Happy Stripes Lexi
Pattern: Lexi Top by Named Clothing
Fabric: Cotton lawn from Stitch Sew Shop
Sewn up: April 2020
I sewed this as my “first-day-of-work” shirt.
I accepted a new job in early March, pre-pandemic. It feels like I decided on this change at the last possible moment before everything shifted. When I tearfully shared the news with my team at the time, my sadness was 100% about leaving a job, and a work family, I had been a part of for seven years. The changes that have now impacted all of us hadn’t begun yet.
As March ticked by, it became clear that this transition would be happening differently than planned. I would clean out my desk late on a Friday night in a deserted office. I would say good-bye to beloved colleagues one by one over Zoom. I would be onboarding into my new job at my dining table, not in the company’s bustling office. And I would not be spending my week off between jobs at sewing camp in the Catskills with my sister Katherine.
But! I did spend my week off at sewing camp in my apartment with my sister Katherine. She at her sewing table in Boston, me at mine in DC, we Google-hungout every afternoon the week we were to be at camp. One of the things I worked on was a muslin of the Lexi Top, which I had been meaning to try for a long time after admiring @make_something’s many versions. Katherine’s muslining practices have rubbed off on me ever so slightly – she buys muslin in 25-yard units, and taught me a wonderful/hilarious expression she learned from Threads magazine – that the first time you make a pattern, you can either make a cheap muslin (out of muslin) or an expensive one (out of your real fabric). I was glad to have muslined this, as I found the pattern slightly too cropped for me.
Post-camp, on the day before my job started, I made this real version of it, in a cotton lawn called “Happy Stripes.” This was one of the first fabrics I purchased after learning to sew – I loved the design and I loved the name. I never had the right project for it until virtual sewing camp in the time of life transitions both planned and unplanned. Happy Stripes felt like just the fabric for this season that we are all still learning how to live in.
~ Photos shot at a social distance by Lizzie Epstein - thanks sis!
Drawing process reel: Sewing table photo, pencil sketch, digital drawing.
