How taming “Chaos Whimsey” with structure helped me rediscover myself after six years away.
I haven’t made a collection in six years. I haven’t written a blog post in six years, either.
As I type this, I am filled with gratitude to return to this mental space of consideration, contextualization, and collaboration with you—the reader and fellow creative. I will get to the reasons for this long absence shortly. But first, let’s start with the scene in my studio that led me back to these treasured creative activities.
I am with my client, Elsie. I hadn’t seen Elsie in years, and piled on the floor are parts of her amazing fashion collection. I have always felt an affinity with Elsie’s taste; she collects clothing from small conceptual lines and independent designers with a strong perspective.
Spread all around my table were Elsie’s edits:
- Vivienne Tam: Fine mesh, floral embroidery, bold reds, and traditional Chinese motifs.
- New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival: T-shirts featuring years of iconic graphic design.
- Santa Fe Artist Tees: Graphic designs embodying protest and politics.
- People of the Labyrinth: Items from this Dutch design collective that captured my wonder in the best possible way.
It’s a brave thing to hand off your collection and trust a designer to cut it up. But Elsie had a need. While these garments held embedded stories of her life, she no longer wore them. They didn’t fit the way she was living her life now.
This raises a question I ask often in my Fair Fit Method Online Courses: How do you keep things that are meaningful, but repurpose them into objects that serve who you are today?
The Art of Sustainable Upcycling
The beauty of textiles is that they are soft goods. They are fluid; they can transform—if you put them in the right system that maintains their meaning while reinterpreting their form.
As I return to design, I want to share how one collection begins. I want to show you how a designer’s pattern blocks create a system to transform existing clothing into meaningful garments. As a teacher, I share my design process to demystify the illusion around creating clothing.
Whether you are designing your own wardrobe or working through a rough spot in your creative practice, these principles apply.
Where I’ve Been: The Reality of the “Medical Mom”
When we began this collection, I hadn’t seen Elsie in five years. In that time, my entire life changed.
My daughter was born with complications that dragged me into the medical system with states of daily emergency. I spent those years in a kind of isolation I didn’t know was possible—navigating health challenges, doctors’ offices, and the endless cycle of trying to keep a child alive.
I existed in a system where compassion was often viewed as a weakness. I thought I would be there forever, so I did not make art. I did not teach. I abandoned my blog. In that process, I lost track of myself.
When you are caregiving to that level, you lose yourself. It happens. But everyone has their own timeline on which they return to themselves.
The Lifeline: “I Want You To Have Fun”
Elsie knew I had a baby, and she knew some of the story. Looking back, I wonder if she was throwing me a lifeline.
Elsie explained that this chapter of her life is about exploring how to “have fun and be older.” She knew my dresses fit her body in a way that made her feel alive. She laid out her rules for the project:
“I want you to have fun with this. I want you to be playful. I want you to be you. I like your designs best when you are allowing yourself to be free to play and be curious.”
Something in me shifted. I think Elsie knew that someone who builds things—who works in shape and cloth—sometimes needs an invitation to come back to making.
Patch + Piece: The Rules of Engagement
In my fashion design practice, and what I teach in my Pattern Making Workshops, is that you must set rules and boundaries before beginning a project.
I call this project Patch + Piece. It is based on a concept I started years ago to translate pattern blocks into knitwear designs, applying sustainability principles to repurpose materials.
The Rules for this Collection:
- Nothing Online: Sold only in person to test the fit and community response.
- Only Repurposed Materials: T-shirts, studio scraps, and designer deadstock.
- Time Limits: A limit of 3 hours per dress maximum sewing time.
Patch + Piece reminded me of the words that formed a core principle for me in my design practice. of one of my mentors at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. J. Morgan Puett, a conceptual artist and fashion designer would say to us in her mentorship, “If you’re not doing it for your friends, who are you doing it for?” I took her question to mean that creativity should serve the people in your real life, the people you actively engage with in your community, your friends who wear your work, the people in your city who change in conversation by wearing it. I felt this question meant that if your work doesn’t live in community, it turns into fantasy, into projections of places or groups you imagine to navigate. Creative circuitry that’s relational to the people you actually interact with and either solves a problem or brings joy to their lives.
Elsie met me at one of the local markets and later came to my TedX talk, and continued collecting. I truly enjoyed her perspectives and in my conversations with her I would feel so engaged and inspired. She is a lively, brilliant person and I felt honored that she enjoyed my work.
Chaos Whimsey Meets Pattern Structure
The People of the Labyrinth garments were my favorite because they represented what I call “Chaos Whimsey.” Neon spray paint, printed mazes, and sacred geometry. It was electric.
However, returning to creative practice when your nervous system is fried is difficult. I was constantly trying to manage my daughter’s health, living in a state of reaction. But I realized that my daughter reads my energy field. If I’m not calm, she’s not calm.
In the past I could never sit still. So I never spent long periods in reflection, I just kept learning by doing in my usual frenetic pace. When I look back at my older collections that I created for the runway shows I did in New Orleans, they were absolute chaos whimsey. I would ride my bike to wherever I was going that day in the French Quarter, and then a story would begin about a character and what she would do, wear, how she would be defined in color. If her story was long enough, it would be the basis for a show. This was creating from a place of wonder and sheer enjoyment of making something exist, but in design, that’s not really realistic.
I learned that whimsey needs a structure, or it cannot be fully lived.
This is where The Fair Fit Method comes in. Pattern making can seem like a harsh way of thinking—you have to think 10 steps ahead. But without limits, the garment becomes chaotic and unwearable.
The 7 Critical Areas of Fit
The Fair Fit Method follows the terms of fit I have found most beneficial. I focus on the 7 areas of the body where proportion is critical:
- Chest
- Upper Chest
- Waist
- Hips
- Shoulder Seam
- Across the Back
- Lengths of Torso and Legs
All of these can be customized to your unique proportions. You can still modify it to contemporary fashions, but also maintain looks that have always really worked and transcended trends. This is a form of sustainability that isn’t talked about enough: Setting up modular frameworks that accommodate customization. A living pattern that shape-shifts, instead of holding rigid rules.
Creativity as Medicine
I paused for six years and didn’t make anything. But it wasn’t an end; it was an incubation period.
I’ve learned that creativity serves purposes beyond business or applause. It is actual nervous system regulation. It is medicine.
Elsie’s collection didn’t just begin in the studio. It began in the hours of caregiving, with the realization that my nervous system could not heal if I kept asking it to only endure. My practice could help me regulate. Pattern making is a structure that not only holds my forms, but sustains my stories.
How to turn multiple garments from different eras, different mixtures of silk and knit, velvet and leather, and fit them into a pattern system.
All of these mismatches can be overwhelming to a designer. Where is the consistency? What is the grounding theme? For me the commonality was the color, and which ones combined into a harmony that when fit into my Patch + Piece pattern system, made the most sense and existed well side by side and combined.
I looked for the loud patterns, and then the quiet ones. There are dresses in Elsies collection that had bold fragmented rainbow silks and then there was soft ice dyes. There were some very intense silkscreens and then very fine detailed line drawings. I like to either juxtapose features like this in one garment, or side by side in the collection. Most people who have viewed this recent work are drawn to this dress of strong colors and fluid silks with loud fuchsias and purples. When Elsie put this ice dyed dress next to it, she called it, “her quiet sister.” It’s in this way that playing with opposites brings out the best qualities in the textiles and the shapes.
It became a grounding theme to find places of quiet to put in each garment, and to have calm pieces within a very wild collection of textiles. In one garment I changed the shape to an oversized dress that still hugged the shoulders and slimmed the arms, but existed through the torso in places of fluidity and grace. I added flutter sleeves of silk to tight mesh sleeves to bring down the harshness of form fitting and add the magic of opposites existing together. On top of each other. Id take a form fitted bodice, and slice into the skirt so it could be layered and relaxed. I kept working in this way to keep each garment surprising.
This way of working really can’t be done in a factory.
What’s Next?
In upcoming posts, I will go deeper into the “How.” I will show you:
- The actual pattern systems I use.
- How to break down garments and fragment them.
- How to balance loud prints with quiet spaces (the “Quiet Sister” effect).
- How to think about proportion and fit simultaneously.
If you are interested in learning how to create your own sustainable, fitted wardrobe using these methods, I invite you to explore the Fair Fit Method Online Courses.
For today, it is enough to say that the collection begins here: with a friend, a pile of beloved clothes, and a designer who is remembering that creativity is not a luxury. It is medicine.