Notes on Mentorship- Introduction

Each year I like to take a couple sewing and/or design workshops that are over several days or longer. Of course everything this year has been upended due to the pandemic. For awhile my sew-jo left me, all my plans for 2020 went out the window and I just made a whole lot of masks and then it slowly started to return. As my sew-jo returned I wanted to intentionally be creative. Not just make for the sake of making!

I did a lot of thinking and pondering about what I wanted to work on in my sewing journey the second half of this year and I decided that I wanted to work on some more designing options and develop stronger skills. I want to be able to see an interesting garment and be able to 'see' how to create it using either flat pattern methods or by draping. Now these are 2 very different ways of working so I decided I wanted to concentrate first on flat pattern methods.

I am pretty capable of working on this project completely on my own. BUT... working with a mentor is always a bonus in my book. Having another brain to bounce ideas off of and to ask a question when you get stuck or frustrated is good for me. Also having another person to help keep you accountable can be a bonus!

So, with the above loose goals in mind I wrote up a 4 month self-study mentorship program on using flat pattern methods to create new designs. (actually I wrote up 2! One for flat-pattern and one for draping) 

I had several specific thoughts on what I want to work on during this 4 month mentorship. I want to work on wearable designs, not special occasion. No jackets in this go around. I want to work off of master patterns that I have developed for myself and develop new designs for me in:

Tunics

Skirts

Dresses

With this idea fleshed out and defined I sent my pretty detailed proposal to Sarah Veblen to review. She was game to participate and act as my Mentor for this project. Sarah offers several different types of online learning options. From zoom classes to full on 4 month mentorship programs and everything in-between!

I have worked with Sarah in a mentorship before but it has been several years and this time I wanted it to be more design and exploration based.

The basic idea is that for each of the 3 categories I use a certain amount of time to 

     1. identify inspiration garments-

    2. identify what it is about that inspiration garments that I like     

    3. Sketch these ideas on my croquis

    4. work in 1/4 scale patterns to transform the sketch into a pattern based off of my master pattern.

    5. take the more interesting ones to muslin stage

    6. take one or more to final garment. 

The tools that I am using for the project are:

     Pinterest, Google Images, Instagram, my own photos, books and magazines for inspiration.

    Pinterest with creation of secret boards and uploading my images and sketches and shared with Sarah.

    A My Body Model croquis that I use on my IPad Pro in Procreate app for sketching and drawing.

    Camera and Camera phone for photos and to use in reducing the full size pattern pieces to aprox 1/4 scale.

I am really looking forward to this exploration of design for myself! It will be fun and I am sure that I will learn a lot plus it will help keep me occupied as we enter into the colder months during the pandemic.

I am hoping to document my process and progress on the blog under title - Notes on Mentorship:

Feel free to follow along if you are interested or skip right over if not!