Sew label prompt!

This all started with the sewing must have product of the year – the Kylie and the Machine advent calendar. In the UK, lots of fabric shops and haberdasheries have announced they’ll be stocking the beautifully designed calendars this year, and have opened presales just as we got payday. The calendars look gorgeous, and contain 66(!) labels and 2 patches, and I’m told that the labels look amazing (although obviously we can’t see them, only retailers have had sneak peeks). It’s fairly priced for the number of labels within the calendar, you could say it’s a bargain, but at the same time, it’s quite a big outlay, in August, for a Christmas product.

The must-have sewing accessory this Christmas

Social media has been going crazy for the calendars as more and more shops announce pre-sales, with lots of price undercutting going on to tempt us to buy (I’m deliberately not linking here as I don’t want to favour one shop over another). And it left me wondering whether to get one or not. On the one hand £50 is a lot of money, I could do a lot of things with that money, but on the other hand, come December I’ll probably wish I had one, and If I buy one at a later date, it’ll cost me more as lots of shops are discounting the pre sale price. So I put up an Instagram story, asking whether I should buy the advent calendar, and got so much feedback.

Initially it was neck and neck, but it’s now becoming clear that the majority think I should buy one. Lots of people have messaged saying they’re in a similar position, unsure what to do and afraid of the FOMO! But what’s clear is that lots of people have the same issue as me…

We already have lots of labels, but forget to put them in our clothes. And so that got me thinking…maybe we should ask indie pattern designers to include a prompt in their instructions to remind us we could insert a label.

Although it seems simple at first, it’s not as simple as saying ‘insert label now’. There are different preferences for label placement. In baby clothes, I tend to mostly put them in a side seam and visible on the outside, but then on my own clothes I prefer them to be sewn on mid construction on a facing. But sometimes there isn’t a facing. I prefer not to have to handsew them in, and I prefer not to see visible stitching from the right side of the fabric. So many issues.

But I think we can still ask the question, for indie sewing companies to include a prompt when they think it might be an appropriate place to add a label of we want to. Of course, not everybody will have labels, and so it’s optional. But it’d make a fun little feature within the pattern instructions for those of us who’d use it.

So who’s with me? How can we ask our beloved pattern companies? I suggest we share a photo of a label and tag some of our favourite pattern companies and ask the to include a #SewLabelPrompt in their patterns. All we can do is ask, right?!

I also want to acknowledge that as far as campaigning by the sewing community goes, this is very frivolous. As a community we continue to come together and campaign on much more serious issues, and this label idea is very much tongue in cheek.