Me-made May is probably the most popular challenge in the online sewing community each year with thousands of participants from all over the world. The challenge was initiated in 2010 by Zoe Edwards of “So, Zo…”, and the main purpose is to learn more about your relationship to your me-made wardrobe and more generally about yourself as in body image, creativity and so on.
Today, in its 12th year, the challenge is crazy popular and draws attention from all over the world. The participants are sewing, knitting or crocheting their own garments and sharing their outfits. There are many ways to engage in this, and most important, you don’t need to post selfies online unless you want to. That said, most of the activity is on Instagram where thousands of people post pictures of their me-mades each day. There are several hashtags you can follow, and the most popular this year is #memademay2021 with thousands of entries each day. The main point is to find a pledge that’s meaningful to yourself. Wardrobe assessing, being creative with your me-mades, discover holes in your wardrobe and much more are among several popular pledges.
This is my second time participating in MMMAY. When I started sewing my own clothes for real in 2018, I only had a very small me-made wardrobe, so I followed along from the sideline, very intrigued. In 2019 I had made more than enough to join in, and I remember it was fun. Last year, I felt blah and didn’t find the motivation while being confined to my home “office”, aka kitchen table. While this still is the case most days, I decided to give it another try this year, so here I am. My pledge is to wear something me-made every day and to assess what I have. My goal is to be able to make better choices going forward, as in detecting what I actually wear and not what I think I want to wear. I’m posting daily updates to my Instagram stories and saving them in the highlights.
The first ten days of May involved visiting relatives, walking in the park, some actual shopping and two days at the actual office. I also chopped off a significant amount of hair, which was a good decision I think. The weather has been mostly underwhelming with cold winds, low temperatures and some very rainy days. I’m not going to bother you with details of all my outfits, but looking at these photos, I’m interested to see if there is an obvious pattern emerging?
What I see is very unsurprisingly a lot of trousers, jeans, tops and shirts. I think of myself as a skirt and dresses-person, but in reality I don’t wear those that often.
If I break this down a little, I wore rtw jeans five times, three different me-made trousers four times and a jumpsuit once. I wore shirts three times and rest of the time I wore various tops, jumpers and cardigans in jersey. I wore several me-made jackets and a new trenchcoat.
Is there anything interesting to say about this? My thoughts so far:
- To my surprise I’ve reached for a few of my older me-made garments, for example the Kinder cardigan, Elliot tee and Maja wide leg trousers in wool which all are from 2018. I think this is because I normally have so many new and shiny pieces to choose from that I simply forget the good older ones. I need to slow down my production or give away more of what I sew.
- Dressing in office appropriate attire makes me feel awkward. The old blazer I wore one day made me feel very old and boring, so I need to find another solution for when I need to dress more formally. I regret not wearing a simple dress instead.
- I definitely prefer classic colors and little or no pattern on my clothes, but I already knew that. Bring on the neutrals and some blue, khaki or dusty yellow any day.
I think this is good for now, really. The deeper insights about my body image and getting older are taking shape, but I’m not ready to articulate those yet. After all, we have 20 more days to go, so I’m leaving it at that.
Are you participating in me-made may this year? Are you having fun with it? To be honest, I’m not sure if I’m having fun, because some of my self scrutiny is pretty uncomfortable. But it is an interesting process for sure, so I’m sticking with it.
Sew Ingwii 