For my first attempt at making pants for myself, I made Arenite Pants from Meg of Sew Liberated. The pants have a ton of ease and lots of options in terms of style and fabric choice, so the five pairs I made from the same pattern and size feel very different from each other.
The image shows the paperback version of Full Catastrophe Living: Using the Wisdom of Your Body and Mind to Face Stress, Pain, and Illness, by Jon Kabat-Zinn, but I actually ended up listening to the audiobook. The Chaplain recommended this book to me a little while ago. He didn’t say much about it. I just remember him telling me, “you should read it.” Since he doesn’t recommend many books to me and our reading interests don’t intersect much, I took him seriously.
If you follow me on Insta, you know that I participated in something called #memademay this year. This is an optional motivational tool and fun adventure for sewists who make their own clothes to wear what they’ve made and feature it on social media.
I don’t think most of my friends sew, so while I hope they didn’t get sick of seeing my face in May, there was also the bigger thing of maybe no one caring that I make my own clothes. And the sticky issue of who, exactly, our social media accounts are for.
Us?
Our friends?
Attention for us, from our friends?
*cringe*
I found Meg McElwee of Sew Liberated, through Rae, another sewing, pattern-making blogger. I loved Meg’s artsy aesthetic and layered style. I purchased a couple of her PDF patterns over a year ago, but I never printed them out to use them.
Fast forward to this spring – two years since I made anything meaningful. I’d just committed to taking a fast from buying RTW (ready-to-wear) clothes.
Last year’s #memademay felt like a total flop for me, but this year as May swung around I thought to myself, I’m going to start with May 1 and just stop when I run out of handmades to wear. No pressure.
I knew I didn’t have enough clothes to wear something I’d made every day of the month. I was cool with that. As though permission to fail was all I needed, I started sewing again. I got two more patterns from Sew Liberated, and ordered a ton of fabric.
An Extraordinary Union: A Novel of the Civil War, by Alyssa Cole, is an intersectional work: historical fiction, romance, and Black History, all in one place. Bonus? It’s also written by a woman of color.
