I have not written in a few weeks. Family health issues took me on an unplanned trip home to California. Between the health challenges in my family and prom season for our sewing instructor, Lisa Lambert – who averages more than a hundred prom dresses during prom season – the motto for the month was to keep showing up and keep moving. I am on route to an out of town work event for my day job so I will keep our update for this month short.
We successfully completed another virtual fitting with the Boss Blouse. By this week we will close out the month having sewn up five muslin blouses, which may not seem like a lot but is a miracle with all that is going on. My unplanned family trip forced me to hand off a few more steps of the process of making client muslins, which was a good thing. We also refined our quality control procedures to make sure that the blouses are hitting our measurement targets for each client.
At this point, we are ready to move into the final fabric blouses for our first few clients. I have been reticent to do this in our current space on our array of home machines. However, the womenswear workshop roof continues to experience delay after delay. I spoke with the landlord to understand exactly what was taking so long. He listed out the requirements – overnight temperatures of above 60 degrees (it snowed last week in Princeton), five plus consecutive days of no rain and then the contractor has to be free and to come out and do the work. As he was detailing this for me, I felt as if he was listing out an impossibly unlikely series of events to count on in the coming months. I hope we can all laugh about this when we are settled into the workshop and are working away.
So that all said – we are going to need to proceed with the final blouses for several of the Founder’s Circle clients before we get into the workshop. The good news is that Lisa Lambert and our apprentice has loaned us time on a few very nice home machines which will produce a beautiful product – albeit not as efficiently as the two machines that are gathering dust waiting for a space to come alive. But our mantra is to keep moving, no matter what. Next month we hope to have a few of these final blouses under our belt and several more muslin blouse fittings and muslin blouses shipped.
There is a lot of darkness in the world right now. This work is our lantern.
Thank you so much for all your support.
Go, fight, win.
Reid