A while back I posted about the baby kimono I’d made for a friend who was expecting. Well, here is Charlotte modeling it for me. Hello, cuteness!

Four years ago I wrote a post about how I wanted to learn to sew better. At the beginning of this year, many of the clothing issues I wrote about back then still applied. I still disliked shopping. I still loved that minimal, logo-free “Cayce Pollard” aesthetic. I still bought (and sewed) too many things that I didn’t wear and ended up donating. There were eight black t-shirts in my closet that got heavy rotation with a couple of skirts and pairs of jeans, and everything else was dusty.

There’s one big thing that’s changed since I wrote that post, and that’s my job. I still work in software, but not in the coding end of it where the jeans and t-shirt uniform are the norm. Last year I moved into product management, which is a land of executive presentations and customer meetings and multi-thousand attendee user conferences and indirect influence. It’s not exactly a corporate banking power suit environment, but dressing to impress is more important than it used to be. And my wardrobe wasn’t cutting it.

Several of my coworkers have used Style Kouncil to get impressive wardrobe makeovers, so a few months ago I decided to try them. The process was more or less this:

First, I filled out a questionnaire that asked about my current style, the style I wanted, likes, dislikes, people whose style I admire, etc. (The style I wanted: minimal, black/grey/white, architectural lines. Pleats, not gathers. Age appropriate, but with an edge. Architect professional rather than banker professional.)

Kat and Kelly, the Style Kouncil principals, came over and curated my closet with me. They helped me rediscover pieces that I already had but did’t wear very often, and cull pieces that didn’t fit the image I wanted to project. They made a list of things they thought I needed to fill in the gaps. They even looked at some of my fabric and made suggestions about things I could sew myself.

Then Kat and Kelly went shopping for me! Best. Shopping. Experience. Ever. All I had to do was meet them at the store. Check out what was waiting for me:

Black, white and gray. Everything already in my size. I spent three hours in the changing room drinking sparkling water and eating English toffee while Kelly and Kat handed me things to try on. I felt a bit like a life-sized Barbie doll, but it was pretty awesome.

They found a charcoal gray skirt that was similar in style to my favorite skirt (a vintage plaid wool pleated school uniform skirt), but with a lower risk of fetishization:

I discovered “structured leggings” and a couple of new brand crushes (particularly Theysken’s Theory and The Row — which I never would have guessed was Mary Kate and Ashley Olsen).

I’ve never really worn “designer clothing” before; most of my clothes came from The Gap or Banana Republic or — more recently — Calvin Klein (but the affordable collection, not the designer collection). It felt weird wearing Givenchy — even if it was on clearance. But this is me trying out being a grown-up:

I left Barneys with a wool coat, the leather jacket above, two skirts (including the gray pleated one), two pairs of pants, the ankle boots in the previous photo, and a few shirts and tops. From there we went to Madewell, where another pile of stuff awaited me to try on, and I picked up a pair of jeans and a few basics like tank tops and long-sleeved t-shirts (yes, even a black one). When I got home I was shopped out and a little horrified at all that purchasing — though I had set a dollar amount going in that I was willing to spend, and didn’t go much over it.

Now that I’ve lived with my new wardrobe for a few months, I’ve discovered (not surprisingly) that less is more. I have slightly fewer clothes than before the closet curation, but I wear more of them regularly — unlike before when I wore a small subset repeatedly. Getting dressed is easier because I know what goes together. Even when I pull on a t-shirt and jeans (which probably happens more than it should — old habits die hard) they’re more sophisticated than they used to be, and I usually wear jewelry with them.

Best of all, everything I wear feels like me – just kicked up a notch or two from before — and I have a stronger sense of what my style is and isn’t. I consider harder before making new purchases, and I’m more confident in the pieces I’ve acquired on my own. So I’m very happy that I tried out Style Kouncil’s services, and I’d do it again.

I don’t wear jewelry very often. I have some pieces I really like but it’s not part of my daily dressing routine to put them on, so unless I’m dressing for a super-special occasion I tend to forget to wear them.

Part of the problem, I think, is that until yesterday all my jewelry was stored like this:

These boxes were in a drawer in the closet, and if I wanted to wear the contents of one of them I had to pull out the stuff that was stacked on top of them and then figure out which box contained the piece I wanted to wear. (Yes, there are a lot of boxes from Murmur! If you’re in Calgary you should check them out!)

I thought if the jewelry were more accessible and more visible, I’d be more inclined to put it on in the morning. But I don’t have dresser space for a jewelry box. So I came up with this:

I used a 3M Command Adhesive Hook to hang a 12-Pocket Hosiery Organizer from The Container Store on the empty side wall of our walk-in closet. The Container Store had other hanging organizers for jewelry, but the pockets and size of the hosier organizer appealed to me more.

Now most of my jewelry is right in my field of vision where I choose my clothes, and easily accessible (and — bonus — I freed up half a drawer). Let’s see if I can spruce up my image a little this year!

Things that you think are liberating can actually become extremely confining or restrictive or oppressive, and things that you think are controlling can actually give you a greater sense of security and liberation in the end.

Andrea Zittel
Art21: Consumption

My mom was a big Christmas baker when I was a kid: shortbread, sugar cookies, gingersnaps, Nanaimo bars, mincemeat tarts and chocolate-covered cherries (which had a crunchy nut layer between the maraschino cherry and the chocolate — I loved the nut layer and the chocolate but not the cherries, and years later we found a bunch of petrified cherry remains behind the piano). When I moved out of my parents home I continued that tradition for a while with my own specialties: miniature brownies, meringues, gingerbread.

I haven’t done much baking since I got married, since E. won’t (or can’t) eat most of it, and we were often at my parents’ place for Christmas anyway. Sometimes, though, we have a party or two to attend, and then I have an excuse to indulge my sweet tooth a bit. Yesterday was more about making candy than baking, but it was indulging nonetheless.

This peppermint bark recipe from the Food Network was super easy to make. I cut the recipe in half because I didn’t really need two pounds of candy(!), and I sprinkled a handful of leftover crushed candy canes on top for some sparkle. I melted the white chocolate in the microwave 30 seconds at a time at 50% power, stirring after each burst, until it was fully melted. Took maybe 15 minutes, including hammering the heck out of the candy cane.

I love fudge, but I don’t remember the last time I tried to make it — probably as a teenager, and I sort of remember it being a major fail. Perhaps because I didn’t have a candy thermometer at the time and was trying to cook to some “ball” stage that I had no reference point for. Candy thermometer and Alton Brown’s Chocolate Fudge recipe for the win! My one critical mistake was that I accidentally used semi-sweet chocolate instead of unsweetened, so it’s really, really sweet. But still edible!

This is Megabyte’s favorite toy ever. It’s called Hide-A-Squirrel and it has three little stuffed squirrels (each with a squeaker inside) that you place in the holes in the tree trunk, and the dog has to figure out how to get them out. I got it for her last Christmas and she plays with it all the time — my parents stick the squirrels back in several times a day, and next time they come into the room the squirrels are all on the floor again. Hours of enjoyment for the whole family!

The squirrels stopped squeaking pretty fast (Megabyte is hard on her toys) but the beautiful thing is that you can buy replacement squirrels! So last time I visited I brought several packages. (They also have a bird house, bee hive, gingerbread house, and several other options if your dog isn’t into squirrels.)

I go back to Calgary a couple of times a year. Whenever I visit we have a family dinner, which, between my parents and five siblings and assorted spouses and seven nieces and nephews (five of whom are 10 years old or under), tends to be a chaotic event with lots of catching up to do.

Last weekend the event was at my brother’s place, and I got to spend a little time with my nephews before everyone else arrived. The six-year-old, Reece, was in the playroom drawing, and I asked him if he wanted me to make him a book. He got really excited and gathered a handful of large index cards for me, and tape, and scissors. When I told him I was only going to use one piece of paper and no tape and he was pretty skeptical.

(I have to be honest here: the day before I flew up to Calgary I quickly learned a few single-sheet structures, just in case I got a chance to do this. The pamphlet Books from a Single Sheet of Paper from the web site Bookmaking with Kids has a half-dozen simple structures — including those I used.)

I started out with a book that the BWK pamphlet calls a center cut accordion. Reece wasn’t interested in making the actual book (when it was done he asked me to write “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer” on the cover and then he handed me another piece of paper and asked me to make one for “Cars”), but while I was working on it his eight-year-old brother Will asked me to show him how to make one. He had a little trouble matching the corners up but it turned out just fine.

Reece wanted another book, so I asked if I should make a “pants book” (dubbed the long cut accordion in the BWK pamphlet — it looks like a pair of pants when unfolded). This got both boys giggling and they thought definitely I should make a pants book. So I made that, and then a simple accordion, and then an accordion with pockets so Reece could put things in the pockets, and then another pocket accordion shaped like a row of houses — so we made paper dolls to put in the house pockets. The dolls had abnormally enormous heads, so Will and I dubbed them Brainiacs.

It was half an hour. I think they had fun. They’re old enough now to remember me when they see me, so I think it would be cool if they remembered me as the auntie that made books.

Since I mentioned some volunteer projects recently, I thought I’d talk about the one that launched last month.

I work for Salesforce. It’s a fairly large software company; as I write this it’s growing and for the last several years has been in Forbes magazine’s list of 100 Best Companies to Work For. One of the things that earns the company that ranking is Salesforce’s 1:1:1 model, which is this: 1% of Salesforce’s product is free to non-profits in the form of donated or discounted licenses; 1% of the founding stock was placed in a foundation to be used in grants; and 1% of each employee’s time is made available to volunteer with non-profits of their choice.

That last part means that each Salesforce employee receives 6 paid days off per year to volunteer. But during my first couple years at Salesforce I found it hard to make time for volunteering outside of the 2-3 corporate team-building events my team participated in. So this year I made it a goal to use all my hours.

Enter the Bay Area Association for Disabled Sailors (BAADS), a local non-profit that offers sailing programs to people with disabilities, fostering independence, confidence and a whole lot of fun.

Ironically, BAADS’ website wasn’t accessible to members with certain disabilities: the screen reader software used by blind and visually impaired users to read web pages couldn’t access some of the content. Additionally, the site was full of broken links, and the content was outdated: any time BAADS wanted to make a change they had to pay the consultant that had developed the site to do it, so they’d save up several changes and then there would be some delay before the changes were actually done.

One of the things I do at Salesforce is participate in a workgroup that works to make our web-based software accessible to users with disabilities. I’m also a bit of a WordPress geek (the content management software I use for this blog). And one of BAADS’ board members happens to be my neighbor. So I devoted my volunteer hours to setting BAADS up on WordPress so they could update their own content, and creating a WordPress theme (the wrapper that handles layout and style for a website) that would be accessible to all of BAADS members.

Last month, after many hours of work, the new BAADS site went live. (Yay!) The visual design was provided by one of Salesforce’s visual designers, Grant Anderson. There are many things that I could explain about why the new design is more accessible than the old one, but I’m saving those for a post on my other blog, where I usually geek out over such things.

I’m pleased with the way everything turned out. Between this and another volunteer project this year, I turned in more than 100 volunteer hours — well over the paid 1%, but totally worth what I learned through the process and the satisfaction of helping a great group of people. And BAADS is thrilled. Everybody wins.

Last night I was watching the animé series Honey and Clover and was struck by this soliloquy from Hagumi Hanamoto, the (somewhat disturbingly) child-like painting student, as she ponders a Rodin sculpture in an art history book:

There are so many things I want to try to do. There is an endless amount of things I want to try to make scattered inside of me. I chase after each of the images that fly by, catch them, wrestle with them, verify the taste and drink them down, name them, and return it to the appropriate place…. I want to open all of these boxes, but a human’s life is too short to open them all. There is a limit to the number of boxes that one human can open in a lifetime.

There are a lot of things I would like to do, and many of them revolve around making things. I’d like to be better at some things I already do, and I’d like to try new things. It’s very easy to close the door on these things and ignore them, to lie down with my iPad and read whatever comes up on Twitter, Reeder, Zite or Pinterest — or to watch lengthy animé series, for that matter. And I think that sometimes that’s okay; sometimes work and other commitments take up all my energy and all I want is to be distracted for a little while. But these kinds of distractions tend not to be very satisfying, so I want more — I subscribe to more feeds, follow more people, install more apps, keep hitting the refresh button to see what’s next, and then it’s more of a habit than anything else. And then I’m not opening boxes.

My friend Dinah emailed me after the On Simplifying post and congratulated me on my positive Discardian shift. Dinah came up with the concept of Discardia — a holiday that celebrates letting go of things that are getting in your way — about 10 years ago, and she recently wrote a book about it. I wasn’t thinking about Discardia when I wrote my post, though I’ve known about it for years and have sometimes even deliberately celebrated it. But when I read Dinah’s book there were parts that echoed some of the things I’ve been thinking about lately, and she gave me some ideas for moving forward. So if I’ve touched a nerve with you at all, you might want to check her book out for yourself.

Speaking of things that go well with onesies and stress-induced ADD requiring mindless handwork, more baby items were in order for this particular friend. It seems like it’s easier to find somewhat hip baby stuff these days — beyond the pink and blue and media-branded items — but who wants to pay $20 for something that baby is going to outgrow in a few months? So I used this übersimple gathered skirt pattern to throw together a couple of skirts to pull on over the onesies.

The bicycle skirt is a nod to the daddy-to-be:

The leaves are something that the mommy-to-be would probably wear herself:

The fabrics are Michael Miller Citron Gray Bicycles and Nature Walk Organic Leaves Crimson, both purchased from Fabric.com. I ordered half a yard of each fabric and made the 12-18 month size. For the smallest size, you could get two skirts out of a half-yard — I had plenty of fabric left over. For the bicycle skirt I used the full width of the fabric (44″, less selvedges), but I felt it was a little too full, so for the leaf skirt I cut about 6 inches off the width.

(I also grooved on this tiered gathered skirt for babies, but lacked an infant for measuring and didn’t have enough coordinating fabrics around to pull it off.)