Michelle Mistalski

Ahoy Michelle


If you have followed my blog since the beginning of time, you'll know a number of things has changed about it from the layouts to the type of blog to the change in domain names. I have been blogging since 2001, but started this site in 2009 with the intentions of just writing summaries about my day (those posts have since been deleted because of how personal they were). Over the years this blog evolved into something that I can finally call a home or at least a place where I am motivated more than ever to write again.




A few things that I have learned from all of this is to be patient and not to overwhelm yourself over it. I have made rash decisions by paying over $2,000 worth of layouts and hiring designers only to decide that things were not working out. It finally occurred to me that none of my social media accounts even matched! But despite all of the mistakes, I have learned my lesson and out came this new blog with a fresh layout to go with it. It took me a good four hours of vectoring everything by mouse and the results are amateur-ish, but it is definitely reflective of who I am!

Anyway, I will not bore you too much over the new layout. Here are a few things that has happened since my last major update!


I am in love with my Nike Trainrendor sneakers! Ever since Steve Booker mentioned it in his blog, I knew I had to get a pair myself. Luckily for me, Richard was able to find one in my size (thank goodness for tiny feet) and it literally is a God send for my feet throughout my trip in Seattle. I think it is sold out everywhere in this color, but if it ever pops up again I will be sure to share the information to everyone.


For those who were wondering, I actually work off of a ping pong table. Patterning requires a lot of table space and I cannot fathom to buy another IKEA table large enough to fit in my mom's house for that matter. I ended up re-purposing (but it still works) my brother's old ping pong/air hockey table as a patterning table.


These are my weapons of choice for sewing: Fiskars rotary cutter, notcher, puncher, scotch tape, Sharpie markers, fabric sheers, Westcott titanium scissors, thread scissors, red and blue colored pencils, french curves, hip curves, a C-thru ruler, mechanical pencil (must have) and tons of different sized pins. Even though I have been sewing for years, I wish I had half the talent that Andrea Brown has.


Here is a photo of what patterning looks like for those who are interested in taking up fashion design. This is a draft of many drafts for a blazer I had to construct for a class assignment.


Here is the blazer (it needs more steaming and button holes) in its finished glory. A number of things that I want to be honest about is that I was taught to do a lot of tailoring by hand in my undergrad so for my Master's I am instructed to do everything by machine, which throws me off by a lot. While sewing by hand is tedious, the results are almost perfect whereas sewing by machine...can lead to unhappy endings 75% of the time.


I am not sure if I ever shared this project, but it was towards the beginning of this semester where I had to make a high waist pencil skirt. I loved how it turned out (minus the vent, oh how I despise vents), but the wool fabric had a lot of give to it which made it nearly impossible to get the fit to be perfect on my mannequin.


Here is one of my menswear collections that I had to make inspired by texture. I think this was for the film "The Punisher" where everything was reflective of the debris in the movie.


This is a glimpse of the more difficult parts of curating a collection and it is to make technical flats. I cannot hand draw flats for the life of me. My illustrations are always all over the place so there is no way I can draw perfect curves so I do all of it on Adobe Illustrator.


Lastly, here is a men's t-shirt from PacSun's heritage brand, Modern Amusement. If you remember back when I mentioned I was interning for PacSun as a men's design intern, you will know that I contributed tons of prints to the designers. It is tough to get prints chosen to be put into production because of trends. I happened to browse PacSun's site and saw that one of my prints that I had contributed last Fall has made it into production! While I would not wear the shirt myself because the print is too loud for my taste, it made me extremely happy to know that I was a part of something as big as that. You can view the shirt here.
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