Me Made May 2021
It’s that time of year again, time for all of us to wear every random thing we’ve ever made all month in an effort to only wear “me made” garments for 30 days! I’ll be honest, I’m terrible at Me Made May, like so so so so bad. If you scroll through the archives of this blog, every May I start out strong and by about 5 days in I’ve abandoned things completely. My most successful years have been 2014 and 2016 so I revisited those posts to see what I did differently in those years that made me able to follow through.
Images from Jen's 2016 Me Made May
One of the problems I always have is that I’m a serial outfit repeater. I will wear an outfit until it cannot be worn another time, then wash and repeat. Which does get a little boring when you’re supposed to be taking a photo of your outfit every day and sharing it with the internet. There’s pressure – probably mostly from yourself – to have a fun new outfit every day, but that’s just not how most of our lives work. Especially now, when most of us are still working from home doing the zoom look of fancy top, pajama bottoms.
In addition to being a serial outfit repeater, I also am not the world’s most prolific personal sewer and because of this, and the fact that the garments I make last a long time, a lot of my garments are repeats throughout the years. Again I think, well this will be boring for my followers, this is the 3rd year I’m posting this shirt/jacket/dress. I think that’s a great advertisement for sewing your own clothes though, the quality is so excellent!
Images from Jen's 2014 Me Made May
Last year I just completely ignored Me Made May, and I’m sure a lot of you all did as well. It was just not the time for me to be taking a daily selfie when I was just trying to figure out how to keep myself going day after day. But that’s the reason I’m excited to participate this year. After a year of semi-nothingness outfit wise, I feel like now’s the time to re-evaluate my personal style. What do I still like? What do I no longer like? What new things do I want to try out? You probably read the op-ed in the New York Times called “You Can Be a Different Person After the Pandemic,” it certainly passed around my friend circles like wildfire, and I think this applies to my outfits.
So with that in mind, I’m going to spend the month reevaluating my current wardrobe. I have no goals to make anything for Me Made May, just go through what I already have and see what’s working, what isn’t, and what I think I’d like my style to involve going forward.
I’ll be posting in my stories on the @grainlinestudio Instagram account and in my feed on my personal account @jen_beeman if you’d like to follow along there.
Are you participating this year? If so what’s your game plan, how are you making it work for you? Leave me a note below and include where you’ll be posting so we can follow along. I’m so interested in everyone’s approach as we begin to emerge from this pandemic!