Elves hijacked my sewing mojo!

For the last two months my life has been quite intense, emotional and full on events. I went on a two-week trip to Tokyo, a few friends came to stay with me in Dublin, another friend got pregnant and I am trying to spend more time before she becomes mum, my parents got married for the second time after being divorced for 19 years, and last but not least, news from Ukraine has not always been good! Due to all this, I have not had any significant progress in sewing.

Before my sewing enthusiasm left me, my latest achievement on the fabric battlefield was this shirt-dress with hip yoke which, due to a lack of fabric, turned into an asymmetric shirt.

The inspiration for the shirt came from the Talent’s sister blog. Not only is Nadia an amazing seamstress, she also has a great eye when it comes to working with colours and, when I saw her shirt-dress, I totally wanted one myself.
I chose to work with this delightful NaniIro fabric from my stash. The pattern required 2.25 metres of 140-centimetre-wide fabric. However, the two-metre cut I wanted to use measured only 106 centimetres across. (Do you follow me? ;O) It took me a while to play with placement of the pattern pieces, but in the end, I managed to save on the length of the garment, the sleeves and the collar.

Despite the fact that I used the fabric in the most efficient way, I don’t like this shirt and, objectively, it does not look good on me. I don’t like the yoke, nor do I like the asymmetric back. The worst part of it was that the day after the photoshoot my sewing mojo disappeared.

I’ve never felt so miserable sewing-wise before! In the course of the last two months, I attempted to work with three different patterns but none of them were what I wanted. I cut one in the fabric and, while sewing, realized that it was not my style. The other two patterns remain at the muslin stage and need some modification but I feel hesitant about the alteration process. I wish I knew why...

This weekend, when I took the time to reflect on it, I came to the conclusion that sometimes you need to step back from something you feel passionate about in order to move forward. So I decided to stop sewing and think about sewing, read sewing blogs or look at my patterns for a few days to bring my motivation back. Instead, I’ll try to start doing something which I don’t do well, like cooking. Hopefully, this will help!

What do you usually do when your sewing motivation disappears?