Hey you…

I’m talking to you…

First, a little background…

I’ve always thought of Labor Day as my December 31st.  Last day of the year.  Though I love January as the month with nothing on the calendar and the frantic holiday overkill just a distant memory, I think of September, and always have, as the start of a new year.  All through my schooling and my kid’s schooling, I loved the clean slate of September, starting fresh, and looked forward to a new school year with lots of new adventures and new opportunities.  September also represented the end of summer, and that means hot sticky weather and summer clothing.  I live in a climate that has four definite seasons, and I love the anticipation of cooler weather and warmer clothing, especially layers.  Not that I have much place to wear clothing like this, mostly I putter in my studio in my pajamas, but that’s for a different blog post.

The newest issue of Vogue Patterns Magazine arrived in my mail box last week, I gave it a cursory glance since I already ordered most of the patterns featured in it when the “new for the fall” $3.99 sale popped into my inbox.  I have a lot of patterns, topping out at more than 400.  They are organized now in 12 pattern file boxes, and in my Adobe Bridge organizer, with keywords like Tops, and Pants, and searching my archives is a snap.

There was a lovely book review in the magazine along about page 58 that I happened upon, written by Bridgette Raes, about a book titled “Overdressed: The Shockingly High Cost of Cheap Fashion” by Elizabeth L. Cline.  Sort of a “Supersize Me” of the fashion world, it sounds like a book that throws back in our faces what most of us already know, that fashion is now throw-away, and quality is a thing belonging in a museum along with a typewriter and cradle style telephone.  ” Quality is measured in how many washes it gets before a garment falls apart.  Cline argues that people have become so disconnected to their clothing that they no longer  care for it, mend it, or respect it.  Cheap fashion is disposable and there are landfills to prove it.”

Sigh…

Perhaps I will order the book, which will only further emphasize what I already know, it sounds entertaining and it is well researched according to the reviews, but it is also shockingly full of grammar mistakes, silly ones that any good editor should have caught.  So to the list of things relegated to museums are apparently editing skills…

Anyway…

(There is a point to all this…)

Peggy Sagers, owner of Silhouettes Patterns, is a brilliant designer, and lovely woman, I’ve mentioned her before, and she is also a fabulous teacher.  I was privileged to take a class with her at the American Sewing Guild conference in Houston last month.  She offers a whole group of low budget Webcasts, for free, that talk about everything from organizing your sewing room, to what to do with a French Curve.  I’ve passed the link onto many of my sewing friends, and can’t remember if I posted it here.  No matter…

My friend Ginnie wrote me and said she just finished watching the episode on Organizing your Sewing Room and I should check it out.  So I curled up with my tea the other day, and started to watch.  Apparently Peggy had no particular sewing room designated in her house, she had stuff squirreled away in many different rooms and it wasn’t until her kids left for college that she was able to have a designated sewing room and promptly renovated the room, and brought all of her sewing supplies into one space.  So far so good, however this has nothing to do with me, since a sewing room would be an easy no-brainer.  For me, I have 15 shaft looms, 20 inkle looms, about 1000 textile related books, and shelves and shelves of yarn to contend with, trying to find a place for just a sewing machine and serger, and OK, an ironing board, shouldn’t be a problem.

Then she started talking about “the stash”.  Them’s fightin’ words…

It was important to Peggy to have an aesthetically pleasing look to the room, so she selected storage units from IKEA with doors, to hide the stash properly.  She also selected a few sculptural pieces as accents, and it looks like any ordinary room with a sewing machine in the corner.  She hired an organizer to come in and give her hints about organizing the stash and she shared some of that information with the viewers.  Here’s where it gets a bit dicey…

Peggy claims that it is important to periodically go through your stash of fabrics and toss out (or give away) anything older than two years.  And it is important to leave extra shelves open for future acquisitions.  I nearly choked on my biscotti…

Two years?  Is she kidding me?

This will clearly never work for a fiber artist/educator like me, and though I’m not going for an aesthetically pleasing space, I will admit I’m choking in too much stuff.  But two years?

I’m thinking that by her standards, I’m technically a hoarder?  Two years?

I’ve been looking at my fabric stash, which is stored on seven shelves in my wall units in my studio, and an additional shelf of acetate linings and Sibonne from the 50’s, both of which are no longer available and I am definitely hoarding that stash.  And of course I have a huge inventory of interfacings, since I have to buy 200 yards at a time because I sell it to students, but my regular stash of fabrics, collected from here and there, and donated by others who were de-stashing (free is good, isn’t it?) is folded up on seven shelves. Two years?

So, here is what I’ve boiled this all down to…

I don’t sew enough.  When I do, I make quality clothing.  I know what quality is, and I’m good at it, and I enjoy putting underlinings and linings in things. But I am a handweaver too, and make really cool yardage to make really cool runway type pieces, that occasionally win awards, but the thing I love the most, is to just curl up with my tea and sit down at the sewing machine and do what I call, “Quick Sketches”.  In the art world, we call those warm-ups, but for me, who may spend six months creating an outstanding wearable art garment, a quick sketch is any garment I can make in a couple of sittings.  And oddly enough I don’t do any of that, even though I’ve been collecting fabrics here and there for a long time.

Fall is coming, and my wild and crazy teaching schedule is winding down, and the need to be outside and gardening is winding down as well.  In the northeast, once frost comes, you are basically finished outside until the spring, unless it snows. Which it didn’t last year…  (Well OK, there is leaf raking…)

Which means, I need to start moving through some of this stash…  Because Peggy shamed me into it, and because it is almost fall, and Labor Day and this is the beginning of a new year and some new year’s resolutions, and because I really like to sew.
Because it was already pre-shrunk from a tutorial I wrote for the conference last month, I chose this fabric, which was on the top of the stacks on one of the shelves.  It is a rayon batik print, with Longhorn skulls printed on it.  Looks like a Georgia O’Keefe motif.  And I did a search under “tops” in my Adobe Bridge program, and came up with this one, Vogue V1100.  I had some rayon Bemberg lining in the stash, and I preshrunk that, had an invisible zipper in the stash, and I was good to go.  So that’s in progress…

And I decided to start pre-shrinking the next fabric up, which was the next fabric down on the stack on the shelf, an Italian Tropical Weight wool in Olive with a lovely fine stripe.  I typed “Skirt” into my Bridge search and came up with this, Vogue 1324.  I might have to be creative with the layout, but I like that kind of challenge.  Both pieces of fabric were in the stash of remnants I bought at Waechter’s in Asheville, NC last spring.  And while I’m sewing I might be listening to more Webcasts with Peggy Sagers.  But I won’t watch them while munching on a biscotti…

Two years?

Stay tuned…