Defining My Style

A Way to Sift and Sort Through All of the Patterns

Making our own clothing and accessories is a direct path to acquiring the wardrobe of our dreams. There are a lot of options out there and it can be difficult to sort through the patterns to find what you like. It might not be the reason I started knitting, but it is one of the reasons that I continue to knit. Yes, I do end up gifting a lot of my makes. But that doesn’t mean there isn’t a little bit of me and my style in every one of them.

Deliberately Defining My Style

Recently I started to delve into sewing. It started as a quarantine hobby and now its become one of my favorite ways to spend my time. It’s actually rivaling knitting! As I split my time between the hobby I’ve loved and one that I’m learning, I need to be more thoughtful about how I spend my time. And my money too.

Seamwork, a sewing website, magazine, and community is something that I recently signed up for. This is a three week course to learn how to make your own wardrobe. Initially I thought this was a great way to learn new sewing skills rather than try it on my own.

That’s what I did with knitting and I ended up purling backwards for YEARS.

Course Prep-work:

Part of the course is a digital download, a workbook, to help you define your goals for your wardrobe. It never occurred to me to sit down and define my personal style, but it makes so much sense. Style is something that evolves over time. Yes, there might be common threads, but as you grow older and learn and experience new things, your style evolves. So I’m at a point right now where my closet is a bit at odds with itself. While this isn’t a terrible thing, many pieces in my closet go unworn.

Part of this is also because of covid, having a baby, and my husband being in healthcare and not socializing as we had in “ordinary times”.

I’ve made the decision to gift or donate items that I do not wear as I add new me-made pieces to my wardrobe. And piece by piece, I’ll redefine my style literally making it my own.

I am excited to do this course prep-work and work on defining my style not only because it will inform what clothing I make, but it will also inform my knitting.

Defining My Knitting Aesthetic:

If you spend any time on the internet these days there’s a good chance that you’ve heard of the new “aesthetics”. Cottage-core and dark academia are raging in popularity. It makes me laugh because I took a course in aesthetics in college way before it was kitsch or cool and part of me feels that this area of study is being bastardized as its being coopted by the masses, but I’m here for the styles. In fact, I’m in love with all the imagery coming out of both cottage-core and dark academia.

Knits and hand made items are surging in popularity once more and it is a glorious thing to behold…and to be a part of. I’m excited to design new pieces at this time, and create content for people who are looking into picking up these hobbies. Who knows, I might even sell a few of my pieces! But before we get too carried away, let’s look at what my aesthetic is or will be.

Currently:

Up until now, my knitting style could probably be defined as “cabin-core” or “apres ski-core”. (If you’re not familiar with this trend in aesthetics you can basically put “-core” after anything and it becomes a unique aesthetic. These are things that you’d want to wrap yourself up in or put on to warm up, walk to your car, or take a hike. This definitely sums up all of my hats, most of my shawls, and heck, even my Christmas Tree Skirts could fall into “cabin-core”.

Clothing, knitting, interior design, everything-wise, you could basically drop me in a cabin in the woods or ski chalet and it would all fit.

Now I’m taking stock of my wardrobe changes and new inspirations and integrating my knitting. I’m hoping that this will imbibe me with a new sense of energy and spark new ideas. Recently I’ve felt a bit stale. You can see my last post on feeling the blanket blahs here.