Me-Made May update

It’s nearly halfway through Me-Made May! I didn’t make a specific pledge but I’m following along sporadically on Instagram and taking it as my usual opportunity to look at my wardrobe and personal style with an analytical eye: What do I really wear? What do I feel my best in? What are gaps that I can fill with a new sewing project?

Well, one obvious answer for a start is I wear 100% me-made trousers…

Week 1: Philippa pants, M7445 pants (twice :D), and Ginger jeans (from 2015!)

Week 2: Trend TPC12, Ninni culottes, Lander pants, Philippa pants

I ‘ve also had one of my big semi-annual wardrobe clear-outs, in particular of my tops which are generally more RTW than me-made. I don’t buy a lot of new clothes or sew as prolifically as I did when I was learning, but things still seem to stack up: generally through items I’ve hung onto for nostalgic reasons or me-mades that didn’t quite work out and I’m on the fence about keeping, altering or recycling.

As I batched my things back onto their matching hangers, it was interesting to see that there are fairly clear groupings around colour theme, both in the hue – I only need five different hanger colours to cover almost all of my tops – and the specific tones within. I started to divide the colours into groups based on frequency in my wardrobe and tangential thoughts about how often I wear each hue and how good I feel when I wear it. I counted up each group and this is what I came up with:

My categories seemed to be:
Neutral: The basics: black, greys and cream/white. Stuff to wear when I don’t feel like deciding what to wear, or as a background to the other colours.
Primary: The colours I wear the most as accents and usually feel great in. I’m pretty sure these are the colours that suit me best and they all happen to work well as crayon-style all-over colour blocks too.
Secondary: A bit of a riff and extension of the primary palette with perhaps slightly quirkier or more fashion-led tones: lilac, chocolate, olive and sky blue.

I then pulled these colours into this little palette, which I think will be a very useful thing to keep pinned to a Pinterest board or even to physically print out and carry with me when I shop for fabric or clothes to guide purchase decisions.

Finally, my friend happened to post this little colour meme on Twitter which I posed on Instagram, and it was interesting and probably non-surprising to see that most of the answers that came through were firmly within the same colour themes: blues, browns and neutrals. Funny!

And, more importantly, all useful info to help me keeping making sure I choose to sew things that have longevity and high likelihood of regular wearing. Is anyone else using Me-Made May as a chance for a bit of wardrobe introspection?

2 thoughts on “Me-Made May update

  1. SteelySeamstress

    Interesting post. MMM is a good opportunity to examine what’s in the wardrobe – don’t know about you but I don’t tend to take many photos of what I wear any otehr time of the year. Love your idea with the coloured hangers. I could see how that would work well to mix and match items for an outfit.

  2. Chloe

    I too did not make a pledge this year, but I have been playing along with daily insta photos. I was honestly surprised by the amount of dark clothing I’ve been wearing! It will be interesting to see what the remainder of the month brings as the weather warms up. But it should definitely provide me with an idea of what I’d like to work on – perhaps injecting a bit more colour into my cold weather wardrobe?

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