Hello 2019, and happy new year blog friends! Well, I don’t know about you but to me it feels both wildly overdue and impossible at the same time to have arrived at a brand new year. Instead of trying to make sense of it all just imagine me making some wild gestures and muttering incoherent while I attempt to say something funny or smart about it. Anyway as the title suggest, I am not here to make any grand speeches about 2019 (yet). Instead I want to look back at 2018 for a bit more. Of course I had planned to type and post about all a recap of the year last week when everyone else was posting them but the last days of the year, with all the holiday stuff going on, can be so full and even though I had gotten quite far with my wrap up post and might have been able to finish before the new year if I had made a point about it, I decided not to stress it and just take the task into the new year. First week of the new year is the last week to do your wrap up posts amiright?
So here is my annual looking back on the year post. My main take away of 2018 is that it’s impossible that this year was just 12 months long. I feel 2018 was at least ten years. Not because it dragged on and on, on the contrary I feel so much has happened and changed (and changed and changed again) in my life that it cannot just have been one year. To be honest I felt like December alone should have lasted a year given the amount of stuff that was going on. Most of that happened behind the scenes though, so hasn’t made it to any of my tiny screen accounts. What has made it to all my various screen outlets is the making that I did this year.
I always like reading people’s year reviews and looking forward to the year. I also enjoy writing them myself and I always come away with the feeling that I accomplished more than I thought when I started writing the post. This year is no different. I thought the start of the year was extremely slow for my making, and while that was not entirely untrue, I had also just forgotten quite a few things of what I did or misdated when I made them.
So let’s have a look at my year in sewing:
This year saw me pushing my comfort zone in various ways. I tried a bunch of new styles in term of clothing like culottes and jumpsuits. I broke through a mental block on taking modelled photos that I expertly put there myself in the first place at the start of the year. I properly got into sewing and posting about summer clothing, which as lame as it sounds was spectacularly out of my comfort zone.
I also tried some new dress, pants and short lengths this year. Or, returned to some depending on your outlook: I wore miniskirts in high school, but that long ago enough to make this feel like new territory to me. Like with this this dungaree dress: I distinctly remember taking these pictures on an icy cold day in March just after voting in the elections over here. I was and still am very pleased with this make. It’s possibly one of the coolest things I made and one of the more successful projects. I like that I re-purposed fabric from a failed make and turned it into something I did like.
Finally I sewed and posted about my first bra. This had become a personal sewing holy grail after having it as a loose goal on the back of my mind for years. I can hardly believe that I finally broke through it! The bra is this year’s show-piece price, my masterpiece, the pièce de résistance, the crown jewel of my sewing this year. I made my first bra after wanting to do so for a looooong time and it is a big deal for me.
I felt a lot of pride and joy from this one, but I have to admit that I hesitated about posting it and just felt a bit weird and awkward about it in general. At the same time I hated that feeling and I recognize the social systems in place that make me feel that nervous and I wanted to push through that (and also just want to show you guys what I make and help others but you get the idea). I haven’t completely rid myself of those feelings but I’m glad I pushed through enough to post them anyway.
I’m so happy, proud and somewhat relieved to finally have this goal crossed off of the long list. Bra fitting and making is a steep learning curve but I feel like I learned a ton already and I really enjoy throwing myself deeper into the craft that is sewing so I definitely consider this a success. I can’t wait to develop my bra making skills further in the new year.
I feel like I made strides this year into finding out what I like in the clothing I wear. Particularly with sewing I feel I made a big step this year. I’ve been a dedicated knitter for a lot longer than I’ve been sewing garments and always felt that my sense of what I like and don’t like with knitting was always light years ahead of my style and preference development in sewing. This year I’ve thought more about the overall picture and style I want to communicate and in turn have made progress in figuring out my non-knit style better. A repurposing the fabric from a previous make to make Eloisa made me think more actively about what components go into making me enjoy a wearing a piece of clothing.
I did part of Colette’s wardrobe architect and Fringe Association’s slow fashion October prompts this year. (I did this offline for myself and -shock horror- didn’t record this online anywhere) but found them helpful in figuring some things out about myself. I’ve now got a much better idea of my fabric, print,colour and shape preferences. I still have more ground to make up in this area, and of course taste and style are ever changing but I’m really pleased with my progress and the work I did in this area.
My favourite sewn make of this year is surprisingly, ahum, the bra. However, given that I can’t (comfortably) wear it I feel that doesn’t entirely count. So of the other items my favourites are the Kalle shirt dress and the Ninni culottes…closely followed by the Yari jumpsuit and the Eloisa Dungaree dress. Given the difficulty I had to pick a favourite I can safely say that this year’s sewing has been a success!
I’m excited to see what next year has in store for me. I have some ideas as to sewing goals and things I want to develop but nothing is set in stone yet. So that was my wrap up of my sewing. Stay tuned because I got two more wrap up posts to go before I sink my teeth into 2019 including all my knitwear. -I feel I can be as extra as I want on my own blog-
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