How to make your handmade wardrobe more wearable? (Part 1)

It’s no wonder that I am in need of a major closet purge, once again. I do sew a lot and accumulate a lot of garments that fill up my closet space. Many of them are hardly worn and I ask myself why I haven’t worn them. I decided to dedicate a series of blog posts on how to make smarter choices when choosing the patterns, materials and techniques for your handmade wardrobe to avoid spending time and money on garments you never wear.

What can I learn from my successes and my failures?

If I compare the garments that I wear to the ones that I don’t, can I find common traits why a garment works for me or why it doesn’t?

Successes

Let’s list a few examples of successful garments:

• My trench coat

I made it with care and I made sure that it fitted well. The style is classic and the coat suits for the Finnish climate. It goes with almost every outfit imaginable and makes me look instantly polished.

• My black and white skirt

This wasn’t a very long make and while it lacks a lining it can be worn with a slip. The pattern is classic and goes with many different kinds of tops. The only minus is that I have to iron it to wear it.

• Sew over it Penny dress

I spend a lot of time pattern matching and finishing all the details carefully. The colour and the pattern is just my style and the fit is perfect. The elasticated waist and the wide skirt makes this dress also super comfortable. Although this is a vintage-inspired pattern it is not too costumey.

Failures

Then some not so successful garments (I admit that this is a polished list since there surely are some garments that never made it to the blog…):

• Wrong colour: This linen dress

I did make quality work with this one. However, the colour looks awful with my pale skin tone. Also, I can only wear it on hot summer days, so the number of days I could wear it is quite limited.

• Too costumey, not my style and bad fit: This jacket

Already as I published this make I said that this jacket looks better from the inside than from the outside. It is just too weird and costumey with the fabric, brass buttons and puffed shoulders. Also, it is too tight at the waist.

• Wrong fabric, not my style: Stella shirt

The idea of this blouse is to play with combining sporty raglan-cut and drapey and luxurious satin. I chose a fabric that was too stiff for this shirt. My added design choice (the piping) emphasizes the stiffness and adds to the sporty look. The shirt ends up looking like a failed 80s windbreaker jacket.

• Cheap fabric: This wrap top

This fabric stretches all over the place. The seams do not stay straight and sometimes the inside parts become visible showing the serged seams. I have much better looking RTW cardigans so why would I wear this?

There are certainly some common traits with these and some other failed makes. Mostly I could summarize the fails by saying that I did not put enough thought into the process while making them. I was in a rush, wanted to make something quickly and used a material that I happened to have whether or not is suited to the project. I do buy a lot of factory remnants and cheap fabrics and I should be more careful when selecting the fabrics – cheap-looking materials do not improve when sewn up into a garment. If I had made smarter choices I would have made fewer garments but they would have been better quality and more wearable.

In the next blog post in this series, I will make a list of 10 questions one should ask before starting a new sewing project. Subscribe to follow me and receive a notification on my future blog posts!

Thank you for reading and happy sewing!

Katja