Creative Process

What I learned about the creative process...

Capstones are, by design, a semester-long project. I had never done a personal artistic project intended to take so long. It required time management skills different from the ones I've been working on my entire life, and those were already a struggle for me. Despite that, I found myself wanting to work on this project instead of procrastinating on it. When I couldn't make myself pleat the skirt, I'd pick up some embroidery on the jacket and come back when I was tired of that. My most effective time management tools were a checklist and a desire to sew. To that extent, my workplan as I first devised it very quickly fell apart – my expected workflow simply wasn't possible. However, it continued to be an incredibly helpful tool to keep track of my pieces, what work still had to be done, and where to go next once I finished something. When making my workplan, I built in a couple weeks at the end with little to no work. As I anticipated, those weeks disappeared into dress rehearsals and midterms, and in the end, my time filled out the semester pretty perfectly. Despite my apprehensions, I managed my time well, and it's one of the things I'm proudest of in this project.

My first design sketches for the outfit. I really struggled to come up with a skirt I liked (you can see that none of these are quite the final product), but some things, like the jacket, I already had the guide for and knew what I wanted to do with.

I used almost no patterns for this project, just one wikiHow article and a lot of looking up advice online. A lot of sewing is sitting down with an idea and looking up answers to questions as you get them. I used only a few stitch styles to make all of this (running, whip, and back), even for the embroidery. In general, whip stitches make for sturdy seams, running stitches make nice simple hems, and back stitches provide the precision embroidery needs. You don't need more than those three. I was amazed to discover that the minimal sewing I'd done before was enough to get me started.

It was incredibly light on materials cost, too. Admittedly, I had most of the equipment I needed already (sewing needles, thread, seam ripper, scissors, pins), but in my research, I found that it's not difficult to get a nice set of all those materials under a tight budget. The only item I acquired during the process (still free, from an Arts Scholars event!) was a small 4" diameter embroidery hoop, which was admittedly life-changing. You can still achieve a pretty similar effect with safety pins, if you're embroidering fabric onto other fabric (like a patch), though, and I had been freehanding embroidery, no hoop, with perfectly fine results beforehand. It just took longer. That's the main moral of the story: you can strip everything down to basically needle, thread, and scissors, it will just take longer.

All of this embroidery was done without the hoop. The fabric was safety-pinned down, and I had to be careful not to pin it too tightly or too loosely. Once everything was sewn down, I cut out around the edges to make the rough white fabric cuts less obtrusive. This bag features both whip stitch seams (black) and running stitch hems (multicolor yellow-orange).

My project was a somewhat extreme example of minimizing fabric waste. Most upcyclers go to thrift stores and dig through old sheets, or find the section where things are marked down much cheaper as a last-ditch attempt to sell them before they're cleared off the floor. These are great ideas if you're looking for a more specific color, material, or just more fabric to work with, and can yield results closer to the glamorous online "thrift flips" that professionals make. That doesn't mean you can't use the stuff you're going to throw away, though. T-shirts can make great linings, patches, or easy body measurements, for example. Not every piece has to be visible to have value in your construction. This project is designed to encourage you to think about what you would do with the fabric you have, not how you would make exactly the same thing I've made here.

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