How do you need to dress in your day-to-day life?
Are you dressing up to drink champagne or to split wood?
What characteristics do your clothes need to have? Which features are indispensable?
What performances do they have to withstand?
When imagining the wardrobe of my dreams, I kick all reality related characteristics out the window, most of the times.
Dreaming of long silk dresses with delicate embellishments. Fragile fabrics rustling while you walk over clean and smooth floors. Kimonos and shawls to lay around your shoulders while roaming through the garden in the fresh hours before sunrise.
Suttle and earthy toned linen combinations for picking flowers in the fields or collecting apples from the trees.
Statement pieces to pose in at exhibitions in front of your art piece, while having intellectual conversations and drinking prosecco.
Then I remember that I am not living in a 16th century French chateau where I only must worry about which flowers should be placed in what room or which Cristal glasses, I am going to drink my Champagne from. Or worry where my next exhibition will take place.
If I must split some wood or take a walk through the wild forest, I will rip apart all the silk and linen in an instant.
What should I wear if I want to split wood in the day and drink champagne in the evening, without changing my dress in between?
Thats where it is rather convenient to sew your own wardrobe, no need of compromising between the two.
For almost two years I am carrying this flower-patterned wool fabric around with me.
Every time I pass it though my hands, I am lost in thoughts of admiration. How it feels to the touch, soft wool combined with the bright flower print. And I imagine a thousand different ways in which I could wear that fabric if it became a garment one day.
Skirts, blouses, trousers, kimonos or linings for a coat, even just as a scarf…
But never I had the courage to start cutting the fabric apart and into the shapes of a piece of clothing. What if I wouldn’t manage and waste the fabric? What if I wouldn’t like the outcome? What if later I would have a better idea of what to sew with it?
Sometimes the fabric and the ideas just need to ripe for a while until they are ready to be worked with.
The time is now.
After I spend all the dedication and time to create a perfectly fitting trousers pattern, I had to choose fabric to now sew the trousers I would love and cherish.
After cutting comes sewing...
…even though I am using a pattern, there is always time for some more engineering
...admiring the colours
...choosing threads
…sewing endlessly long strips
...the final touches
...followed by the off cut threads
...and an army of pins
Finally I can try them on...
...and I am absolutely in love!
Even though I must admit that I am not completely sure if I am ready to cut wood or stray though the forest in those trousers… for most other activities that aren’t including 16th centuries French castles, they work pretty good.
Thank you for passing by, and have a wonderful week!
All photos and words are my own, taken and written by me.