Recently I retired a whole crew of old sweaters.  the sleeves got turned into these awesome gauntlet leggings, which I now wear everyday.

here’s how:

1. these were all cashmere sweaters, not the 1980s era cashmere that never pills, but the late 2000s cashmere that wears out quickly.  These sweaters were showing their age after 3 years of wear….  so I semi-felted them with a warm water wash and tumble dry.  tread carefully with this one, because they will shrink some….

2. cut off the entire sleeve, including the curve that makes the sleeve cap.  This part makes the gauntlet- knee cover bit.  I lessened the curve of the caps a little, but this depends on your sweater style.

3. trim with zigzag stitch and elastic.  I used foldover elastic, which is the same type of trim I use for underwear and lingerie.  It binds the fabric so fraying can’t happen, and creates a really clean finish.

4. make something else from the body of the sweater.  (I’ll be making cashmere panties, but it would also be great for stuffed animals, vests, or camisoles….)

from our most recent emailing….

so, we’ve got a new look, logo, webdesign, and shop. yay!

I’m super excited about it. Daniel did the logo design and web design, and then I spent all last weekend implementing it. (the shop is running on big cartel, which I’m quite pleased with- just enough customability to make it interesting, but not too much- more on that later.)

I’m focusing this shop on ready-to-ship intimates and loungewear. I’m going to maintain my etsy shop as a complementary element to my store- for custom orders, outer garments, samples etc.

And I’m going to focus this blog on just a few subjects, instead of the wider ranging discussions I’ve had before:
-artisanal business/ artisanal lifestyle
-clothing design, intimates design
-design and fashion

anything else I’m tempted to write about will probably be living over here on tumblr. It’s nice to have some rules about where stuff goes- this can be quite freeing.

Earlier this week Daniel and I went to hear the artist Andrea Zittel speak over at the museum. She was a very humorous speaker, and her presentation was quite engaging- especially to me. By the time I left art school (and consciously decided I wouldn’t define myself as an ‘artist’ )- Zittel’s work was the only art I found accessible, interesting, or could identify with. I wrote a thesis paper about her work in 2001-ish, and was brought back to that time, and the decisions I made then, by hearing her speak this week.

Much of her work is about rules and freedom- and she implements them as structures within her own life. I’ve always liked self-imposed rules as well- both in the addictive sense and in the creatively bounding sense. Does that make sense? Self-imposed rules can be an addiction- OCD-like tendencies- or they can be freeing- since limiting one’s options allows a person to move forward efficiently. I’ve always enjoyed both sorts of rules (yes, there is a sort of sick enjoyment one finds in OCD structures.)

Until the age of 22 or so I readily identified myself as an artist. I don’t anymore, for several reasons. I stopped making conventional art (pictures, sculptures) because I hated storing it. I wanted to only make functional objects- hence the choice to make clothing. In theory, I wanted to make furniture too, but in practice, I disliked working with wood and heavy machinery, so that never went beyond one woodshop course in college.

Beyond the art-storage issue, I didn’t wish to work within the gallery system. I’m not a fan of inviting others to judge my work unless they are going to buy it. Customers are welcome to give me all the feedback they’d like, and I’ll take it quite seriously.  I’ve always appreciated the transparency of profit as a motive, and while that’s easy to trace when working directly with a customer or a store, it’s not so easy in an art world where the art critic is neither the customer nor the potential profiter from an artist.

So, again, here’s to some structure and some rules.  I’m going to further explore what it means to be a working designer and artisanal producer here, and leave the tangents to tumblr.

for the first time in years, I feel as though I’m actually working near potential, instead of just functioning at a fraction of what I’ve known was possible.

Hence the radio-silence.  There’s been a great deal of behind-the-scenes effort that has resulted in little writing online for the past six months.

plus, I’ve been pretty happy.  and focused on the real world, not the internets worlds.

So, watch this space for transformation over the next couple of months.  I’m refocusing how I work in several ways:

- this company, brook there, is shifting towards lingerie and loungewear.  It’s always been what sells best online, and I’d like to streamline that process.  This is going to mean more items in inventory, sewn for me by local sewers.  I’m realizing i need to take my actual hands out of the handwork in order for this company to grow.  (of course.)

- I’m developing a couple other sewn products lines, both alone and in partnership. Depending on how these conceptually relate to brook there, I might be announcing them here over the next 6 months.

-perhaps key, I’m working with other people.  This has its challenges for me, which I’ve mentioned before, but overall it’s been incredibly motivating and inspiring.

scarves

panties gift sets

oh, not really, but it does control what we access.

around 1 am last night I got some emails from google informing me that my primary site, brookthere.com, had been identified as serving malware and consequently would be blocked from search results and when opened in a modern browser, would provoke scary warning stuff everywhere.

I was frustrated, but at the same time, slightly relieved.  secretly relieved.  I’ve been planning on redoing my site for a while now, and putting it off, and putting it off, and was basically forced into to blowing it up, destroying every database and file, and starting fresh.  both because I didn’t have the skills or energy to seek out only the badware and get rid of it, and because my primary objective was to get google search results, and consequently my domain name, to show up normally again.

here’s the technical background, as I understand it: I host several sites on dreamhost.  I like the user panel.  I like dreamhost pricing. I even like their live chat, which was off today, it being a weekend and all.

The sites I host are mostly different forms of wordpress or zenphoto installs, or both.
Now, I’m terrible at maintaining things. It doesn’t matter if they are digital or real world.  My heater was condemned and removed last year (for a few weeks in late october) because it hadn’t occurred to me to maintain it.  Similar thing, less the condemning, happened with my hot water boiler a few years prior. and my car….the only ticket I’ve ever gotten in my life was for not having an inspection sticker.  because I forgot.

so, I had managed to forget to maintain wordpress and zenphoto.  you know, getting them up to date.  and something did happen, I’ll never know exactly what, but most of my sites were redirecting to a suspicious .ru domain.  Somehow, one had been hacked and the bad code got into everything.

So I’ve spent much of today doing just this:  backing up what could be, and moving things around.  I was able to quickly move the hosted location of two important sites from dreamhost to yahoo (where the domain reg and mail servers were anyway, so it was convenient enough.)  Once that happened google started serving the pages properly, without warnings.  However,  I’m going to be rebuilding these sites bit by bit over the next week.

and I’ve come to this conclusion.  much like happened to automobiles in the 80s, i guess, the casual hobbyist is no longer suited for hosting blogs and cms stuff.  Technically, keeping wordpress or zenphoto up to date is well within my comfort range… however, the frequency of which this needs to happen is not.  I want to spend no more than 5 or 10 hours a YEAR implementing new themes, and I hate the upgrade process of wordpress et el…

(by the way, my suspicion lies with zenphoto-  it always seemed much less stable than wordpress, no doubt due to its lesser popularity. but again, I’m not going to know.)

I don’t like blogger very much, but I wanted to at least put my extracted/ transported/ transformed wordpress xml export someplace, and, since google controls everything, this seemed like a place they wouldn’t mind too much.

(I also spent 5 hours today hand-editing the said seventy thousand line xml export, removing all the crappy spam that for some reason is standard wordpress export.  The file size went from 6MB to 1MB once I removed the spam.  I know I could export it without the spam….but I realized that after I’d destroyed the databases and deleted the hosting on dreamhost.  that was in the middle of the night, not the best time to be making those decisions, obviously.)

and, in the transition, acquired a cat.  who, despite her young looks, is actually around 16.

and there’s been a quite specific wardrobe associated with the past few months of transitory-ness:  tank top dresses, cut off thumbhole shirts, and leggings.  wool socks and these frye oxfords that I love for their practicality.  everything is easy to put in a backpack and walk around with.

my bicycle has been sitting next to the pattern rack for most of the past couple rainy weeks.

it’s been a very busy couple months, filled with lots of new projects and new energy.

I’ve been making the amazing wool jackets again, in limited quanties (the above two examples have semi-felted organic merino wool as a base, and are paired with silk faced buttonholes and silk pockets.)  come into the store for a preview…I’ll post more photos someday soon.

because, the new excitement is in the new camera….

one of the standard mirror shots…new camera, view of the studio.