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A question of labels

1/23/2019

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The more vintage clothes I see, the more curious I get about the labeling practices of our grandmothers' generation.  Nowadays, a ready-to-wear garment usually has two labels: a brand tag that says who was responsible for its production (GAP, Lord & Taylor, or the like), and a care tag that says what it's made of and how to launder it.  Sometimes they're clustered together; other times the maker is in the back neck and the care tag is in the side seam. 

Vintage clothes, however, often have more tags, and in different places.  I'll show you two examples from my own wardrobe. 

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Butterick 3836, Plaid Wool Blazer

1/10/2019

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Picture
Couture kitty likes the wool!
Today, I'm gonna try a new format for my project diary... I think it'll be useful for people learning to sew to have a clearer idea of how long something takes and how much it costs, so I'll start including those details as accurately as I can.  I also know that a lot of people stop reading when they see a block of text (not sure why, since I like blocks of text, but the world is diverse!), so I'll try to put vital stats in bullet points to make them easier to read. 

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Honesty About Money...

1/7/2019

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A year or so back, a woman late of Hawai'i asked me to make her puletasi, a two piece Samoan ensemble of fitted blouse and wrap skirt.  She was unhappy with the work of her current seamstress, who didn't finish seam allowances in any way.

We had a brief email exchange, in which it quickly became clear that we had very different ideas about a fair price for the labor, and it ended amicably with us agreeing not to work together.  But it was such an interesting exchange, especially in light of my previous ruminations on money, that I want to examine it. 

I will not be betraying any personal or identifiable details here, just the bare bones of our disagreement, and the broader question of pricing and the value of time/work. 
Picture
Puletasi, by Amolioo [CC BY-SA 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0)], from Wikimedia Commons

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(Almost) Perfect Plaid Skirt

1/3/2019

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Picture
When I was sorting my clothes using the KonMari method, I held each garment in my hands and asked myself "Do I love this?  Does it spark joy in me?"  Quite a lot of things went west, but the ones that stayed taught me a little about what my style actually is*, and made me determined not to settle for clothes that were "almost" right but not quite, when I could have things that are perfect for me. 

Today I'm going to show you one of the few things I kept even though it had a ton of little problems with it, and what I did to make it perfect for me. 
* Tailored, classic but quirky, and nipped-in at the waist!  Warm colors with rich saturation. 

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NEW YEAR! 2019 resolutions

1/1/2019

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Two-thousand-eighteen was a rough and un-productive year for me, for various emotional reasons.  However, I have learned a bunch, and my resolutions for 2019 are informed by those lessons.  Here are my sewing-resolutions:
  • My new resolution is to only buy fabric for a project I have ready to go... i.e. I have a pattern picked out, and intend to make it in a timely fashion. 
  • Related to the first, I have resolved to only buy things I love... not things that are on sale, a "really good deal", almost right, pretty good, or not-my-color-but-so-unique. 
  • In my project diaries, I will include prices for fabric and notions, since they may be of interest to people learning to sew.  It feels weird to talk about money, but as I am interested in all aspects of my hobby, I will start to. 
  • I will try to keep better track of my time, for the same reason. 
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    Karen Roy

    Quilting, dressmaking, and history plied with the needle...

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