Working On: slowing down and doing less

it's more about the process than the final product, for me

The linen shirt is done.

Well, apart from one buttonhole that I need to decide on a location for. But that’s a decision for another day - the shirt is perfectly wearable as-is so that’s exactly what I’ve been doing. (This is also why it is incredibly wrinkled in all the photos you will see in this post.) It works as a shirt, a dress, or a duster, and is exceedingly comfortable in all these forms.

The fabric for this garment was cut on June 8 and I sewed the buttons on Saturday, July 1 - so that’s about 23 days from start to finish. Every single stitch was sewn by hand, including the ten buttonholes, and the yoke and sleeve seams are topstitched as well. I finished the seams with a simple whip-stitch, which is quick and simple to do, looks quite nice and is effective. My boyfriend also deserves a shout-out here for helping me pick out the buttons for this shirt, which are a gorgeous cinnamon color and contrast perfectly with the blue of the fabric. (These are the 11mm pressed-cotton buttons from Merchant & Mills, which I’m obsessed with.)

To be honest, I thought this project would take longer. More than three weeks, certainly. I really thought I might work on it for two or three months, depending on how much I hated sewing the buttonholes. To my surprise, however, I love hand-sewing buttonholes ( I even managed to do a few of them on the Tube) and the whole project came together quite quickly, and without incident. It almost felt effortless.

I have never been a speedy sewist, so perhaps I was particularly well-suited to this project. Sometimes my machine-stitched garments take me a few weeks to produce. too, just because I pick them up and then put them down again, work on something else for a while, then circle back. I’m not typically sewing a garment that I urgently need, so don’t have a reason to rush - and rushing is something I hate doing. Hurrying should be actively avoided, in my opinion. (What I like is efficiency, which is a totally different thing.)

The more time something takes to make, the more I tend to enjoy it. Garments can be dashed off in an afternoon, certainly, but I prefer to linger over them. Savor the process. It’s a sort of antidote to overconsumption, this slower-paced work. For me, the urge to have something new can be sated by spending time working on a project, which is good for both my bank account and my wardrobe.

Of course, this is good for the planet, too. One of the reasons I wanted to hand-sew this shirt was to slow down my making practice even more, because crafting still consumes resources and I’ve been feeling the need to reduce my consumption lately. Me-Made May showed me that I don’t actually need too many more clothes, and of the items I do need (summer dresses, mainly), one or two will be enough to fill the gap. Social media can play with your feelings, making you think you want all of this new stuff - but it isn’t really true, is it? In the end, my favorite garment will always be the plain white t-shirt I’ve had since I was ten years old.

This morning I spent some time reading a very interesting article in the Stanford Social Innovation Review about the focus on ‘circularity’ in the fashion industry. Those of us who make our own clothes do so for many reasons, but I’m willing to bet that we are all trying to opt out of the fast-fashion whirlwind, to some degree. We are all aware, these days, of the many problems in the clothing industry - the huge environmental impact, the appalling working conditions. Fashion companies are becoming aware of consumer sentiment as well, and they’ve been doing an awful lot of greenwashing lately, making vague statements about ‘sustainability’ or ‘transparency’ or, the buzzword of choice at the moment, ‘circularity’.

For the fashion industry, circularity doesn’t really mean anything other than recycling. It certainly does not have anything to do with a circular economy instead of a growth economy; rather, it’s a term that corporations seem to use to express their intention to continue growing revenue at a mind-boggling pace while reducing (or at least, not increasing) their carbon emissions and resource consumption. H&M is particularly forthcoming about this, as they’ve said that in the next seven years they intend to double their revenue while reducing their carbon emissions by half.

Now, even if they do manage to achieve this, which is extremely unlikely, H&M as a company will still be doing a lot of damage to the environment, using and degrading resources that we need to conserve, and generally having an overall negative effect on our society. They will, however, have $40 billion in sales - and that’s their real goal.

As Ken Pucker, who wrote the SSIR article I mention above, points out, this means that in spite of their alleged environmental concerns, H&M’s actual focus is still to increase the overall consumption of its goods. These retailers need more people to buy their clothes, and to buy them more frequently, and therefore to dispose of them more frequently, so they have room to buy more - but it’s all OK if the clothes get recycled, right?

Pucker’s argument is that the concept of ‘circularity’ is simply a way to avoid discussing the real problem with the fashion industry, which is overconsumption. Like so many other marketing buzzwords, it’s just a greenwashing diversion.

As a maker, this is something that has been on my mind for a while, and I imagine that many others in this community feel the same. Being clear-eyed about our consumption habits is increasingly important these days, and I think it’s always worth re-evaluating where we stand in relation to these issues. For me personally, I’ve been trying to reduce my consumption of ‘virgin goods’ lately - that is, I’ve been buying used instead of new.

This past week I purchased five balls of cotton yarn at a charity shop, and the linen I used for my hand-sewn shirt was bought used as well. There are so many reasons why this feels like a sensible thing to do - for one thing, I save a lot of money, and I also prevent unused materials from going straight to the landfill. One of the key concepts of true sustainability is that we need to maintain a high level of use for all of the resources we do consume, and it certainly feels good to know that I’ve taken a piece of fabric that was sitting on a shelf and turned it into a garment that will get lots of wear before the end of its useable life.

Reducing the frequency of my consumption is also something that I’ve been working on. I have so much yarn and fabric in my stash already, and it’s much better to use what I already have instead of buying more stuff. There is no perfect way to live in this world, of course, but I find that taking steps to consume as sustainably as I can means a lot to me.

Being a maker of things is a really important part of my identity, and I’m always interested in ways to make that practice more sustainable. I expect to have lots more to share on this subject in the future, so stick around if that sounds interesting to you - and please chime in with your thoughts as well! True sustainability can only be achieved through community and collaboration, and it’s important that as many voices as possible are part of the discussion.

This past week I spent a lot of time on the London Underground and passed the time by reading ebooks on my phone. I’ve been burning my way through D.E. Stevenson’s two Miss Buncle books and found them extremely entertaining. If you are in the mood for a cozy, countryside-y story set in an English village in the 1930s, then these are for you. They’re also laugh-out-loud funny, and were just the thing for a train journey as they don’t require too much focus.

That’s all from me for now; I’ll be back next week with more thoughts on textiles, creativity and sustainability. If you’ve enjoyed this post, please feel free to share with a friend or on social media. Talk to you soon!