Archive | Miscellany RSS feed for this section

Jersey Love and Cloth Habit 2.0

November 1, 2012 Comments

My sister and I saw Illegally Blonde in this theater.

I am feelin the Jersey shore today. I have so many childhood memories of funnel cakes and salt-water taffy, of tacky jewelry and pinball machines. I’m from Michigan, but nearly every summer, my mother packed us kids up in the green station wagon and we went to visit grandma and many of my 30-some-odd cousins in New Jersey (my mom is one of 10). There was always a trip to the shore. I cherished the boardwalk memories so much that when I was in college, I spent a couple summers working crazy waitressing hours morning and night during the tourist season in Ocean City. (Good way to make college money!) Some very late nights after work, a bunch of us would drive up to Atlantic City to blow our tips on slot machines. During the calm midweek, we’d take a drive down to North Beach Island to watch the surfers or Sea Isle City for a coffee. For my 27th birthday, I drove out to Asbury Park to visit Bruce Springsteen’s old haunts. For my 30th birthday, my roommate and I drove all night from Ohio through the Pennsylvania turnpike to do some vintage shopping in Philadelphia and then straight to the beach just in time for sunset. (I had to have a slice! Sorry New York and Chicago, there is no pizza like Jersey pizza.)

Anyway, I hope those in the storm are staying peaceful and dry.

In other news, I’ve done a bit of site redesign. Whenever I get a new creative bug or project going on, I turn my house inside out. I have to re-arrange everything. I’ve dragged 300-lb furniture between rooms. I want new things on the walls. If I had time and money I’d re-paint the entire house and replace all my cat-destroyed chairs. This time, I went at my blog. I wanted to re-do my blog design a year ago but the project sat on a shelf while my headers and other little designed navigations slowly started to go wonky as I continued to upgrade my WordPress theme. I got most of the new look up today and I hope you like it!

On a very important tech note, if you subscribe to my blog, you might need to resubscribe. I am no longer using Feedreader so my subscription links have changed.

If you use Google Reader, you can either go into your account, click the big red “Subscribe” button and add my website name. That’s it. (An even easier way to subscribe to blogs in Google reader is to add their bookmarklet to your bookmarks bar, which is in the “Goodies” tab of your Google Reader account. Any time I’m at a website I want to follow, I just hit that button and bam! it’s in my Reader.)

If you use Bloglovin, you shouldn’t need to do anything, but I’ll keep checking on it to make sure it’s working. FYI, here is my site’s feed on Bloglovin.

Annnd, if you use something else like an email program to read blogs, you will have to re-enter the feed address, which is http://clothhabit.com/feed/

And alright, while I was at it, I made a Facebook page. A little birdie told me that more people are reading blogs through Facebook, so I thought I’d shoot my feed through FB, too.

· Comments { 6 }

Fresh Starts and Wish Lists

October 3, 2012 Comments

Happy Happy October! I love this month. It cools off, the weather is gorrrgeous, the roses come back out to play. It’s my favorite time of year and alright, I’m not totally unbiased. I’m an October birthday.

It’s a few weeks away but I’m already starting on my wish list. Here’s one fantasy…

Have you seen this beauty? It’s not in production but a finalist in this year’s James Dyson Awards. UK university student Sarah Dickens designed her “Alto” as a basic make-do-and-mend machine. (I love the name, too–I’m an alto!)

This would be an awesome Kickstarter project. About time someone made the “Mac” of sewing machines, right? You can read about the Alto and watch a video of it in use at Ecouterre. (Thanks Steph for the link!)

Wish list aside, I like fresh starts and I almost always hit the reset button on a lot of things in October. Maybe it’s that beginning-of-school-year feeling. And I have a confession for this new year… Over the summer I got bored with blogging. Maybe restless is a better word. Every time I went to write a post, I’d write and rewrite sentences 15 times before I’d blast the whole thing and assign it to blog draft purgatory. There are a lot of lonely ideas in there that would like to be free. A month-long break from blogland helped, but I still wanted a bit more focus, perhaps some new direction. Up till this point I’ve written mostly about personal sewing projects. The problem is, I start to feel pulled and nagged by a project queue, rushing toward the finish line just to have something to blog about and that’s no fun, is it? Blogging is an art in itself and I want to get better at that.

So sat down for a few hours and wrote out some thoughts about the topics I like, where I’d love to go with this whole blogging-sewing-fashion-thing and how to keep a natural rhythm with it. And one thing really stood out to me. I LOVE to teach, and more than half of my blog ideas were teaching about sewing and designing, not just sharing my own makes. I spend far more time experimenting with patterns and fabrics than finishing them because I love to learn more than I want finished clothes. I love the process of problem-solving, too, and my constant instinct is to help others solve problems. But teaching is a skill and I need to sharpen it.

So to that end I’ve just initiated a local sewing workshop with friends. It’s still in the planning stages but I’m so excited about this! I’d like to bring that here too by sharing some of my own patterns, technique tutorials, re-fashioning. And I heard y’all about the bra-making sew-along. It’s in the works! Friends, that will really sharpen my scissors.

I’m going to start simply this week, with a new weekly post called “Lingerie Friday” featuring some of my favorite designs with a big sprinkle of DIY. I like having a little something to hang my hat on each week no matter what I’m working on.

And thank you to all my readers and friends for following thus far–you are amazing people and I hope that what I express here can be a source of refreshment for you.

· Comments { 16 }

Late Summer Escapes

September 2, 2012 Comments

Well hello again. I’m writing this post from a somewhat sunny California, on a much-needed rest at the tip of summer’s end. Sometimes space is good, nobody knowing where you are is good.

That I’m wearing a windbreaker should give you an idea of how happy I am! When I last saw Texas, the heat was still pretty killer. I experience a certain late-summer languishing akin to those late-winter blues in climates that actually have a sense of winter. Too hot to think, too hot to get inspired about clothes! I’ve been traveling quite a bit and have hardly been home in the last month but I’m hoping some of this time away from heat and le blog and interweb activity will bring some fresh perspective and direction, both in my sewing and my writing.

Not that I haven’t been sewing or at least thinking about it! My free time has been filled with visions of pretty underthings and a few experiments in my own designs. Friends, I am utterly taken with lingerie design. Making my first bra a year ago tapped into something deeper for me–more than just another thing I’d like to learn how to make. Gardeners often talk about “signature plants” and my flowers became sweet peas. I even tried breeding my own varieties. Their history, fragrance, short-lived ephemerality, small but radiant blossoms and attraction to bees essentialized everything I loved about flowers. You can probably see the connection. I might have to stop myself from turning this into a lingerie blog! But seriously, I might start a regular feature on lingerie design, sewing and sourcing.

But first things first. Thank you for your sweet comments about my silk bra. It’s already become one of my favorite bras and definitely one of better-fitting ones I’ve made. I can’t wait to get back home and experiment some more with the pattern. Several comments gave me some good ideas for later later posts. Katherine asked me about how I adjusted my patterns for stretch and this is a little something I’ve been researching and working on, with a help of a few books about lingerie design. I’ve even come up with a geeky cool calculator that is helping me adjust pieces for different stretch percents. In an upcoming post/s I will share more ideas on how to adapting and fitting bra patterns.

Now to catch up on all your lovely blogs… Or just keep enjoying the bits of cool sunshine on my face.

· Comments { 4 }

I Need a Brain File Cabinet

April 1, 2012 Comments

I so so want of these to put all my little treasures. Lost keys, weird European change (oh, I saved all the pre-Euro coins!), sewing supplies.*

Lately, my brain has felt like it’s on inspiration speed. So many ideas coming at me, all at once. When I was younger, I’d just ride the wave, worried that the muse wouldn’t strike twice. But since then, the tsumanis can be as much of a burden as the droughts. Every single idea being “a rare opportunity, the one that never knocks!” And I keep hearing that song in my head.

I’ve taken personality tests in the past just to get a grip on what tends to motivate me and how I organize (or don’t). On the popular MyersBriggs, I’m usually an INFP which explains my passion for ideals, intensity of feeling, love of learning new things, and a lot of my past jobs and education (and my not infrequent changing of jobs and education). It also, unfortunately, tells me I have trouble organizing, setting goals and sticking to them. I do like finishing things, the sense of satisfaction that comes with it, but if something very interesting and important and new comes up, it’s hard to concentrate.

The one thing I’m always wishing for more of is organization. I’m just not the personality type who comes up with brilliant organizational strategies although I love to death the kind who do. (Y’all are a gift, and you know who you are!) At this point in my life I’ve made peace with my creative impulsiveness, but I’m always searching for a better way to sort through all the ideas that come at me. For awhile I was trying to keep a visual logbook, sort of like this one.

I also get real pleasure out of following my mental rabbit trails until a few of them connect in some meaningful way. Lately I’ve taken to mind-mapping software.

I have two highly organized business-owner friends who’ve suggested I try it out. I downloaded MindNode because it has a Mac-friendly interface. (There are free ones, but they run on Java which I don’t like.) For example, I used it recently for a blog post idea. As I started writing, the post started turning into a tome (a frequent problem) and I needed to map out all the rabbit trails I was going on. Visually, my mind works more in circles than branches, but it’s been really helpful to use this so that I can 1. find the theme that ties all my ideas together, 2. happily follow the ideas to their extremes, 3. decide which branch is important–at this moment.

So for example, remember in my last post I was talking about re-doing my website? I had a theme all redesigned and almost ready to go and then some other ideas popped in my head. I tried them out and kept fiddling and fiddling. At no point during all this did I take notes on what I had done or why. Did I want a typographic-y theme that felt like an old book? and how old? Did I want a very clean look, kind of modernist and straightforward? I have a soft spot for designs with little clutter, with simple visual cues. Or did I want some feminine-y sort of retro vibe? I should’ve had my mind-mapping software when I started!

And as a sort of creative exercise this week, I did some serious spring cleaning of all my sewing stuff and my books and files in my home office. This was really good. I spent hours and hours going through papers and tossing. I fasted a bit from Pinterest and other distracting muses.

And I weeded, a lot. Weeding is good for the brain, too.

(See, Oona, I got dirty hands!)

Do you ever feel overwhelmed by your ideas and how do you organize them, just the ideas?

*As a kid, I loved flipping through these for hours and was endlessly fascinated with the Dewey decimal system and book titles. I remember sitting in a farm country library circa 1998, researching for my grad degree. I was the only one in there with a laptop; it was just at the the beginning of the dot-com boom. There were two lone card catalogs left and I felt a little pang of sadness; I knew the weight of that type of organization, the beauty of its craftsmanship, would be gone in a matter of days, months. (I remember thinking, time to get one now on ebay before they are like $1000. Um, too late.) These things are a beast though, the smallest weighing at least 150 pounds.

· Comments { 14 }