Changing my behaviour with Stefanie London

Before

About 6 months ago I decided to overhaul how I "consume" clothing. This is something that has been building for a while, like a niggling thought about something I knew wasn’t right in my life. There are plenty of facts and figures on the way that we over-consume fashion these days, but this article is a good start: https://t.co/QacevqGPsR or here: http://www.huffingtonpost.ca/entry/transforming-the-fashion-industry_us_57ceee96e4b0a48094a58d39

The upshot is that back in the 50's the average woman owned about 9 outfits. From the above articles, people have an "average of 16 items only worn once and 11 still with the tags on" in their closets.

After

The increase in consumption has much to do with fast fashion and the low cost of garment production by fast fashion companies. Why spend $100 on one top when you can get 5 or 6 for the same price at H&M, right?

The problem is, the cost cutting not only effects the quality of the garment (meaning they degrade quicker) but the wages and working conditions for people making the garments as well as the environment (watch this The True Cost on Netflix for more info on this. Ne prepared, having a box of tissues handy.)

What am I doing about it?

1.     I've put myself on a temporary fast fashion ban. No H&M, no GAP, no Old Navy etc. It's been just under three months so far. Ideally, I'd like to go a whole year. I've realized that I actually need a lot less clothing than I'd previously thought.

2.     Taking better care of the clothing I own, learning how to mend things instead of replacing them.

3.     Shopping more carefully and thoughtfully when I do buy something new. I’m trying to choose more sustainable fashion brands or at least buying an item of high quality that I know I will use lots and will last me longer than one season.

4.     I am now learning to sew and knit. This definitely isn't me saying we should all make out own clothing, but to me it was a natural part of changing my habits.

The easiest thing you can do to lessen your fast fashion impact is to simply buy less, buy thoughtfully and buy better

quality. I feel that this is one of those things where small behaviour changes across larger groups of people will have massive impact. Try “shopping your closet” by creating new pairings of items you already own, or making a promise to finally get those jeans hemmed so you can wear them out instead of leaving them unloved in your closet.

Is this something you’ve thought about? How have your shopping habits changed over the years?

Relaxation--Are you active, or passive?

Yvonne Lindsay
Deborah Hillman Photograpy

We have an advertisement on our televisions here in New Zealand, where a high profile sportsman talks about being an active relaxer. That is, to relax he needs to be doing something, like going for a swim or cooking, etc. It's got me to thinking about how I relax and I've discovered that far from being the total couch potato I'd always thought I was, I'm kind of an active relaxer, too.

A few years ago I took up knitting again because just sitting and watching TV in the evening stopped being fun and, because I'm also into instant gratificiation :-) I picked socks as my project of choice. Enter the wonders of Ravelry.com, a free site for knitters and crocheters (I'm NZYvonne on there if you want to look up some of the socks I've done.) What a treasure trove of patterns and ideas.

I've found that I love to work with colour, so hand dyed merino-blend yarns are an absolute delight for me. Colours make my brain happy, doing something useful in a time of relaxation makes my brain happy, seeing a project completed in a reasonably short period of time makes my brain very happy. That said, for Mr Fix-It, I do stick to his preferred (yawn) navy, grey or black. Everything in me rebels at working with the plainer tones but that's tempered with the fact that I'm making socks, with love, for the man I love.

My eldest daughter, The Drill Sergeant, has recently joined me in knitting as a relaxation (except we won't talk about the 13 attempts it took to get her most recent beanie completed, or how relaxing it may or may have not been, LOL!) We've both found knitting to be a mental time out, whether we're thinking about other stuff or just letting our minds wander or even if we're just (okay, that's me) obsessively following the pattern. Either way, we've both found it beneficial, and I've also found that my creative writing juices flow more evenly during the days following an evening of knitting.

I think I've always been an active relaxer, certainly since I've had my two gorgeous girls. Initially it was cross-stitch and floral design, more recently mosaics and quilting (hey, I didn't realise it but they essentially go hand in hand, don't they? Piecing bits and pieces of colour together to make pretty pictures?) and latterly, knitting.

How about you? Are you an active relaxer or are you blissfully happy to do nothing at all in those precious moments when you are able to do nothing at all. Share your thoughts with me and I'll put you in a draw for one commenter to win one of my backlist books (stock permitting.) And, if your native tongue is a different language to English, and if I have a foreign edition in that language, you have a choice of an English or foreign edition ~~ Yvonne Lindsay