Inside the 10,000 Hours
Bridging the Beginner-to-Pro Gap Through Garment Upcycling
Nowadays, everyone loves the idea of upcycling — take something unwanted, wave your creative magic, and voilà! However, there needs to be more conversation that the “magic” of upcycling involves a great deal of hard work.
In September, I chose one focus to manifest #SustainableSeptember by tackling a handful of projects in my repair pile. Shortly afterwards, I got emboldened to start working on one project in my upcycling pile: a RW&Co linen jacket that’s too small. Almost immediately, I got reminded of this misconception of upcycling magic.
When I started getting serious about sewing 10 years ago, I realized that I have developed a pattern, a cycle of emotions if you will, that may be familiar to fellow sewists. I shared about it at length in my blog post titled “Sewing Projects: Exercise of Discipline, Motivation, and Skills.”
For that blog post, I made a diagram that I still bring up in conversations from time to time:
It takes time to build competence. Sewists and creatives who are used to upcycling have spent many hours problem solving and learning sewing techniques to make their vision a reality.
We rarely talk about this vast middle territory of skill-building: the place where you’re no longer a beginner fumbling with your first buttonhole, but you’re also not yet at the level where restructuring an entire garment feels intuitive.
A Community-Taught Sewist
I’ve learned to sew through a patchwork of methods — YouTube tutorials, trial and error, observed techniques from fashion student friends and pro sewists. This means I sometimes take the long way around problems that formally trained sewists would solve in half the time (or quicker!)
But it also means I remember what it feels like to stare at a garment and have no idea where to start, and I want to help demystify the “magic” behind upcycling a garment.
Working on this jacket project was my chance to give that visibility, to break down the steps I took to transform a linen jacket that just doesn’t work to one I’m looking forward to wearing.
By sharing this progress, I hope beginner / advanced beginner sewists can have a better idea of what adding those 10,000 hours actually looks like when you’re accumulating upcycling skills, in the shape of dozens of smaller competencies that eventually let you look at a hopeless garment and see possibilities.
