My wardrobe journey
Hello there!
This week I’m doing a newsletter series about finding your own personal, handmade style. We will work through subjects like inspiration, colors, shape and planning. This is something I really would benefited from when finding my own style in my handmade wardrobe. Because when you make your own wardrobe it isn’t just to try something new out all the time like fast fashion likes us to do. When we do something handmade for ourselves it’s harder to throw away and we are more prone to alter or fix them in some way, instead of just tossing it away. And that’s good, I believe. We need to have a closer relationship to our clothes and to know how much time has gone into sewing that garment makes our bond stronger.
I started my journey towards a handmade wardrobe many years ago and I was very scattered in the beginning. Maybe it’s not so hard to guess why? I didn’t know what I wanted. I just knew I wanted to make a dress but I didn’t really figure out which color scheme I liked, which materials I enjoyed and so on. (I actually made a dress from a fabric bought in Ikea. It wasn’t very nice to wear..)
As the years went by I started realizing that I really enjoyed wearing linen and cotton, natural materials. I actually, accidentally, bought a really expensive, wool fabric and made a black dress from that which I had for years to come. And a dress I wore a lot was a dress with whales on it. And to these dresses I wore short cardigans that I started to knit in 2013. It has been such a long time!
In 2019 I decided to have a year when I made ALL my clothes I wanted to wear. By this time I had figured out that I enjoyed wearing a black linen dress with no sleeves and a belt in my waist, AND - that I didn’t enjoy circle skirts! All of this I could credit my dear friend Susanne for! I met her in 2017 and as she’s a seamstress she helped me out a LOT.
So by this time I had my staple dress all ready to go, and I made some skirts and so on. But this is where my knitting journey took a turn. Before this I knitted garments in all kinds of colors. Red, blue, bright green and light grey. Non of these colors exsist in my wardrobe right now (except the red, but it’s a different kind of red). And by 2020 I knitted mostly in dark grey, rust and beige. These are all colors in my color scheme I have made. And I feel such a calm in my wardrobe now, because almost everything goes together and I have a “uniform” now that I always feel comfortable in!
This has been such a journey and I loved making this post! It’s so clear to me where I was going and I can really see where my style evolved and where I took very tiny steps to make that wardrobe happen, but it’s also scary! It’s daunting to change style and to not know what people were going to think and say, but more about that another time :)
And if you want to follow along on this week of exploration and discovery - sign up to my newsletter and Let’s Go!