(who you can reach at: fabricleftovers@aol.com)
After a whole year of not buying clothes (December 2008-December 2009), I either forgot how or really liked refashioning so kept it up after my main reason for refashioning ended. For what THAT was all about, please see my blog: ayearwithoutclothes.wordpress.com.
I don’t refashion to be green and I don’t do it to save money. I just do it. It amuses and challenges me, it comes in handy when you’d rather wear a burlap sack than anything in the shops that season, and there’s always that somewhat smug satisfaction of getting one over on the fashion industry — who for some time now has been copying ‘our’ craft. I often find myself explaining this ‘fad’ to very puzzled people who don’t ‘get’ refashioning for a variety of reasons. I’ve had more than one person tell me it is my ‘duty’ to spend my husband’s hard-earned pay to help the economy (WTF?!?). Anyhow, I champion the assorted doctrines of the refashionista movement, I just observe them more casually than I used to. Each of us must refashion in her own way. Sometimes that’s remaking a garment, sometimes it’s harvesting the fabric from a garment, old curtains, old accessories et al to make something new. I no longer consider it falling off the wagon when I go on a splurge on Fifth Avenue (though to be fair that meant a mere two cardigans on sale at Uniqlo around Easter and hardly worthy of this Corporate Wife Of A Capitalist Pig).
The success of my first refashion blog was due in large part because it had a theme, a plan, a decided goal. Didn’t want to buy more hot weather clothes for the second (unexpected) year in Hong Kong so there you go. New wardrobe from old. Trouble is, for a couple years now I’ve had no particular REASON to refashion other than the challenge to remake something and remake it well.
Spending so many nights alone (51 in 2011) while Himself is away on business is being rewarded with an all-first class series of flights around the world to celebrate our 20th anniversary in a few months. We took a similar trip in ’06 on his airmiles to celebrate the publication of my first book. Then I bought all new stuff, but that was back in the days when I believed the bunk about having to have a career to be fulfilled. Yawn. I look after Himself. Stuff that in your Betty Friedan pipe and smoke it. I’ve always suspected she was a failed seamstress.
I digress.
This time we start at our old stomping grounds: Hong Kong in late July. Singapore, Darwin and Hawai’i aren’t going to be any cooler but at least Sydney will be bearable to a girl who really dislikes the heat. For assorted reasons these weeks are when we have to go — and I don’t have very many things to wear.
I gave away a large portion of my hot weather clothes when we finished the two year assignment. Don’t need many where we live now. Himself earned the free flights and hotel rooms while working all the hours God (or The Bank) sends, the least I can do is not spend a penny on the wardrobe. And not just on clothes, but bags, hats, belts — as much as possible gets made from what I have in the craft & sewing room right now. I also plan to make up all the many lengths of fabric bought during those years in Asia too (poor things have been sitting in lots of boxes since our return while I think about what to do with all the batik, silks, linens, cottons). Harvesting old fabric to make mocks of the dresses and tops I want counts as refashion to me: if I don’t like the finished version (and I might not since the colors of a lot of the fabrics chosen for the mocks aren’t ones I’d normally wear) my local Cancer Research shop benefits from a well-made garment. I’ve also swapped some of the things I’ve made and will always let you know if my latest is up for grabs.
