For clothes lovers, sewing (if you’re sufficently experienced, that is), is a kind of superpower you no longer need to rush to the stores for something that fits or simply for whatever specific item you’re eager to wear, all you have to do is to sew!
Yet, it’s only recently that I really understood what sewing could really offer (but also the rigour it should imply). Indeed, till now I had only sewn one thing at a time, when I had an idea. If something went wrong with it, I could simply let it down: it was only about one garment more or less in my wardobe. But lately, the sewing blogosphere began to use words I had previously read only on the fashion/style blogs, talking about “capsules” or “palettes”…
My reflection began with this comment of Balibulle on the Alexa Chung collection for Madewell. “I want everything… and nothing in particular. Which, to my eyes, perfectly sums up Chung’s style : rather than specific pieces, a way to associate them. Maybe we could all dress like her with what’s in our closets, if only we KNEW how to do so”. At the time, I thought that yes, building a style had little to do with my “magpie” way to pick a few cute, but isolated garments, but rather with owning a coherent wardrobe, like the scale from which you can start playing variations.
I first tried to do this with Ali’s Summer Essentials Sew-along, a playful proposition to sew a mini-suitcase for summer, but lacked of time to make it. Then, Zoe approached the question differently: not in terms of element to plan on a long term, but in terms of colors as a base to build on. Then I got lucky: as a sequel to what had already been said on the subject, the Colette patterns team launched the Spring Palette challenge, which has already been helpful to structure my future projects. I planned too much at first and had to reduce my ambitions, but realized that once more, the most important was not the deadline, neither neither the number of garments I could sew, but how much I want to sew each and every one of them, in order to compose a wardrobe I could live and play with. I think I might be growing up…
