Hello, hello hello!

Well, hello there! Fancy you dropping by after so long!

This has been one hell of a year and 5 months and i am so bloody exhausted by being exhausted and not appreciating what i have and what has been given me. In the grand scheme of things, i will always miss my Beloved, but it is time to move on, and he would certainly want that. Grey Man treated me like a Princess, and it’s time to start acting like a Princess, the kind that is happy, balanced, creative, engaged productively with the world and ready to charge into the future with her eyes open, aware of the gifts of love and hard work that have brought her to this place, from her own hands and heart to those who have lent their caring hands and helping hearts, from Memory to Etherwaves to Real World.

My son has come back to me and i am thrilled to re-connect with him. He has helped, is helping me in enormous ways, physically, emotionally and spiritually. We have covered a lot of ground in talking and will keep on talking. I NEED him in my life. We are not going to dwell on the past because all we have is the now, though we have spoken of old days and n0w are past that point, because the future will take care of itself if we take care of the now, no WooWoo intended or expected.

Keep on keeping on, keep on trucking, as they used to say in the “olden days”!

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I have gone back to the REAL basics, ones i never learned in all my garment making years. Since i decided to re brand as a wearable art business: learning to draft my own patterns or adapt others and how to make slopers has been one hell of a curve. (Especially when some of the teaching aids haven’t been translated into English…) One really important thing i have learned from it is that there is no point in me jumping into the “sell a PDF pattern” as an adjunct biz. As much as i’d like to, A. i haven’t the patience to learn how to use Adobe that extensively (too freekin much math and i prefer the hand drawn aspect anyways of drafting) and B. i haven’t the patience to chart EVERY step, no matter how small, to write as instructions, and C (the most important) there is nothing new under the sun.

From studying the flats online of new pants patterns for example, they are all pretty much the SAME. Seriously same. Of course they are! I mean come on, we’ve got 2 legs, an ass, a crotch and a waist fitting in there, torso sticking out one end, feets out the others. That’s all that pants are. The world does not need another pants pattern from me. Kudos to the pattern makers out there already, but i’m not going to be one of the Club.

In a sense too, i didn’t HAVE to do all this new brain stretching work BUT my focus this time too is for curvier women than i clothed before (most were probably in the size 14-20 size range), and you can’t just add more seam line to a pattern to change a size 18 to a size 34. (I’ll be talking about that peeve/bugaboo/insult called “sizing” in a future post.)

Even if people never notice this, or don’t care, or i never get it perfectly, it’s wonderful to be making the brain work. My body is shit right now ( brace, knee operation or new knee in the not too distant future?), but the old vasty skull still has a sharp tenant keeping the lights on and the stair rails firmly attached.

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I have also discovered that the “style” i am doing/using/re-inventing/making with in *my* way, is known as “dopamine dressing”. I LIKE that. Big loud colours, huge scale florals, stripes, polka dots, bold graphics, simple shapes re-interpreted, nifty details (dare i say “nifty” without sounding bumpkin or disingenuous?), peculiar and idiosyncratic mixes of motif, colour and texture. OH YEAH BABY.

So, over the next few days, 2 weeks at most, i will be blasting photos of colour, pattern, mixes there-of and shapes, hopefully intriguing you to shop when i make my first “Drop”. (SHUDDER. I do not like that term: i am not dumping food, water, blankets or medical supplies from a “Helo”. I will be, as usual, posting listings.)