Casual vs. Considerate

I screwed up today, friends. In a major way. I misgendered a child at work. I am profoundly disappointed in myself. Here's what happened: a man came in with his kid, who had shoulder-length hair and was wearing brown corduroys and one of the shirts we sell as a boy's T-shirt. They went to the boy's swimwear section and started shopping. The kid didn't really say anything, and spent most of the time climbing around on our shelves and so forth. I assumed this child was a boy, and I was wrong! It seems that despite all my desire to revolutionize the way we treat gender in our society, and my recognition that this needs to begin and end with how we treat children, sometimes I am part of the problem. Despite my frequent frustration that we even divide our clothes into "boys" and "girls" at all, I went ahead and assumed that a child wearing a T-shirt we market to boys was, indeed, a boy.

Now, the reason why I acted this way is simple: I wasn't thinking. When I'm at home in the comfort of my room, browsing the internet, in class, etc. I usually have the presence of mind to have things like gender identity and sensitivity with labeling at the forefront of my thoughts. When I'm at work, I go to a different place. I'm more concerned with maintaining a smooth (and this usually means superficial) shopping experience with customers. This means I'm not really going to go around asking everyone their preferred gender pronouns, even though I recognize that I would do that in the ideal world that I'd like to think I'm helping to make. Everyone would do it, and it would be normal! But when I'm at work, I find myself conforming to the present-day definition of normal, even if I don't particularly like it. Now, obviously, if a child takes the initiative to seek out clothes of the "other gender," I'm happy to help. When I made the mistake of using "he" to refer to the girl at the store today, I instantly apologized to her and her father and made it clear that I would be happy to help them pick out clothes of any sort.

As you all know, I'm a bit of a dreamer, so long before today I thought up a solution for this problem, set in the future where I have my own children's clothing store. In this store, every employee is trained to ask customers for their PGPs right off the bat and explain the term for those who don't know it, and obviously none of our clothes are divided by gender. Au contraire, our sections are grouped by color schemes, patterns, styles, etc. Skirts all mixed up with pants and dresses and vests and shirts and so forth, with no one telling anyone what they should or shouldn't be wearing. Where the store I work now has little cards at the register explaining our sizes and return policy, or offering cutesy little phrases in Swedish, my pipe-dream store's cards will have glossaries of important LGBT* terms, links to local support groups and family resources, and so forth.

So I don't know. I think my head's in the right place, but sometimes in the heat of the retail-industry moment, I play the part of an ignorant pawn of tired stereotypes.What do you folks think? Have you encountered similar customer-service dilemmas? Do you find yourself playing an uncomfortable role when you deal with the presumed "normal people" who you interact with? Is there a way to reconcile radical thought with comforting, unobjectionable customer sweet-talk? I'd love to hear your thoughts on this!

Periods and an Outfit of the Day

Hey there! The Pajama Pants Project is humming along nicely. PS & SM's pants are almost done - they just need to be hemmed! I've spent the past few days putting the little finishing touches on the pants that take them from being pants-shaped objects to being actual pants. I like to think of this phase of a project as "putting a period on it," which I think is a phrase that I learned during my art student days (Artists use writing metaphors, and when I'm writing I usually think in terms of making a drawing. Funny how that works.) Anyway, just like a period tells you when a sentence is done, even though it doesn't really convey any of the information of the actual sentence, certain small finishing touches are needed to bring any artistic project full circle. I learned this through experience during what art historians will someday refer to as my "pear phase."

"St. Agatha's Pears" - Jonathan Kindness, 2009. Oil on Canvas and a torn up piece of red fabric I found in a dumpster.

What do you need to turn a pear-shaped green blob into something that is recognizable as a pear? Turns out it's a stem! Witness:

        Pear-Shaped Blob             ------------>           Pear                      

Weird how that works, isn't it? The tiniest little details make something complete and real. Anyway, that's what's happening with the pajama pants, and I'll be posting the Completed Product for those two in a day or two.

Meanwhile, it's time for a little glimpse inside the world of Riley Reed's Exciting New Style! I present to you Gathering Pins's first Outfit of the Day:

Shirt: Gap
Skirt: Thrifted (Global Thrift in Waltham)
Socks: Banana Republic
Shoes: John Fluevog
Glasses: The one and only Wellesley Optical on Newbury Street! Mention this blog entry and... I don't know. Probably nothing. But tell my dad I said hi.

Photography by the inimitable [linearequation], whom I joined for lunch on this breezy and beautiful day last week. This skirt is an old standby for me - I do believe it is the first skirt I ever bought at a thrift store, and it was purchased as a sort of sidebar to the shopping trip that preceded this photoshoot:

Anyway, it's basically my "wear around the house when I just feel like wearing a skirt thank you very much" skirt, as it's cheap and breezy and fluttery and fun. Nothing too fancy, but suitably classy and feminine. I was going for a kind of funky but low-key look, something that might raise a few eyebrows but not start a riot. I wanted my hair to have a little more volume, but I like what happened there anyway. I forgot those glasses were transitions before I went outside, but I kind of like the sunglasses look in these photos. What do you think? Anyway, here's a few more shots for the sake of drama:

Backlighting. Intense.

What? I can so look in other directions. I could look in whatever direction I want, darn it. I just... happened to be looking in the same direction in all of these photos.

I don't usually like the idea of tucking a button-down shirt into a skirt. I always sort of assumed it would look goofy, but I actually kind of like how this turned out. I think it has a nice, sort of polished silhouette to it, though it did require a lot of tucking and adjusting throughout the day. So... what do you think? Did I pull it off? What looks good, and what looks awful? As you might imagine, there aren't a whole lot of places to turn for guidance on how to achieve a look like this, so any feedback from the outside world is helpful. I'll leave you with my glamorous outdoor runway shot:

My Very First Sewing Project! (Pt. 2)

Welcome back, friends, and Happy Mother's Day! It's time to hear a little more about my first foray into sewing. When I last left off, I was just getting into the first stitches of my roommate PS's pajama pants, and overcoming the initial hurdles of getting used to my machine.

It's... *gasp* ... My First Seam! Aww, isn't it cute... and kind of crooked and weird?
That's a seam only a seamster could love.

Anyway, as you might imagine, a lot of the sewing in this particular project is nice and straightforward: one big seam for the outside of the legs, and one seam for the inside. I think the hardest part about most of it was remembering which pieces were the fronts and which were the backs. I foolishly kept putting away the layouts and patterns and then dragging them back out again to remind myself. (By the way, I'm on my third pair of pajama pants now and learning from my mistakes - I hang all my unsewn pieces on the wall on a pant hanger, with their patterns!)

So that was all well and good, and then out of nowhere came my next big hurdle: CURVED SEAMS. While I loved the logic puzzle of constantly trying to figure out exactly what I was sewing (pants look really weird when they're inside-out and still missing their outer seams), I made some very silly mistakes in the haste of dealing with instructions more complicated than "Pin, Sew, Repeat." So we're going to play a little game: SPOT THE PROBLEMS!!

Funnily enough, I think I was actually taking this picture at the time because I was proud of nailing my first curved seam.

I feel like I'm forgetting one or two, but I know I made at least two errors here. The first one is pretty obvious if you're a sewer: See that vertical seam in the middle of the crotch, parallel to the curved seam I just sewed? Yeah... I sewed it closed, to the side. It's supposed to be open! That seam is a little awkward now.

The second mistake may not be obvious unless you've read the pattern: notice how little seam allowance there is in there? (That's the distance between the stitching and the edge of the fabric - it's supposed to be 3/8 of an inch) Yeah, so the pattern calls for you to trim the allowance in the curved area down to 1/4 of an inch... but just the curved area. The ones on the side are supposed to stay untrimmed (natural?) and get pressed flat like a regular straight seam. Welps. What's cut cannot be uncut, and I hope PS will forgive me for some slightly-less-than perfect PJ pants. Sewing a project for all three of us is an interesting prospect: whoever I make pants for first gets pants first, but they sort of get the pants with all the mistakes. I guess it's kind of like being the oldest kid in a big family? Anyway, here are middle-pants-getter SM's slightly-better seams, for comparison:

I probably need to stop doing this.

Uh, so that picture probably isn't super helpful if you don't know what you're looking at. It is the same seam as above, but from a different angle and with the pant legs spread out to the side. The creature's mouth is made of the two perpendicular seams (inside the legs) which are properly sewn open here, and that little forehead stripe is where I left the seam allowance wide so it could be pressed open.

Anyway, after all that fun stuff, I ended up with two pairs of what I like to think of as pseudo-pants:

That is to say, they are shaped like pants, but don't have waistbands and aren't hemmed yet. Also, due to the dark pattern, SM's look like giant drop-crotch clown pants in that photo, and that's pretty cool. As of the writing of this entry, PS's pseudo-pants have gotten a waistband, and my pants are all cut and ready to be sewn. But that's a story for another day!

I'll leave you today with a bittersweet and hopefully inspirational story. I work at a children's clothing store (whose name I won't mention because I'm about to be slightly critical of our merchandise, which is for the most part excellent.) Essentially my favorite customer right now is a little 4-or-5-year-old girl named Malia (I am guessing at the spelling). She came in a few weeks ago with her grandmother and spent about an hour and a half deliberating over dresses and trying on, I think, nearly every one in the store. She's absolutely wonderful: smart, shy, thoughtful, and full of initiative and personality. Every once in a while a kid comes in who is clearly doing all the legwork of shopping for themselves, and there's nothing to prevent me from talking to them like they are the customer. That is a very fun experience. Anyway, Malia came back a few days later with her mother for a few minutes, and as far as I can tell this was just so that Malia could introduce the two of us. She poked her head into the back room while I was working on sorting shipment, and sort of excitedly pointed me out to her mother like "Oh that's the guy who helped me!!!" I was honored, and the two of them came back a few days ago to buy some gifts for friends and some new pajamas for Malia. While I was ringing them up, another customer commented on how beautiful Malia is (she really is!) and how she looked like a princess (she kind of does!), and I thought this was cute if a little weird to say. Then I looked at the pajamas Malia was buying. They were covered in princesses! White, blonde princesses. Malia is neither white nor blonde. Malia is (as far as I can tell, and this is probably an unfortunate generalization) Indian. She's got dark skin and black hair. She's amazingly gorgeous, but the princesses on her pajamas don't look anything like her, and I think that's a little sad. I think that Malia should have princesses and whatever other sort of model of beauty or success that she wants that look like her. So I've added that to my list of clothes to make someday: pajamas with princesses of every color, size, and shape on them, for every little kid who wants to be a princess. So... here's a question: what do you think kids need to see more of in the world around them? What should be on their clothes, in their movies, in their books, etc.?

Fashion Distraction: The Prisoner Blazer

Every once in a while, I notice a quirky trend running around that gets my fashion sense tingling. Last week I spotted a woman walking through the Harvard Square subway station in a black blazer with white trim on the lapels. She was also wearing dazzling pumpkin-orange pants, and that's awesome. I noted the similarity between the blazer and a certain iconic look from an old British science fiction show, but didn't think much of it at the time. Then, lo and behold, on Once Upon a Time last weekend, THIS:

Oh, Regina. I could dedicate an entire blog to your hair.

Here's Regina Mills, AKA The Evil Queen (Evil being universal pop culture code for TOTALLY AWESOME). And she's rocking the white-trim blazer! Could there possibly be a better way to inextricably link this fierce look to the concept of powerful femininity?

My English Professor went to school with her. *Swoon*

Oh. I guess *maybe* if the Secretary of State, Former First Lady, and All-Around-Badass Hillary Rodham Clinton wore it, that might help. So yeah, here's to you, Black-Blazer-with-White-Trim(-and-Sometimes-Buttons). You just keep killing it out there. But what should we call this look? Ooh, I know, how about The Prisoner Blazer?

I see what you did there.

So folks, have you seen this particular garment anywhere? Got photos to share? Maybe you've even rocked the look yourself? Something about it tells me I need to make it someday, so look forward to that happening once I've graduated from pajama pants to fitted suits. Can't be too long now, right?

My Very First Sewing Project! (Pt. 1)

Hello again! Thanks for stopping by. Today I'm going to tell you about my very first sewing project (ever!), which is still ongoing. It all started when I was out shopping with my mother a few months ago for some reason or another, and she agreed to buy me my first sewing machine. It's a cute story, because we are cute people.

Here's my mom (left) with her big brother, sometime around 1950. Vintage fashion alert!

Anyway, my mom is totally cool, knows all about my "eclectically-gendered" fashion choices, and even knows (if she probably doesn't quite understand it) that I identify as transgender/gender-fluid. That being said, I didn't really feel like picking out a skirt pattern for myself on that particular trip, so we decided on a cutesy little family number for me and my two roommates:

Hello there, Simplicity 2823!

For now, I'm just sewing the adult pajama bottoms, as my mom and the saleslady at Jo-Ann agreed that that was a good place to start. No buttons, no zippers, no fancy darts or doo-dads. Just cutting, stitching, and hemming (with an elastic waistband thrown in there to test my skills and patience). I picked out some deliciously tacky felt fabrics for the three of us:

Pink skulls on a minty background for me! I'm worried that I might start blinding people if I wear too much of my own handmade clothing.

Scorpions for SM! I knew he needed scorpion pajamas. He knew it too, but only after I showed him the fabric.

 And... Uh! I forgot to take a picture of PS's fabric, a funky pink/green/brown/yellow paisley on white that you can see a bit of underneath SM's scorpions. Sorry about the oversight. Pictures of the work-in-progress will be forthcoming.

(For folks who know us personally, yes, SM's abbreviation nickname on this blog is indeed the same as PS's real-world initials. It's confusing for us too, so maybe I'll figure out new nicknames for them soon.)

Anyway, despite the fact that I was in a major LARPs-and-Papers-Writing Time Crunch of Doom at the time, I quickly dove into my new hobby, gearing up my machine as quickly as possible and finding videos on the internet when I got confused and lost. I also made frequent calls to my good friend [dragonwolf](let me know if I can use your real name) because she is the bestest and knows how to solve all my silly little beginner problems.

My Adorable Workspace, AKA the Dining Room Table. Actual size.

When it came to working from the actual pattern, my first task was to copy the right size onto new paper. I followed some online advice for cheapos and just bought some sheets of decorative tissue paper from a local craft store (which turned out to also have fabric - good find!). I put my drawing pens to good use and made new patterns in the right sizes and cut them out. This took a long time, I'll tell you what! It was sometime during one of the full days I spend moving big pieces of paper around my house, ironing them repeatedly, and using them to chop up fabric that I realized how much I enjoyed losing myself in this work. When I started sewing, I frequently ran into one of my biggest headaches:

Enlarged to show Infuriating Texture

For those who've never sewn, this is what happens when your machine sucks your thread up into your seam and chews on it for a while. It's ugly, ugly, ugly. I can't count how many times I had to restart seams because I lost the loose thread at the end to this garbage. At one point, I was keeping such a tight grip on it in fear of this that my sewing needle came down bent and snapped right off against the throat plate.

I'm sorry for posting this image, [dragonwolf], but this is how I felt.

Fortunately, after dealing with this nonsense for a few weeks, I finally got my copy of the beginning sewer's bible, aka the Sew Everything Workshop:

Your hair alone tells me all I need to know about how amazing you are.

Of course, right there on page 32, it tells me to "pull the thread through any guides or pins leading down toward the needle," and lo and behold, there's a little window right above the needle to pass thread through, which keeps it in place much better. I'm not sure if that's the exact solution to the problem I was having, but I'm pretty sure it hasn't happened since. Whew!

Well, there's a lot more to tell in this story, but I think I've gone on long enough for today. So, sewing pals, what's your biggest stitching frustration? What's the little thing that keeps going wrong and screwing up all your hard work? Or maybe you know some common problems and how to fix or correct them?

Setting Off On the Path of Pins

Greetings, one and all, and welcome to Gathering Pins, a blog documenting my perilous and strange journey through the world of sewing and fashion. As of the writing of this introductory entry, I am a 25-year-old graduate student at Simmons College, studying English and Education.

This is Me. Hey.

As much as I love English and Education, and still probably want to end up as a teacher someday soon, a little something inside of me recently started screaming out that if I don't follow my dreams of creation and visual mischief right away, they might die inside me and harden into painful little stones of Regret. So I decided to give myself a year or more to dive into learning how to sew, being an artist every day, and telling everyone about it. Consider this a bachelor's party before my wedding to a career in education. And who knows? Maybe we'll all get to live together in a big harmonious threesome or something. This metaphor is getting beyond me.

This is also me. I'm kind of a chameleon like that.

So what are you going to see on this blog? Here's the rundown:

1. My Sewing Projects
I'm teaching myself how to sew, and I want you to see what I make! I love clothes. I love fabric. I love thread. And I love sharing. For years, as an art student, I used all the trappings of garment-making in my work without ever learning how to sew. I think my subconscious was trying to tell me something.

Well... Maybe my subconscious was trying to tell me a lot of things.

2. My Fashion Adventures

I have been trying to make myself look better since high school. I even won my class's Best Dressed superlative, despite being an all-around geek! Nowadays, I'm all about freedom in clothing. As good as I look in a button-down suit and a crisp tie, sometimes I just want to wear a skirt and makeup. And sometimes I want to be a fey deer spirit. So I do!

I happen to believe everyone in the world should be able to dress however they want. Style is about expressing your personality in a visual form, and that shouldn't be limited by color palettes, garment types, fabric choices, etc. So I'll be posting photos of myself (and hopefully my friends!) trying all sorts of fashionable options in everyday settings, fancy parties, theater productions, LARPs, etc. I'll be looking for feedback on what works, what looks fierce, and what should probably be tucked back in the closet for a long, long time.

3. My Thoughts on Visual Culture as a Whole

Given how important I think style is in our everyday lives, I'll probably have some thoughts and feelings to share on fashion, art, tv, movies, etc. I love talking about culture, and I'm going to do some of that here. I also happen to have a vested interest in children's culture, given my past (and present) with childcare and my whole future with education and (hopefully someday) parenting. What we show our kids, and how we let them dress, is of utmost importance, so the next time some boy gets yelled at for wearing pink toenail polish in a J.Crew ad, you can bet I'll be ranting about it here.

A TERRIBLE SCOURGE ON OUR SACRED AMERICAN VALUES

So there you have it. Gathering Pins in a nutshell. I hope you like what you see here, and please feel free to offer suggestions, constructive criticism, and respectful argument. I'm here to learn!