I have abandoned my beautiful website in the process of piecing my life back together after some big personal shifts, but I haven’t stopped writing! In fact, I have been writing (and illustrating!) more than ever over on substack. The only reason I’m on substack is because people can follow/subscribe to my posts so easily over there, since I never started a newsletter for my website here. Maybe I should do that. I actually don’t love that the only option substack has to support their writers on that platform is a yearly subscription. It would be nice to have a pay-what-you-want-if-you-like option, akin to a Buy Me A Coffee button (speaking of which, I will link mine here). Anyways, I would love to shift my work from substack to over here on my actual website at some point in the future. Substack is just another social media conglomerate mining it’s users for their intellectual property and money. It has its perks but ultimately I would love to feel like I can exist in my own space and get a readership outside of the system of social media. In the mean time, please join me there if you’re on substack, or hang out here as I try to share not only more often, but share more about my life in general!
I’ve been sewing my way through a nice little fabric haul I got after receiving a generous gift certificate to Mood as a Christmas gift. For about twenty thousand different reasons, both political and personal, I haven’t been spending much money on fabric or craft stuff lately. It’s been wonderful to push my way through my fabric stash this past year, but by the end of 2025 I was nearing the end of fabric that is actually reasonable to sew (lots of wool coatings and denim and specialty textiles that I don’t really have much need to invite into my wardrobe at the moment) so it was nice to refresh my coffers with some new yardage.
I bought three different colors of Mood’s sandwashed viscose (which looks and feels like cupro) and planned to make the black yardage into a dress (check!) and the other two into tops. My pussy bow blouse dreams were dashed when I realized I didn’t have nearly enough yardage of either for my pattern, so I rifled through my stash and randomly stopped on a vintage pattern from the 1950s that I have always loved.
I attempted the pattern many years ago when either my skills or my patience were much too thin to handle the strain of what vintage patterns often offer, but I’m pretty sure I abandoned the project before completion and can’t even remember how far I got into it. For some reason I felt compelled to make another attempt at this design with my newly acquired viscose, and I’m pretty proud of myself for not abandoning it for a second time because vintage patterns be WILIN’!
My viscose has a soft hand and flowy drape and is therefore pretty shifty- because there are so many tucks, darts and pleats in the pattern (15 in all!) it made transferring the pattern lines very difficult- the fabric didn’t hold the chalk super well and the lines came out all wavy because of the slippery fabric. In hindsight I should have given my fabric a gelatine bath to stiffen it up before cutting and marking the busy front with chalk, but instead I just sewed each tuck incorrectly and then ripped out the seams to start over approximately seventeen times. Eventually I started over from scratch: ironed out all my prior pressing, used my side seams as guidelines and then measured the width of each tuck from there and sewed it before moving onto the next one. I’m not even being hyperbolic about the seventeen times- it was almost like it was physically impossible for me to sew anything correctly the first (or second, or third!) go. I’m still unsure how my fabric didn’t get completely gnarled up from all the unpicking and resewing I did. But somehow, someway, I managed to get the front pleated and tucked properly and although the lines are far from perfect, the overall impact of the blouse is spot on.
The pattern is one size too small for me so during my first attempt at this blouse years ago I had widened the blouse at the bust and added length to it, (length that I didn’t need and ended up chopping off), but vintage tends to fit smaller than roomy modern day Big 5, so better safe than sorry. I actually love how this blouse fits! The bottoms of the sleeves are low cut and loose as opposed to tight up under my arm, so it’s got breathing room for my pits while still giving a pretty lovely silhouette with it’s stark sleeve edges jutting out from the shoulders (it is suggested you pair this blouse with shoulder pads, which is unnecessary for me but probably also a great look). Had the armholes been smaller and come closer to my underarms, I would have considered adding a sweat guard on the inside because I wouldn’t want to stain the pretty fabric with deodorant juice.
I happened to be listening to the Articles Of Interest episode about Claire McCardell’s contribution to women’s fashion, which was around the time that this pattern from 1951 entered the market. How fascinating that McCardell ushered in a new wave of style encouraging women to dress comfortably, for and by themselves, instead of wearing clothes with lots of claustrophobic, size-minimizing undergarments underneath and buttons and fastenings that could only be closed by someone helping the woman get dressed, a la the New Look. I stood at my sewing table plotting out buttonholes for the back closure of this blouse, giggling at the irony of how novel it was for me to see buttons in unexpected places on modern clothing and how hard McCardell fought to bring those same buttons off of the backs and onto the fronts and sides of clothing so women could get in and of it themselves. Fashion, of course, repeats itself, but rarely for the same reasons.
This blouse humbled me. Though delicate and impactful, it’s not a complicated design and the only reason the tucks and pleats were so fiddly is because the fabric was as slippery as it was. Still, modern sewing patterns tend to have much fewer design features than vintage, so sewing them is much more straightforward and much quicker, and I’ve gotten used to the fast pace of garment completion at this stage of my sewing life. My closet is robust and I have no need or desire to churn out items with a quick turn around these days, so it’s been nice to slow down a bit and feel challenged for once: I sewed an entire pair of zip fly trousers in two days, which was less time than it took me to finish this blouse in three!
I’ve had “order new sewing labels” on my to do list for about two years now and finally marked it off recently when I realized I should forgo the consumerist trap of buying more more more and instead put my Bernina’s rarely used bells and whistles to good use. Depending on the fabric I am working with, I sew my “label” directly onto the garment (like the wool trousers below) or onto some twill tape which I use like an actual label, as seen above. I love sewing directly onto the fabric, but when I tried with my viscose, even with interfacing below it, the fabric folded on itself and some of the letters looked garbled up. I’m contemplating using the “label” like a diary entry- “Jasika Made While Emo & Hungry 2026” or “Jasika’s Birthday Dress: 46 YRS” but so far I love the clean and concise Jasika Made.
Last week I threw my second annual Black History Month Day Party with the most important (local) melanin-drenched people in my life and we had a blast, though next year I’m aiming for a brunch because my friends don’t like to hang out past 8:00 on a weeknight, haha. I made black eyed peas and cornbread and a Dismantle White Supremacy Cake which was represented by a white cake with buttercream frosting being overwhelmed by the diaspora. Dismantling white supremacy happens to be delicious and I recommend everyone give it a go if they’ve got some cake flour and sprinkles on hand.
Lastly, I’ve been scheming up an article about nail art, or more specifically, the way that doing my own nails has become what feels, at times, like a radical act of self care in a culture that has come to prize outsourcing a lot of our beauty rituals to technicians. But I’m still processing my thoughts around it, and don’t want to present it as everyone should be doing their own nails so why are you paying people hundreds of dollars to do them for you?? because I am so impressed by nail technicians who do incredible, intricate artwork on nails and understand the power and joy of having access to someone’s gorgeous designs at their literal fingertips. Just because I wouldn’t spend money on it doesn’t mean the service isn’t valuable to someone else. Some people view a set of ornately designed nails that cost upwards of $150 as the ultimate flex, an obvious sign of wealth (or at the very least, disposable income), but I can recognize that people might view me in a very similar way- having the skillset and perhaps most importantly the time to do my own nails every ten days is also a sort of flex. The value system might be different but it’s still based on a limited resource, whether that resource is time or money. Turning this over in my head til I have a handle on what it is I want to say, and perhaps what I ultimately write will just be a tutorial, a little dive into how I got into doing my nails in the first place.
This most recent set of nails I am sharing was a bit ambitious and although they didn’t come out exactly how I wanted, I feel very confident that I learned what I needed to so that the next set will be more successful. I was aiming for tortoise shell and wound up with something more Peggy Bundy-of-center, which I am not mad at! Every time I look down I get a tiny spike of happy hormone release because my first thought is that they look like professionally applied nail stickers instead of two hours of carefully placed polish with Babygirl playing on the tv in the background.
I get most of my nail inspiration from Pinterest but recently stumbled upon youtuber Hannah Rox who started her channel over a decade ago and has a lot of fun and inspiring nail designs on her page, with accompanying tutorial videos. Not all of her style is to my taste and the few years of her content seems to be just swatching polishes that she has been gifted, which is not particularly interesting or helpful to me personally, but I spent a decent amount of time favoriting some of her coolest (IMO) designs from the many years she has been creating content, and this tortoise shell was at the top of my list, though I’m also determined to get good at the ombre sponge technique one of these days.
Ok, that’s all the artful stuff I have to report from my past week. Happy making, folks!
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