My Slow and Mindful Fashion October

Slow Fashion October coincided with my return to blogging this fall, and therefore I can't help but to seek parallells between the two. Slow vs. Fast Fashion is an important question to me, but at the same time it's a difficult one. The working and living conditions of the workers that make our clothing are unacceptable, but since the chain of middle-men between a seamstress in Asia and me as a consumer is long, the difficult question is how to make changes that benefit the poorest and most exploited workers. If you are a Finnish reader, you might be interested in the book Tappajafarkut by Outi Moilala (sorry, it's in Finnish, but the title translates as Killer Jeans, so you get a picture of what the book is about).

So although the exploitation of garment workers is an important question to me, it's not what Slow Fashion October is about for me this year. This October, and hopefully every month from here on, I'm bringing the Mindfulness back into the Making.

I didn't intend to keep a 10 month long break from blogging, knitting and sewing, but it happened anyway. Now that my day-to-day life has settled a bit I began feeling the need to create again. But before I picked up my knitting needles and dusted off my blog, I wanted to pause for a moment and evaluate what my reasons for creating and blogging were. Sewing, knitting and blogging takes time, and I wanted to make a conscious choice that these were the things I wanted to spend my time on, as opposed to something else.

The decision to keep on creating and blogging was easy to make. Turns out this is something that I feel is a part of me, and that brings me to the core of my take on Slow Fashion October. Although spending hours and hours on a single project comes naturally to me, I'm not always good at enjoying that time to the fullest. My thoughts have a bad habit of drifting off to my next project long before the project at hand is finished. And since there always is a next project, and a next, this turns into a bad cycle where I'm always some place else in my mind.

This is where I'm going to make a change. I'm bringing Mindfulness back into the sewing and knitting and treating every moment I spend making something like an exercise in being present in the moment. So far I have only implemented this on my knitting, but I can tell you it feels great. Brain studies have showed that knitting is similar to the brain as meditating, so basically you get the benefits of meditating AND a new scarf at the same time.

This post is a long way of saying this: I'm going to concentrate on what I'm doing, relish the slow process of making something by hand and take pride in the finished project knowing how much love and care went into making it. That's what Slow Fashion is about for me.