Doing Me-Made-May 2020

By lizhaywood | May 4, 2020 |
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For the fourth year now, I’m doing Me-Made-May. It’s an annual event which you can read more about here, where you wear your me-made clothes during the month of May, as a way of wearing them more often, or in a different way. It’s meant to be a personal challenge but most importantly it’s meant to be FUN.

A surprising number of people, including myself, are hoping it will get them out of an isolation sartorial rut.

Some people also decide to clean out their wardrobes and do an inventory, some mend things, finish unfinished sewing projects to wear, wear more skirts, wear at least one me-made item each day, dress head-to-toe in me-mades every day, post pictures on Instagram or not, etc you get the idea.

Here’s my pledge:

I, Liz Haywood, plan to (gently) do the following:

  1. Wear me-made clothes every day, preferably styled in an interesting and untried way, but if not that’s okay.
  2. Put more thought and effort into getting dressed every day, because, quite frankly, sartorial standards have been slipping around here.
  3. Wear the zero waste samples (all me-made) from my book Zero Waste Sewing, which are just sitting here in a box now that all book talks and workshops are cancelled.  I wouldn’t let them be part of my wardrobe because I needed them for show-and-tell, but now I will wear them without reservation.

Here’s the first four days:

Day 1 MMM
Day 1, prancing around in front of a camera and acknowledging friendly toots from passing farm utes (they’re used to me now). Wearing my favourite zero waste jeans with me-knitted scarf, lumpy beret and an Elizabeth Zimmermann yoke cardi.
Day 2 MMM
Day 2. As the temperature drops to single figures, I’m warm inside the coat from Zero Waste Sewing, my favourite project from the book.
We camped in a tent in the back yard that night (and the next night) and I wore it as a dressing gown.
Wearing it with me-made zero waste jeans, knitted hat and lace scarf.
Day 3 MMM
Day 3. Behold my zero waste overalls – they’re a reject from Zero Waste Sewing, mainly because I couldn’t make them zero waste in every size, partly because the styling had a few issues and the front zip was thought to be too complex and partly because I couldn’t go over 144 pages and some things had to go.
I’ve since fixed them up and seeing if I can work them into my wardrobe. Never really worn bib and brace – the haberdashery jangles pleasantly when I walk.
Wearing a hat made from the free pattern on this blog, a cardigan I knitted in high school in the 1980s from a pattern in Dolly magazine, and heavily mended tights.
Day 4 MMM

Day 4. It’s Star Wars day today! I’d been planning to wear my zero waste coat that makes me look like a Jedi today, and a foray to the post office meant I got to wear it outside the house.
Worn with me-made trousers and knitted hat, which you can’t see.

I’ll be attempting to post every day on Instagram.

Cheers!

Posted in Me-Made-May 2020 and tagged

2 Comments

  1. Juliet on May 5, 2020 at 7:25 am

    I love the Dolly Mag cardigan. You unpicked the big E though didn’t you? I wonder if anyone else in Dolly’s target audience made one, or whether they all enlisted mums and grandmas? I never had the attention span for a project like that.

    Reply
    • lizhaywood on May 5, 2020 at 10:36 am

      Yes, wonder if anyone else still has one. It was oversized in high school but now it’s just about right! I unpicked the E on the back years ago.

      Reply

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