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It’s that time of the year again… Me Made May!
For the past I-don’t-know-how-many years, Zoe from So Zo has hosted this awesome challenge to actually wear your self-made clothing. It’s meant to push yourself to appreciate and use your work, and be proud of it! It’s not meant to make you stress out, and you can make your pledge any difficulty at all, whether you choose to wear one self-made item one time the whole month, or wear exclusively self-made clothing. And if you want, you can take a picture of you each day to document your progress and, again if you want, share on various social media. It’s really inspiring to see the other participants’ clothing!
This is the third year that I’m participating. In 2013 I pledged to wear at least one self-made item (including accessories) per day, however I found that I often just fell back on wearing a single self-made necklace, or other small and relatively insignificant accessory. So in 2014 I pledged to wear at least one self-made garment per day, pushing myself to wear actual clothing. (You can see my documentation of what I wore on past MMMs here.) And this year I’m pushing myself a little bit more. This is my pledge for Me Made May 2015:
I, Lisa from Cucicucicoo, sign up as a participant of Me-Made-May ’15. I endeavour to wear at least one garment that I have made from scratch or refashioned in some way each day for the duration of May 2015. In addition, I pledge to complete all half-finished season-appropriate clothing projects in my to-do pile (or decide if any of them should be abandoned and removed from the to-do pile).
A few weeks ago, I spent a couple of days tidying and clearing out my sewing/crafting room. The top picture above shows what one of my work spaces looked like before cleaning. There was a ridiculous amount of to-be-upcycled materials, half-finished projects, strips of felt to be turned into pasta, shirts I’d convinced my husband to pass on to me, etc etc. (I took that picture when I was working on my upcycled crowns, which you can see a little bit of on the chair.)
I suppose the after picture (below) doesn’t look all that much better, but the mess is actually much more in order and also includes things that I’d gathered from various parts of the room, which are now totally cleared up. (And a third of the table is taken up by Altoid tins and a pattern which arrived after I cleaned.) And most of it are works in progress.
Yes, I have this bad tendency to start projects and leave them in a pile for months or even years. So I have bags full of tile fragments to make more dominoes out of, water-worn sticks collected from the beach to make a mobile from, shells to make a necklace out of, strips of jersey left over from my Thumbs Up dresses and shirt to make bracelets from, felt pieces to make bowtie pasta from (in the meantime I’d cut up the strips you can see in the before picture and started sewing them). I suppose the 23 Altoids tins my mother brought me from the States (yes, 23!) and the Belladone pattern that I just need to put away don’t count as works in progress, do they?
What I’m getting to are those two piles of clothing are things in varying degrees of being finished (or not). Some things just need mending (darning jeans, anyone?!) and others are in need of total refashioning. So the second part of my MMM15 pledge is to finally get my butt moving and finish those projects so that my family and I can finally use them!
So, what do you say? Do you sew, knit, crochet, embroider, do macrame or use any other technique to create or modify clothing? Why not join me in this challenge and push yourself to wear and show off your work? It’s a great way to appreciate what you’ve worked so hard on and also gets you thinking about the value of clothing in a global sense. Remember, you can make your pledge as easy or as hard as you’d like! If you’d like to take part, you can sign up right here!
