined version of the Wiksten Haori jacket in something that involves swiss dots.

• Steek a sweater! This one is already in progress!

• And related to this, flex my creative knitting muscles more this year. I love a good, mindless sweater knit or a vanilla sock probably more than anything, and while there’s absolutely nothing wrong with that, I have several really exciting projects I’d like to tackle this year that will require more brain power, and I want to lean into this.

I’m really happy to have this space on the internet to come back to, and I hope that in some small way, my sharings here bring some joy to you and spark inspiring ideas for all that this new year will hold.

Slow Fashion October: You

Hey friends! This month, in addition to all of my normal postings, I'm going to be doing something a little bit different added to the mix. Karen Templer of Fringe Association had this great idea a couple of months ago to have a whole month dedicated to slow fashion - the idea that the clothes that we wear can be made intentionally, beautifully, ethically and sustainably. If you've been reading this blog for a while, you probably have picked up that this idea is one that really resonates with me (and you can read a much more eloquent explanation of this whole idea here.). 

So it's the first day of October (yay!) and so about once every week or so I'll be posting a new post around the general template that Karen has laid out.  This should be fun!

So, a little more background on me as a maker. I've been a crafty-type person pretty much my whole life, starting from a young age when my family would take extensive car trips across the country. My parents, desperate to entertain us four kids for several days in the car, equipped us with every sort of kit and activity you could imagine. For me, that meant everything from crochet to knitting with this strange round circular contraption, to needlepoint and cross stitch and latch-hooking and many others. My mother and I also used to sew clothes for my American girl dolls, and I got my first sewing machine when I was 13. Sewing kind of came in and out of my life through high school and out for a while in college, and I have just recently started sewing my own garments as well as a few random household objects. 

My knitting journey started in high school in Florida when a friend of mine in my IB program taught me how to knit. I loved it so much, I knit and eventually started to crochet all through high school and college. But it wasn't until I moved to North Carolina two and a half years ago that my fiber obsession really began and my queue of projects really developed into a full-blown lifestyle. In that time I was introduced to wool in all of its beauty, attended the NY Sheep and Wool Festival in Rhinebeck, NY (and am going back this year!) and started to learn about the process of making yarn. My eyes were opened to the environmental impacts that superwash yarns have, as well as the carbon footprint of most commercially made yarns traveling from South America, Australia, China and all over to get to my local craft store. This knowledge, paired with the gristly reality of dye houses and garment factories in Southeast Asia created a real conviction to change the way that I think about my wardrobe and my fiber pursuits, as well as a real love and passion for fibers that are not only beautiful and soft and strong, but are made locally and encourage a newly awakened fiber industry in the U.S. again. 

This month, my goals are less about making and more about being intentional about my current state and where I want to go. I am a big thrifter and lover of secondhand, and while wonderful, this has led me to a place in my wardrobe where I find myself looking into my closet and feeling like my style is all over the place. I would love to find some time to pare down, eliminate items I never wear and really think carefully about what I WANT to wear - and how to make that happen. Whether that be knitting, sewing, mending and altering, spinning yarn I want to knit with, or buying sustainably. I will likely also be knitting lots of bowties for my online shop and starting to knit Timberline for my husband's fall and winter wardrobe. 

So there you have it! If you have any goals or thoughts about Slow Fashion October I would love to hear them. October is already my favorite month and I'm so excited that this project is now a part of it!