Thoughtful design is at the core of everything we do at The School of Making and Alabama Chanin. Our collections take months of planning—from choosing silhouettes and colorways to making sample blocks and testing out techniques. Once the designing and planning are complete, samples are made for photography and decisions are made about how the finished products will be available. We never take for granted the time that it takes to make something of quality and always have keeping waste to a minimum in mind.
We’ve introduced products and programming over the past few years to enable you to take that same thought and consideration into your own sustainable wardrobe planning at home. Swatch of the Month introduced new techniques each month to build up your hand-sewing and embroidery skills. Build a Wardrobe was created to give subscribers patterns to work into their existing wardrobes. Our Design Bundles are carefully curated selections of fabric, paint, and notions put together to give you a starting point for exploration with colorways and various embroidery techniques. You can also order individual sample blocks through Custom DIY if you already have a particular colorway, stencil, and technique in mind. And we sell color cards for our 100% Organic Medium-weight Cotton Jersey and many of our notions to help with project planning as well.
With all the options available, we wanted to give you yet another tool to help you build and customize a handmade, sustainable wardrobe—because a sustainable wardrobe is not only one made from organically-sourced materials, it is also one that is well planned and contains only things that you love wearing.
You can now find a free Project Planner on our Resources page for downloading and printing at home. Included is a measurement worksheet so you can record your measurements and use them to help you choose the correct size plus two pages with every detail you need when planning a basic or embellished handmade project (or one of our Custom DIY Kits).
We hope this Project Planner will be something you’ll use over and over and that it helps you be more mindful when making project decisions. As always, we hope you’ll join in the on-going conversation on Instagram using #theschoolofmaking and share your progress and projects with us.