prefer to read the conversation?

Hey, there you are listening to the In Kinship Podcast, a podcast for makers, makers who crave a vibrant, joy filled life on their own terms. And I’m your host, Tina VanDenburg. I am so grateful to have you here. This is the start of our next. Season of kinship. Thank you for your patience as we had a little bit of a hiatus, but we are back with a podcast.

And today I’ve been thinking a lot about, the making process I suppose. And how it feels to work through the challenges that can come with making. So here, lemme just jump right in. I made this dress. If you’re watching the video, you can see it. It’s a red knit dress. It has pin tucks on the front. It has snaps down the button packet it. It’s got a gathered skirt. Actually, I plated. It has all these different elements and it’s what I’m working on for my latest course with ease. That’s going live right now.

And right now it will be March of 2025, so I was working on. The drafting for this particular garment. So in my, with these courses, we take a basic garment and we change it into new and more intricate designs as a way to show people, one, that they are so capable and they can have so many, so much success.

Working through different design elements and learning how to take their garments and make them into something different. I know all of you listening are not garments, so, so, you know, bear with me for a moment. ’cause this really relates, I think, to all of us. So I was working on the pattern for this, this is what we’re gonna work on in late April, and so I’ve got some time and I, how I begin that process is I’ll consider the elements I want to have in it.

I’ll consider. Center, what makes the most sense to make first, and I’ll start with a pattern. I’ll lay the pattern on my table. I’ll start to cut it apart, add same allowance here, add ease there, like kind of figure out what I want this design to look like in the end. And I should say, obviously first it, it begins with like deciding what kind of design I want.

Right, like working through what that might look like. And that truly is one of my favorite parts of any creative project. I love sketching, designs and thinking about, solving my problem, if you will. And by problem, I mean like in air quotes, right? This isn’t truly a problem. It’s really like. I have these parameters and that’s my most fun way to make, is to have parameters that I’m trying to solve.

So like I love that for when I was making a little camping cabinet that I wanted to take with my vintage 1964 Apache Ego camper. I wanted this little wooden cabinet that opened up and had all of the supplies in it for the kitchen. So I began that process by thinking about, all right, how big should it be?

How big can I easily carry? Where will all my supplies fit? And I actually got my supplies out and I laid them out and made measurements. So all of that to say it’s like one of my favorite parts of the creative process. And so for sewing clothing, it’s also one of my favorite parts. So I’ll take the pattern and I’ll start to figure out.

Now that I have the design and I know I have a mood board, typically I know what it is I want to create. Now I’m looking at the actual individual pieces of creating it. And so I had all of my pieces out and I developed all the pattern pieces that this particular garment would need. And I decided because this garment had a lot of, gathering in the skirt, I wanted it to have a lot of.

Drape. So for me that would mean working with something that’s either a mod or in the rayon world, something that’s got good stretch, good recovery. So it has a little bit of a lasting, but it also has great and beautiful drape. ’cause I wanted it to move with me and not feel more stiff like a cotton might.

So I picked up my fabric and I ordered it, and I knew I wanted it relatively thin because I, again, was doing a lot of gathering on the skirt, and I didn’t wanna add bulk with that gathering, but I wanted it to lay closer to my body. And have that movement. So I ordered my fabric. I got to work on my, my iteration, and over the weekend I sewed it up and found a couple of issues.

One, once I got the bot done, I realized it was completely see-through, which does not exactly work, and I could have worked with that ’cause I actually love the problem solving aspect. That comes with figuring out how to make my design or how to alter it to make it work when it’s not quite working out.

So I could have lined it, but I didn’t order enough fabric for that to actually happen. I had an idea that I wanted to try out for the neck band and for the button click. So I tried out this idea. Of a really sculpted shaped button plat and neck band that were all one piece, and I found it to be incredibly fiddly to sew.

And so I thought that’s probably not what I want to teach people in my course. There are already enough challenges with sewing and drafting patterns from scratch to fit your unique body because even though they’re gonna. Follow my process and I’m gonna give them help along the way. They’re still doing this for their own unique bodies, which is beautiful and will give them so much success and so much, upleveling of their skills.

But it’s enough challenge, right? Like we don’t need to push ourselves off. Giant cliffs, we can just like jump off of medium cliffs. We don’t have to do all of that. So this bot did not work out and I found that familiar frustration. And I’m guessing you can probably relate it to this when you’re working on something and it does not work out how you want it to, and you feel like just bawling it up and throw it in the.

Corner and going and doing something else, like maybe scrolling on social media or some terrible idea like that. Um, I’m guessing you have a similar response. ’cause I definitely see this a lot in my courses, in my workshops and my retreats that I have is like, there’s this moment like you’re working through, you feel that frustration, something.

You get a hurdle and then you’re like, oh, this isn’t gonna work. None of it’s gonna work. I can’t do this. And like this snowball, right? The snowball effect of like all the ways in which we in fact are not enough. And of course that’s not true. It’s never true. It’s just part of the learning process. It’s part of the working through something.

And I see this a lot with my little boy. He’s. Nine years old and he’s definitely at that place where he is sort of terrified of doing anything imperfectly. And so I get to think about this a lot too and think about it a lot as a mother, like how to. Encourage him to fail and to be okay with failing to pick himself up and to do something again, right?

Until he gets what kind of success he wants to get out of it. And I realized that probably the only way that’s gonna happen with my 9-year-old boy, what I’m working on as a mom, for those of you who want to know, is I’m working on ways to help him regulate his nervous system when he feels the stress of failing, because he really gets a lot of anxiety when he feels that he has failed and he just really struggles and I hate to see that.

So we’ve been working on different mindfulness techniques, which help me a lot in my own journey, and so I’m trying to. Incorporate that more into his life, but ultimately is he has to fail. He has to try things that he’s not inherently great at the first moment, or there are circumstances he didn’t expect.

He needs to work through those and realize like, oh, I can do this actually, and have success in the end. Whatever that success. Just defined us. And sometimes that’s not like in the recent Breakthrough Rules of Sewing series that we just did in January. Sometimes that isn’t like a finished, perfect product.

That isn’t always what success is. Sometimes success is that you’ve learned something you feel really. Settled in what you’ve learned and you can move on to something else. You don’t have to continually walk that path until you get that sort of perfect result. However, this particular dress I was working on, I needed a perfect result.

And by perfect, I mean just really good because I’m teaching this class and I need to be able to. Fine tune the processes of it so that I can easily show it to other people and they can have success. And so that first iteration did not work out and I felt that familiar feeling of frustration and stress around something not working and sort of those.

Inherent, not good enough feelings that can come with that. And so I had to walk away. I imagine, you know what that’s like. I had to walk away. I had to do something else. And then on Sunday I went back to it and I thought, all right, I’ve got a different fabric. I actually cut the boice off of the dress I was working on and made a tank top, bought us for it.

So now I have this. Because it always feels good, right? To be able to utilize what you’re working on. Although I do encourage us as, as artistic humans, as makers to like also be okay with being curious enough to work through the process until you get to the end of it. And if you have some iterations that are purely, samples and don’t have an end result, I think that’s beautiful too.

I can get sort of hung up on whatever I make has. To have some kind of utility to it. Otherwise, I have wasted my time, I have wasted my materials, I’ve non-sustainable all of these things. But ultimately, if we’re looking at the larger goal, if we’re looking at the bigger picture, we are growing as humans and the more that we stretch ourselves as we grow, the faster we’re gonna become masters at whatever it is that we’re doing.

And so I’ll also be okay. If you cannot use the garment that you are working through that you, if you have to start fresh and you can’t use it. But it was exciting. I say all of that, but it was exciting to be able to put a, a tank top boice onto that skirt and waistband and feel like I had something that I would enjoy wearing this summer.

And then I have to let go of, although I’ll probably use it in my class to show like, here’s why this didn’t work. Because ultimately whenever you’re making something, I know you know how this is, whether that’s. Cooking something or painting something or woodworking or whatever it is. Ultimately there’s so much thoughtful decision making that goes into creating what you want.

Especially as you get into the mastery aspect of it. If you’re brand new, there is kind of a beauty to like not knowing what you don’t know and just jumping in and having sort of wild and crazy success. Like that’s a super fun thing as well. But as you get more mastery and you want to have more predictable success, then knowing what you’re looking at and why it worked and why it didn’t, I think is a good moment.

I think it’s a good pause, right? A pause in the creativity to say, all right, what did not work about this? I actually think that’s a great pause in life in general, like, you know, that I really enjoy. Planning. Sort of the feeling that I want to have for the year. And I don’t do so much planning as far as the exact details.

It’s more like, I wanna feel like this, I wanna feel expansive, I wanna feel vibrant. And so now I know like. Here are some things that make me feel expansive. Here are some things that make me feel vibrant. How do I add those to my life? I think it’s important to stop at various intervals and say, what’s working and what’s not?

And why didn’t this work? Could it be tweaked to work better? Could I add in more friend walks and what that might me feel better both physically and spiritually?

So like all of that is a learning opportunity. And the more you learn, like the better you can make your choices in the future so that you can have more predictable, I guess, success. Although you should always leave a little room for magic, a little room to like, I don’t know what’s gonna happen here.

Let’s see how it goes. ’cause. How fun is that, right? So I’m at that point, I worked through it. I found a different fabric and I slowly worked through the process. Again, changing the things I knew that were challenging about the first iteration so that I could simplify it for myself, but also for the students that I have coming, in April on it.

And so I then had. This beautiful dress that I finished and I took some time to do some hand sewing on it, which feels like a beautiful thing. And part of it is that like I love doing a little hand sewing in my garments, but I’m incredibly resistant to it. ’cause I have this idea that I want to accomplish and get something finished in a certain amount of time.

I have this time Darth, or I can, I’m really working on changing that for myself because. The little bit of hand sewing I did on this garment, like I actually hand sewed where my snaps are actually rivets, which is a story for a different day, but I actually hand sewed where they were going to be so that I could try it on and see how it looked with some negative aids.

So I’m wearing this garment that is actually smaller than my body because it’s a knit garment so it can stretch once it gets onto my, to my actual body. And so I wanted to see what it looked like once I had my snaps in place. And I thought I was very proud of myself for doing that. I was like, yes, good job.

Like way to do a little recon so that you know you’re gonna get what you want. You don’t have this moment of like. I love this dress. I hate where the snaps replaced. I hope nobody notices because you know they’re going to notice. It’s like front and center and like, I think there’s those little spaces where we are sort of short changing ourselves, doing a quick little shortcut on what it is we’re trying to achieve, that we have some room for growth, right?

The moments where I’m like, ah, I don’t need to do that, I’ll just. Go this way are the moments that like they don’t feel light filled and curious and happy. They feel like. Scarce. Like, I’m working in scarcity and I don’t wanna work in scarcity. And that doesn’t mean I won’t ever take shortcuts, but if the shortcut doesn’t feel giddy and light filled, then I don’t wanna take it right?

That’s kind of my new, judgment on whether a shortcut should be taken. If it feels good and it feels light, great. If it feels like I’m letting myself down, let’s not do that anymore, right? Life is. This beautiful experience no matter what’s happening outside of our individual lives. We still have this ability to experience our own lives and I would even say maybe, I don’t know about obligation, but

we can do the most beauty in the world when we are ourselves, our living in joy, and I believe deep in my soul. That we can live in joy no matter our circumstances. Whether our leg is broken or our political system is in turmoil, or there’s great sorrow because we can have both things at one time.

And so I encourage you to do things that you love and to do things that bring you joy alongside the things that are hard because I don’t know about you. What I have found in my life that the joyful times don’t just stick around waiting for me to enjoy them, as an external event, right? I,

my life always has these big ups and downs and like, just when I think I’ve caught my breath, I’ve knocked on my. But again, I’m like, I mean just personally. And then of course there’s the grander scheme of things that we work towards. And it’s not to say that we don’t have empathy or that we don’t work towards the changes that we want in the world, but we also have this life to live.

And we have so much control over how we experience the life that we have. And so what I really wanna leave you with today is work through the struggle of learning something new. Enjoy the process. Us Enjoy life alongside the hard because at least as far as I know, they’re always together. So thanks for listening today.

I hope you have the most beautiful day, and I will talk to you soon.