Step I: Before you design, before you draft, before you sew, you start here. Every designer will tell you:

Good design starts with story.

Grow & Glow: Finding what speaks to you

Start your journey by collecting your story: images, bits of scrap, words, and ideas you love.

Take a minute to think about what lights you up and makes you glow. What makes you feel alive and excited to adventure and what makes you feel wholeness and peace?

Think about these two different emotions that we want to capture in our inspiration images as:

• Ignitability &/or excitement -to adventure and experience -images, words, and ideas that thrill you.

  &

• Gratitude for everything we have experienced -images, words, and ideas that fill you with peace and satisfaction for what is.

A buddy summed this up as “grow & glow”.

We don’t often have a hard time collecting images for excitement, things we want to try, grand adventures we dream of having, or things we dream of making/wearing/posessing. And it’s important to collect images that inspire and excite us to create

…but collecting images that give us a sense of fulfillment, a sense of contented pride, and satiated purpose for the life we’re already living? Doing this helps us to exercise the muscle of residing in enough.

This feeling is crucial to living in our pieces month to month and year to year.

Sustainability is such an important goal and our feelings of gratitude and contented satiation are touchstones connecting the cerebral value to the emotional reason.

Finding our contented gratitude inspirations right from the beginning lays the foundation for appreciating well worn and loved pieces that have the mark of our lives instead of constantly reaching or searching for something new.

And it does something else too, it helps us to find the tail of our golden thread, which is our unique voice & our heart-stone reason in the stylistic thread that runs through our whole life.

Collecting inspiration for both of these feelings creates space where both the graces and the muse can dance in harmony.

For your image collection, I’m not exclusively talking here about clothing or cloth but also places, activities, plants, trees, animals, rocks, sunrises and sunsets, words, moments, music, art, and more.

This could be the color or pattern of a feather, an old black and white photo of an ancestor, the feel of a swatch of cloth, a photo of how light hits the water.

Collect images that make you feel joy and excitement and also images that give you serenity and a deep sense of wholeness, wellbeing, and belonging.

Bring them all, hold them to you and keep thinking about this prompt. It’s the most important part of following the muse into the inner story around which we’ll create a purposeful and inspiring theme.

Our next step is to discover why these images speak to you, what story are they telling? What are we being beckoned to create with these muse whisperings as our foundation?

Collecting your story through visual inspiration

Consider printing your inspiration images out. By all means, use Pinterest if it works best for you. I certainly use pinterest to the fullest BUT I still keep an actual inspiration board so that I can be reminded and prompted by my inspirations physically around me in my home.

<—Digging way back to show you my old inspiration wall in my very first studio, you’ll see that I literally surrounded myself with what spoke to me. Inspiration changes, what we’re going to peer into is what consistently calls to us & why. The photo of this mammoth wall is over 13 years old, but many of those images have hung in there and are defining touchstones of my personal wardrobe themes.

If you’re old hat at this, that’s great, and, there is always more to learn from one another.

Consider what area might need more fleshing out. Are you brilliant at gathering inspiration images that ignite you? Might you need to mull over what pieces of inspiration bring feelings of gratitude? Hang in there, we’re headed somewhere together.

You don’t need to create seasonal collections & an apparel line for stories to be relevant to your wardrobe pieces and life.

You’ll find that by honing in on your muse and inspiration stories that you are in many ways, designing a magical custom capsule wardrobe for yourself wherein every piece holds hands in visual harmony.

The Why

Before you learn or “level-up” your sewing game, I want you to have a clear picture as to the why. Sewing isn’t cheaper than buying clothes off the rack, in fact, it’s more expensive and of course, time-consuming. We don’t create because we’re looking to save some bucks or some time, we create to build the lives we want to live.

We create to put meaning, feeling, purpose, and beauty into our lives. We spin stories, just like the great spider spinning stories of fate in the sky. When we create we put part of our unique spark into our everyday items. The golden thread running through our story leads to a deeper theme, and my hunch is that golden thread is in everything that you create, or dream of creating.

Sustainability comes naturally

As a beautiful symbiotic benefit, creating our dream bespoke pieces means they become lifelong heirlooms. The effort to combine our needs, dreams, and then proper fit means we have beloved pieces to wear and wear, patch, alter, and continue to love for decades.

The sustainability impact is meaningful. Yet, the first step is to figure out your story so that we can return to it when your thread breaks and you’ve put the butt dart where the chest dart was supposed to go….

You don’t have to go wild with your inspiration images. You could have 3 stamp-sized, well, stamps that deeply inspire. As long as your images evoke a spark and thrill or a glowing satiated wholeness, you’re on the right track.

Because of one of my all-time favorite inspiration images, I’ve joked with students that this step is “figuring out what kind of buck nekkid on a rock, you want to be” -but maybe you never ever want to be naked on any kind of rock anywhere, that’s important to know. Maybe you’ve longed to be buck naked all alone in the Catskills, on black sand Icelandic beaches, in the red rock hills of Utah, or in a mist enshrined onsen in Japan, wherever it is, whatever it is, discover it. Let’s begin.

Homework Step I:

• Think about what ignites you & lights you up. Think about what makes you peacefully glow.

• Collect inspiration images. *Collect for both summer and winter. Collect for excitement and serenity.

• Consider sharing an inspiration image with us on Instagram. Tag it @unabashedapparel & #unabashedstory

After collecting your inspirations, the next step is to notice your personal thematic thread(s).

Below you’ll find a smattering of my images from interiors, snow, to summer fairy tablescapes and mirrors in the woods, they all inspire me to tell a story or continue the story they are telling. What inspires you to dream and storytell? What images and ideas bring you alive and whisper to you to go a little further, dream a little more?