When I started my blog Originations (http://originationsbyj. blogspot.com/) in September of 2012, it was because of my admiration of the many sewing blogs I’d been following. There are few enough who are passionate about this craft of ours: the painstaking work of cutting cloth to the correct drape, stitching pieces together impeccably, pressing seams with care, and proudly wearing or seeing others wear the beautifully finished garments. If we don’t find a way to pass the passion along to the next generation of sewists, I fear that sewing for the love of it will disappear. My generation grew up playing under the sewing tables of mothers, aunts and grandmothers, learning from our elders to create and to love the process. Sometimes it skipped a generation - my instruction came from my aunt rather than my mother. We have memories of button tins and sewing baskets full of strange and wonderful notions collected over the years, of wearing particular garments sewn for occasions long forgotten, and scraps of cloth from dresses long-ago relegated to the rag pile. Young fashionistas in the 2010’s know more about where to buy cheap fashion than they do about what goes into creating a quality garment (or how it should fit - but that’s another story), and this fast consumerism has done more to threaten the garment industry than anything else. As I wrote in my first blog post, I decided it was high time to collect those “thoughts that have been writing themselves in my head for months - years, maybe - and get them down, not on paper, but out there for the world to read.”
I chose a blog name that reflects my business name - Janee’s Originals. The format was not difficult to set up, using the Blogger templates, and modeling different areas of the page after some of my favorite bloggers was the easy way out. I can and do make changes to the layout as they make sense to me. I wasn’t terribly surprised that writing flowed out of me for the first post, and I learned how to add photos as I went along. They are the spice to break up the mass of text and add color and appeal to the blog page. What proved harder was to remember to take photos while I sewed, to have them available to include in a post it might take weeks or months (or longer) to get around to writing. Because that was - and is - the inherent difficulty in writing a blog: finding or making the time to actually write it. Because my sewing time is heavily skewed to client work (I am running a business, after all) most of my day-to-day work is very mundane as I complete common alterations. People won’t want to read about those basic techniques. I don’t want to be a person who just posts for the sake of having something appear on the blog; I want my posts to matter to me and whoever takes the time to read them. I have picked up a couple of clients with projects based on what they read on the blog - just this past week I contracted with a young mother to use her wedding gown to make her daughter’s christening gown, because she’d seen a post on my blog from a few months back.
My first post of 2014 in January included the commitment to post more often this year - I’m already woefully behind! I don’t have many followers, probably because I post so infrequently, and most of those are fellow ASDP members, all blog-writers themselves. We follow each other in mutual support. But that doesn’t matter to me. When I find a reason to write a post, I am able to create it quickly and get it published immediately with minimal editing. It might be about a book I’ve read, a consultation I just had with a new client or a technique I figured out for a project that worked especially well. I will probably never be someone who shows the world a brand-new technique that no one else has ever thought of, but I truly enjoy being able to use my blog to let me be a teacher. My hope is that in some small way, I can be one of those passionate sewists who manage to spread the joy of sewing, and inspire just one young person to devote just a part of her/his waking hours to the pursuit of fine garment construction.
