"Haste Makes Waste"

I cut corners. I will admit it. More often than not, I will round up to the nearest inch when measuring something, rather than getting really close to the ruler, squinting my eyes, and counting each eighth of an inch. Having been born and raised in New York City, I am subconsciously always in a rush. I am perfectly aware of what I am doing. The little jingle my mom has been saying in her sing-song voice for as long as I can remember, “haste makes waste”, plays on repeat in my head as I go in with the scissors and make an irreversible cut. Perhaps I have conditioned myself to be comfortable living on the edge when it comes to clothing construction, stemming all the way back to the days when I would make Halloween costumes for my dolls. I was probably about six, which was the age my parents and grandma collectively decided I was old enough to have an expensive American Girl doll for Christmas and not somehow ruin it. Halloween was approaching fast, and my doll needed a witch costume ASAP. One thing that I am is resourceful, I’ll give myself that, a trait which led me into my dad’s sock drawer, a conglomeration of black dress socks loosely mixed in with a wide selection of crazily patterned ones. I pulled out some beauties, obviously not checking to see if they had mates, and ran out to show my babysitter Kristen. Kristen was a gem of a babysitter, in that she always gave 100% when it came to playing pretend with my sister and me. Therefore, I knew she would be thrilled to assist me in this endeavor.

“Look, we can use these socks I found!”

“Who’s socks are those?”

“I found them in my mom and dad’s room. It’s okay. I don’t even think they were in a pair, and he has a lot anyways.”

So I grabbed a bulky pair of kitchen scissors and a dull pair of kid’s ones, and we went to town. We started by cutting them in half, lint cascading from each jagged cut and embedding itself into the living room rug like dandruff in hair. The really great thing about men’s dress socks is that when you cut them in half you’re left with an ankle sock (that can be made into a shirt with three more cuts), and a long tube from the top, which could either be a dress or a skirt. After embellishing my sock creations with some ribbons and various other fabric scraps and fashioning a witch hat from sharpie-tinted cardboard, my dolls were ready to be strapped into their four-doll stroller that I earned for them via months of making my family’s beds. My friend and I carried the stroller up and down 16 flights of stairs so that neighbors could rain praise onto my sock costumes and pour candy into our bags. Those were the golden days of trick-or-treating.

While I more or less got the final product I wanted, my dad spent a good ten extra minutes per morning trying to find socks. In this case, the waste made from my haste was not necessarily the outcome, but the fact that there was an entire bin of miscellaneous socks that I would have been welcome to had I waited for my mom to get home...instead, I replenished that bin! At this point you may be thinking, ‘well, she is being slightly harsh on her six-year-old self. She was just going through a Ramona Quimby phase, as most kids do.’ But no, no, when it came to other activities besides fashion design I played by the books and was quite meticulous. For example, I’d clean my room from start to finish, successfully resisting the urge to shove the mess under my twin bed; when water coloring license plates to successfully turn the couch into a car, I’d stir my brushes three times in water and dry them just how mom taught me. Perhaps it was my sheer passion, the eagerness that flooded through me when beginning a fashion design project, that prompted me to cut corners like no other activity.

When I graduated from making doll clothes out of socks to dresses out of pillowcases for myself, a similar pattern emerged. Yes, similar in the sense that the socks and pillow cases were both functional and used by members of my house at the time I poached them for my own creative purposes, but that is not what I am talking about. I am talking about my relationship to pins. Anyone who knows that needles are ancillary to sewing most likely knows that pins are vital to the process as well. Also, like needles, pins are quite easy to lose, even when you could've sworn you stuck all of them right back into the pin cushion. And who was I to go scavenging for a sufficient number of pins to complete a project when I could just as well hold two pieces of fabric together with my fingers and hope it comes out straight? One day, when I was spontaneously cutting a periwinkle pillow case so that it would have a collar, I overheard my mom talking about me on the phone with my grandma.

“Nope. She doesn’t use pins. I asked her, and she says she...she just doesn’t need them!” “Yes--Yes! I know, right? I could never even imagine sewing without pins!”

My mom was doing what every mom does from time to time. She was marvelling at her child, boasting about me in all my ambitious, talented glory. The reality of the situation was that I just wanted to get my hands on the material, thread my needle, and try my creation on as fast as possible. Who cares if the back and front hems don't quite match up and one armhole is slightly larger than the other? It was just for me, so nobody else would care if it was a little wonky. The second part of the reality was that my mom had been taught to sew by her grandma, the same person who taught her that ‘haste makes waste’. It all boils down to the fact that she was probably better at following advice than me.

Fast-forward ten years. I succumbed to the importance of pins, to the extreme: due to the amount of pins and safety pins I now use in this modern era of my fashion design, you’d think I was the costume designer for a punk band if you saw my garments before they were sewn together. I began to take the importance of pins to heart during my lessons from a woman who was helping me make a genie Halloween costume for myself. I put close to two hundred pins in the purple satin bikini-type bottoms before sewing the two layers together. It was a frightening yet fascinating piece of (unwearable) art in itself, and my teacher could not help but take a picture of my handiwork. Also, I learned about basting. Now, I pin, baste, and then sew. I’ve really had to develop my patience, which years of babysitting has enormously helped with.

However, what I was not going to learn in these lessons was that if I am making something for myself, and nobody in the world is going to see the uneven, unbound seam inside the garment, it is not an excuse to let the inner workings of my garments be ugly. I had a rude awakening when I began to put a couple pieces I made for sale in a boutique: strangers were going to see the uncut threads residing unprofessionally on the inside of this dress! Ever since my dad read the Steve Jobs biography and told me that the success of Apple hinged on Jobs’ obsession with perfecting both the visible outside and hidden inner workings of his products, it has haunted me. My dad’s voice proclaiming the importance of perfecting what cannot be seen, along with my mom’s voice telling me that haste makes waste, caught up to me when I started making clothing for others. There was no room to cut corners, metaphorically and literally. I now exclusively use fabric that is not wanted or used by anyone else for my designs. I am lucky enough to know someone who works at a textile distribution company, who gives me leftover scraps. This, however, means that I only have a limited supply of fabric that is no longer sold, requiring my utmost attention to measurements. I have to make sure that the clothes I make are not only beautiful, but well-made, so that they are comfortable and functional. Practicing patience and precision while making clothing for myself is like putting on my own oxygen mask first, so that I prove to myself I am capable of making clothing that people want to put on themselves. Plus, seeing my clothes on others is a huge motivator for me; yes, my passion and eagerness to use my hands to construct a garment is enough to fuel a lifetime of fashion design, but seeing someone resonate with my vision enough to wear it is like tangibly seeing myself in others. What finally pushed me to clip my threads and obsess over aligning my hems is my discovery that cutting corners does not get me to my destination faster, since my destination within fashion design is to connect and communicate with others.