Reviewing My 2016

I’ve been reading a fair number of blog posts in which sewists look back at the past year, which gave me the idea to do the same with an eye to seeing what I can learn about myself from the photos I published this year. It’s not the individual makes so much as the “looks” that I’m interested in. And this post is primarily for myself and may involve some self-examination, so feel free to skip it 🙂

It was a year of practical sewing, making wearable items to replace a wardrobe that was pretty much non-existent. Although I love clothing and have often spent many an hour drooling over shop windows, I’ve never financially prioritized clothing. I’ve worked at jobs that didn’t require nine-to-five attendance, or the wardrobe to go with it.When I bought an old house a dozen years ago, that pretty much eliminated discretionary spending too.

The result is that I haven’t really known what I would like to look like if I had the choice. Now that I’m sewing, and finding all kinds of places that offer fabric pieces for massive discounts, I do have the choice. So, if not jeans and sweats and fleece, what? The external always reflects and reveals the internal. What I choose to look like will tell me something of what I’ve become by this post-sixty stage of my life.

Here are ten pix I liked  from the last 12 months. While sorting through all the blog posts to find these (and I left out the last three simply because they were so recent, and I wanted to stick to the number ten) I pronounce myself “arty”. Huh. Who’d a thought?

I can also see that I’m pretty happy. I know I’m smiling for the camera, but I remember how I felt when I took all these pictures and I was always feeling pretty good. If I think about it, these pictures reveal that I’m happier than I have ever been in my life. I’ve been aware of this. Over the past two years I’ve sometimes stood looking out my bedroom window at the city and mountains and trees and felt happiness — a quiet kind of contentment — spread like a fine mist inside my body.

I also see in some of these looks a bit of a f**k you attitude. I’m not trying to look attractive. Conventional beauty doesn’t interest me. Conventional clothing doesn’t interest me. I don’t wear makeup and sometimes I think that at my age I should. But I really can’t bring myself to care enough.

Still … if there’s one thing I’d like to see more of — and maybe this will be a sort of goal for the coming year — it would be a kind of quiet, unostentatious elegance. Maybe I’d like to drop the “f**k you” for a self-assured elegance. If I could move in that direction, I think it would reveal greater self-acceptance. So maybe that’s really what I’d like for 2017.