Sewing: Shelf Life

When I sew, I often have a slow stuttery line of projects rolling along--one pattern in the tracing and fitting process, another in the middle of a wearable muslin, another in work as a "real" garment, and so on. This means that the delay from first idea to final garment can be, well, years. That used to be fine, because my wardrobe was trapped in amber, or at least in the eighties. The blouse or skirt or dress that I started working on in 1996 was still just fine in, oh, 2011.

But last year my wardrobe started to change. That change bypassed the sewing projects, a fact that I fully realized, well, about an hour ago. Specifically, while trying on the wearable muslin of my most recent alterations to the Sewing Workshop Cowl Top. It's a perfectly nice top, and in fact cowl necks seem to be everywhere right now, but the style is too safely inside my loose, flowing, covers-everything comfort zone. The same is true of the drop-sleeved high-collared shirt that I started tracing several months ago. The same may apply to my recently fitted calf-length gored skirt pattern. When most of my skirts were hovering around ankle length it was fine, almost daring, but now of my newly purchased skirts are hovering around knee length.

So. Realization. It's time for my sewn clothes, not just my purchased clothes, to start acknowledging that I'm not completely column-shaped. That I have knees. That my skin continues down past my collarbone. Stuff like that.

Not only have many of the sewing projects in work exceeded their shelf life, but so has much of my pattern stash. Long gored skirts. Meh. Long skirts with little flirty flounces. Eh. Lovely old-fashioned calf-length A-line gored skirt with shaped waistline. Yeah, whatever. Many of my patterns seem to have expired.

Time for some thinking.

That is all.

Image: Wikimedia Commons.