Handmade Wardrobe Planning

I was recently offered a look at the ebook  hWardrobe: Designing Your Handmade Wardrobe in a Creative, Fashionable and Sustainable Way, by Valeria Speck, of  hWardrobe.com

photo via hwardrobe.com

It's an ebook put together to help you plan out what to make, how to organize your sewing queue, identify your best silhouettes, colours etc. -- all the things I'm not very good at. I'm usually more of a slapdash, mood-based sewist (kind of like how I read, as well).

I've tried to follow along with the Colette Patterns Wardrobe Architect series in the past, but that kind of lengthy introspection and weekly assignment structure just doesn't work for me -- I dropped out a couple of weeks in, both times I tried it.

So this book held out some promise for me. I can work through it all at once and then again at my own pace. It efficiently lays out some of the same principles but not as exhaustively - for me, that's a bonus.

And there are illustrations and worksheets, along with encouraging commentary. She talks about the body being the key to the wardrobe, and working everything else around your shape and what suits you. It starts by leading you through the process of measuring and drawing your own shape for a personal croquis, in order to be able to create style that suits you from the start. The tone throughout the whole book is very accepting and welcoming of our own idiosyncrasies.

photo via hwardrobe.com

Valeria is from Russia, and it sometimes shows in her choice of words or phrases. I thought it added charm to the book and reinforced the idea that all of us sewists, wherever we are, are on the same page...quite literally here. I also liked how she added a couple of of her wardrobe drawings alongside a photo of the finished piece: it shows how the practice of sketching out our projected makes can really be useful in finding just the right pattern & fabric for a great result.

I have already started looking at some of my stash with a keener eye after reading through this book once. And I plan to work through all of the suggested Q&A and activities, to give myself a kind of structure that I can live with in my sewing room. While I don't like the detailed to-do lists and project flow charts and super-organized plans which some sewists thrive on, I do need a better level of organization. This should help me get started working a little bit more logically and thus -- hopefully -- using my stash better!

You can purchase a copy of this ebook here if you are interested; I am not an affiliate & make nothing from this. I just wanted to share as I found that this book was better suited to my sewing style than many of the other systems I've tried before and think it is an interesting & useful read!