3 Steps to Edit Like a Designer

Podcast Show Notes

• 
  Why Editing is the Secret to the Perfect Wardrobe
  : (Episode 180) Tips for improving your editing skills so you only sew the clothes you love to wear.


• Sarai’s Ginger Skirt


• 
  How to Use The Rule of 3 Outfits: (Episode 25) A rule that will revolutionize how you pick out sewing projects.


• 
  Design Your Wardrobe: Our popular course helps you plan the sewing projects you'll love to wear.


• 
  Style Workshop: This hands-on workshop helps you define your core style. It's FREE for Seamwork members and just $10 if you aren't a member.


• 
  Podcast listeners get half off an unlimited Seamwork membership when you use this link, plus you get to keep that price as long as you’re a member!


• Tell us your idea for the next icebreakers for makers!

Podcast Transcript

Sarai
I'm Sarai.

Haley
And I'm Haley.

Sarai
And this is Seamwork Radio.

Sarai
Welcome back to Seamwork Radio, where we share practical ideas for building a creative process so you can sew with intention and joy.

Today, we're talking about three steps to edit like a designer. So we're going to cover why editing is such a vital part of any good design process. Then, we'll share a three-step process we like to use when working on our own sewing plans for the season.

All right, we have an icebreaker today, Haley, from Carla. And Carla asks, “what skill or technique that you may or may not enjoy really upped your sewing game?"

Haley
That's a great question, Carla. I think that the skill that really upped my sewing game that I maybe don't enjoy as much is hand sewing. I find it very tedious.

And maybe it's because I have pretty bad eyes, so I feel like I always have trouble sitting down on the couch and doing some hand sewing. I know people love to watch TV or a movie and do stuff like that, but I just cannot toggle between those two depth fields with much ease. It's tedious. But when I take the time to do it, it really makes a big difference.

Sarai
Yeah, it does. Well, I think for me, I think learning about interfacing, I don't know if this is a technique or a skill necessarily, but I think learning about interfacing is something that really transformed my sewing. Because I think when you're first starting out sewing, you buy the cheap interfacing at JoANN or wherever, and you wonder why your clothes look so weird and stiff. You know?

When I learned about different types of interfacing and how to combine the right interfacing with the right fabric and started using generally more lightweight interfacings, my garments looked a lot better. So I think that's a big one for me.

Haley
Yeah. I think that that's a phase that every beginner sewer goes through—using far too heavy of interfacing. I know that I've done that.

Sarai
Well, it's just the most common one that's available.

Haley

It's true. Why? I feel like they're tricking us.

Sarai
I don't know. There are better interfacings out there. Well, thank you so much, Carla. That was a great question.

And if you have an icebreaker for us for a future episode, you can leave it at seamwork.com/go/icebreakers. And if you're a Seamwork member, that'll take you to a thread on our community where you can leave your idea for a future icebreaker for one of our episodes in the future.

All right, so let's get into our topic for today. During the spring season of Design Your Wardrobe, we aired an episode called Why Editing is the Secret to the Perfect Wardrobe, and that was episode number 180, and we got a great response to that.

Now that we're in the summer season of Design Your Wardrobe, we wanted to follow up with even more editing tips, and these are really intended to help you think like a designer when you yourself are choosing what to sew.

So I'm really excited to talk about this today and add to that conversation.

This is all taken from our Design Your Wardrobe process, and it's one that we personally use when we are designing for ourselves. So, Haley, in a nutshell, why is editing so vital for designing clothes?

Haley
Well, I think that without editing, you're just getting unfiltered inspiration. For most people, that's not going to be incredibly wearable for their day-to-day life.

Editing is the way that we bring perspective to our inspiration. And what is all of this for, if not to enjoy the things that we make and use the things that we make?

I find that there's a lot of creativity in the editing process. I like to think of it as not taking away, but more of where the design challenge comes in. It's like the fun puzzle part of it all.

So I really embrace it as one of the more exciting parts of the process of like, cool, I have this amazing cool concept and inspiration. How do I make it work in the context of my life? And I like, embrace that as a fun design challenge. But it just brings reality into the equation.

Sarai
Yeah. You can almost think of it as personalization rather than editing. It's like, how do I take these general things that are appealing to me and really personalize them to me and to my life and what's important to me?

Haley
Yeah, totally. Why do you find editing to be super vital?

Sarai
Well, I think the same reasons. I think it's really all about taking something that might elicit some reaction in you—it might be something that you find beautiful, or it might be aspirational for you or represent a certain part of yourself that you want to project. Then taking that and really thinking about, how can I make this even more me?

How can I make this really integrate it into my life as well as my visual sense of aesthetics?

So I think that's really important. And I think going back to what you just said, it's also, for me, it's important that I actually get use out of the things that I create. And so this process of editing really helps me to make sure that it's going to be something that's both beautiful and useful.

Haley
I agree. There are many different approaches to the order of operations in which we pursue inspiration and editing. But in the Design Your Wardrobe process, we start with inspiration and then move to setting up our design constraints.

Why do you like to do it in that order? Why do you think that order is important?

Sarai
Well, I think, again, it goes back to this idea of personalization, of taking something that appeals to you in some way and then personalizing it. But I think it's important to me to do that first step of looking at what generally appeals to me and what is out there in the world that elicits some response from me before analyzing it too much. It's almost like the emotional part of it comes first, and then I can get into the thinking through and really making sure that whatever I'm creating is actually something that's going to be practical.

For me, it's important to do the feeling before the thinking because otherwise, the thinking can interfere with the feeling, if that makes sense.

Haley
Yeah, I totally feel that. I think that it works for a lot of creative brains. Doing the feeling part first really resonates with them because I think that giving yourself that opportunity to live in the fantasy before you you get cerebral about it is a really enriching creative exercise.

And then you're not going to analyze it later on. You are going to bring it back to reality, and it's also if you've done the work of defining your personal style, it's not like you're starting from zero.

You are starting from somewhere. And if you need help with defining your personal style, you should definitely take the Style Workshop. A little shameless plug there.

But I think that it's maybe a more inspiring, exciting place to start the design process.

Sarai
Yeah, and I think it also opens up possibilities for you. I think if you were to start with the practical considerations first, you might take the approach of, “Well, let's see what I already have in my closet. What would go with it? What colors do I already wear? What is going to be practical for my life?"

And I think that's all really important stuff, but that might get you stuck in a rut of not considering anything outside of what you already know.

I think if you start with the inspiration and the visuals first and really open it up into something a lot more creative and a lot more free-flowing first, then you might expose yourself to some new ideas and then find ways to incorporate them into your life.

That can bring some novelty and some newness and some freshness and some creativity into the process that might not already be there. So I think that's really important if that's something that matters to you. If this is really a creative outlet for you and a means of exploring your sense of identity and your self-expression, then I think it's very helpful for that reason.

Haley
Yeah, I couldn't agree more. Okay, my final question is, is there a way to tell when you've edited enough?

Sarai
Well, for me personally, I try to think about how much I can reasonably create in whatever period of time I'm giving myself. So we run Design Your Wardrobe four times a year. We do seasonal cycle, so spring, summer, fall, and winter. In that time, I try to think about, well, how many garments am I reasonably going to sew?

Usually, it's somewhere between three and six, somewhere in that range, depending on how much time I'm going to have. So that's how I know I've edited enough when I can get it down to those few ideas. Which is hard. It's very hard to do. But when it comes to coming up with the constraints, that can be a little bit harder. Thinking about, do I have enough constraints or is there more I need to think about? That's a little bit more something that you have to do intuitively, I think.

Haley
Yeah, I agree with you. I think there's just the brass tacks of how much can you, like, realistically get done in the a lot of time, like a lot of time?

But then when I think about the garments individually and the editing process for each individual one, I think it's going to vary from garment to garment. Something that I think about a lot, and as Sarai and I were talking about today, is the concept of over-designing something.

In your pursuit to create something interesting, are you taking away the thing that makes it good?

So when I'm thinking about editing an individual concept or garment, I always ask myself that question. Am I being interesting just to be interesting? Just for the sake of making it complicated?

And sometimes maybe the answer is yes, and you're okay with that. That is a question I ask myself often during the design process.

Sarai
Yeah, I think that's a really good point. All right, well, let's talk a little bit about the tips. You want to start us off, Haley?

Haley
Yeah. So our first tip is to define, just straight up, where are you going to wear your clothes and what are you going to be doing when you're wearing these clothes?

In Design Your Wardrobe, we call this your design context. So up until now, up until this point in the Design Your Wardrobe process, all you've done is seek inspiration. And defining your design context is your first step in bringing everything back down to reality.

I am of the belief that you can make most design concepts wearable for most occasions.

The context is your tool that will help you figure out how you're going to do that. I fully believe that if you are into Victorian peasant core, that you can figure out a way to incorporate that into your corporate wardrobe.

I think that sounds like a really fun design challenge for you, and it's totally doable. But in order to make those connections and make those things make sense together, you need your context.

So some examples of context are working from home, working in a corporate office, and then maybe you're going out after work. I don't know. Stay-at-home parenting, traveling, maybe retirement.

I think that the key here is that the more specific you can get, the better.

Sarai
I find that process really, really helpful. And it also helps to make some choices about what kinds of garments you're actually going to sew later on. If that's something that's difficult for you, then I think narrowing it down to certain contexts can be super, super helpful.

You have a lot of different contexts in your life, probably. You're doing a lot of different things. But thinking really strategically about, well, what do I want to create for right now at this period of my life, can be really, really helpful in making decisions.

All right. Well, the next one is once you've thought about the context that you'd like to design for, dig a little bit deeper into each one. Then, for each context, what you want to do is define the criteria that your clothes have to meet in that context.

Some examples would be things like, what's the climate going to be? What silhouettes do I need? Do I need certain amount of comfort or mobility? Does it have to be appropriate for the occasion?

For example, if you're going to a lot of weddings this summer, maybe one of the criteria you want to think about is that, well, I'm going to make a dress. I don't want it to be white. I'm going to be wearing it to a wedding. I want it to be appropriate for the occasion. I want it to maybe be a light color, whatever it is.

But think about the criteria that the garment needs to meet for that particular context. You can define those criteria for each context yourself.

Let's say that you've decided that you're going to choose the context of working from home and going on a special trip that you have planned. You're going to make maybe two garments for the first context and one garment for the second context. For each context, you can just list, Okay, what criteria do these garments need to meet in order for them to be practical for me?

I think this is just a super helpful process for really getting to the practicality of the things that you're going to make. You shouldn't discount feelings or moods as a criteria, either, as a criterion, I guess you would say. You shouldn't discount those things. Those are important as well. If there's a certain feeling you want to have or certain mood that you want to convey with what you're making, you can list that as well.

Haley
Yeah. I like to start with the things that are very cut-and-dry choices. If I'm designing for my summer wardrobe, the climate is like, it's pretty straightforward. I know what that's going to be. And then I like to get like, I like to make sure that I'm getting a little bit more specific, too. So think about what are the things that are going to make it good for those occasions.

So I think of working from home, like what makes a good Zoom call outfit? Maybe it's something that has a little interest up near your face because that's all that people are seeing. And maybe that's something that is going to be knit from the waist down. I don't know. If you take your Zoom call sitting down like I do.

But getting into the specifics of that are going to be really, really helpful when you move on to your next step.

Sarai
You know, this is total tangent. I was on a Zoom call the other day with somebody meeting her for the first time, and she had a treadmill desk. I had never met this person before, and she was walking the whole time.

Haley
Was it loud?

Sarai
No, it wasn't at all. But it's the first time that's ever happened to me. I don't I thought it was cool.

Haley
Yeah, I'm like, good for her.

Sarai
I know. She didn't mind.

Haley
I would trip and fall.

Sarai
Yeah. I would. Fully. I mean, if I had a treadmill desk, if I was meeting for somebody for the first time, I'd probably be self-conscious about it. But she wasn't, so that's cool.

Haley
That's good for her. All right. Well, moving on to our final tip. You’re going to take all of these constraints, and you're going to start to conceptualize your garments. A tool that I like to use when I'm editing my individual garments is to build hypothetical outfits.

I can love a garment, the idea of it in theory. And once I start building a hypothetical outfit, sometimes my plans can totally fall apart.

I'd really rather that happen before I start sewing, which is why I think this is such a great tool.

In the Design Your Wardrobe process, I believe we call this auditioning a garment. And so what I like to do is audition my garments in the context of, a) other things maybe I plan on making, and b), the clothing that I already have in my own wardrobe. And then I like to ask myself a few questions about that.

One, I ask myself, do these clothes reflect my personal style? And would I feel good while wearing that? Again, leaning into that criteria that we about in step two.

My second question is, can I build three outfits using it? And sometimes if it's a special occasion garment, maybe that's less important to you. But if it's a context that is a more everyday context for you, I find that this is something that's really important to me.

Can you build three outfits using it? We have a really great episode about the rule of three outfits. We can link that in the show notes. It's excellent.

And then finally, I ask myself, does the garment still meet all of my criteria once I've styled it with other things? Because sometimes something can seem great on its own. But then when you put it with the things that you would actually wear it with, it’s not something you'd feel comfortable wearing. Maybe it's something that wouldn't be appropriate for the climate. So really stacking the outfits up against your criteria again.

Sarai
Yeah. I think that's super helpful. And I think Design Your Wardrobe really helps with that process of thinking through the outfits. I know for my spring wardrobe that I planned, it really helped me think about... So I made the ginger skirt in a white corduroy, and it really helped me think about all the different ways that I could wear it and all the different outfits I could create with it, both with the things I was creating alongside it, but also with things that I already had. And it made me realize what a workhorse it was going to be in my wardrobe. And that was super, super helpful for me.

Haley
And that can be really motivating, especially when, not speaking badly about the power of a simple skirt. But sometimes those are the kinds of garments that I personally am like, “It'd be cute, but It doesn't feel as exciting to me” as the more like frosting type project. Seeing it in the context of the outfit can really inspire me to buckle up and make the thing.

Sarai
Yeah. I think it's also good to think about wearing something in multiple ways and multiple times and really making it a part of your life over time, because I think there can be a tendency to, and I think this is true with sewing, but it's also true with shopping, just get really excited about the new thing and not think about, how can I make this last? How can I make it really practical and useful? How can I actually get use out of it day to day? Sometimes we make things or we buy things, and it's really exciting for a week, and then it just goes to the back of our closet. So I think this is a way to keep that spirit alive, even after the garment is made. Keep you excited about it.

Haley
I agree. I think that the things that I've made where I considered the styling very strongly when I was planning the project are always my most worn pieces.

Sarai
That can teach you about what types of garments to tend to fall in that category. You learn over time, which I think is another really good side benefit.

All right, so I'm going to recap our tips for you.

Tip number one is to define the context. Define where you're going to be wearing these clothes and what you're going to be doing.

The next step after that is, once you have those contexts that you're going to be designing for, to dig a little deeper and define the criteria that the things that you wear have to meet in each of those contexts.

Then the third step is to build hypothetical outfits. So audition any of those new garments within your current wardrobe.

I think that's a really solid, very simple process that you can follow. Whether you're participating in Design Your Wardrobe right now or not, I think that's something anybody can do.

All right. What's your big takeaway from today's episode, Haley?

Haley
I think that my big takeaway is something we just talked about, which is that the third step, considering the styling of the garments, is really... It's one that I am guilty of overlooking when planning my sewing projects from time to time. And it's arguably one of the most important things and leads. When I do it, it leads to my most successful garments. So I think my big takeaway is to not like, underestimate the power of that.

Sarai
Yeah. I think for me, I was thinking about this earlier this morning. I think I'm really inspired by making things that are useful and practical. I find that really inspiring. I was thinking about that in regards to cooking this morning and how I feel really inspired by food because it brings joy into my life every day. I feel the same way about sewing and knitting and lots of other crafty type things that I do that actually are things that I get practical use out of day to day.

I think this process is really a way of celebrating that and making sure that my artistic process is also something that's practical because I do find that very creatively inspiring.

So that is it for us this week, I'm Sarai.

Sarai
And I'm Haley.

Sarai
And this is Seamwork Radio.