Worth Preserving

Hello! Here are some pictures of Jen (blue) and me (Lauren, green) doing Scientific Wear Testing of deadstock ponte that is destined to become Shrouds someday! Jen is as excited as she looks and I am excited too even though my face does not look like it!  

The three primary Bog artists, Jen, Jess, & I, are getting ready for our big show of the summer, the Westmoreland Arts & Heritage Festival. We absolutely want to show up locked and loaded to this 4-day long, heavily-attended show in the gorgeous PA countryside…. so….. It’s finally time to deal with our laundry backlog, so to speak.

Back in 2024 (?!!) when the Bog officially moved to a collective format, Jen came out of the gate strong with the Shroud; she designed it to be a high-drama, low-effort duster that feels like you’re wearing a hoodie but looks like you just stepped out to quest. We got GREAT feedback on the design and we’ve been cautiously making them in small batches ever since, sending them out into the world with all the love we have for our craft. 

HOWEVER. No matter how much you love your Shroud (and if you have one we SINCERELY hope you do), as the primary manufacturer of sewn goods in the group, I have to tell you that the pattern set has certain…let’s call them “quirks.” 

Jen and I got so excited about grading her Medium pattern to a Small and a Large that both of us – BOTH OF US – took our collected years of grading best practice experience and threw it enthusiastically out the window. We just kind of went for it. Jen graded the Small without, as far as I can tell, referencing her original garment. I graded the Large based loosely on my own measurements AND MADE THE LARGE SLEEVE DIFFERENT for good measure (to be fair, I DID have a reason for this because MY sleeve design gave us a better fabric allocation while maintaining the garment silhouette, but this is extremely bad practice because it confuses the HELL out of the stitchers). 

I think honestly we were both so excited to be finally designing and executing our own stuff for a change it felt like someone slipped our leashes off. We both KNEW better, but I guess we had to get it out of our systems. It’s come back to bite us now because even though our vibes-based grading made some pretty good garments, it made for a pretty lousy construction experience. I was always feeling the need to double check my pattern pieces and the Large sleeve being different brought production to a screeching halt every time. This is a type of “sustainable” manufacturing that doesn’t often get the credit it deserves - the importance of mental sustainability, especially for a small operation like us where 4 or 5 people are doing everything. If it makes you nuts to make it, it won’t get made.

So anyway, having given ourselves that lecture, Jen and I booked two days this week to work TOGETHER on the big table at my shop, which is a rare luxury for both of us! We hammered out all the discrepancies in the Shroud pattern set, made plans for a NEW VERSION for summer (premiering at Westmoreland), and BOY did we have ourselves a time! We preserved that original sense of play & freedom by working in pencil and paper only. Both of us learned this method as baby patternmakers and it’s how we start almost every project. The Shroud is a 27-piece pattern set in three sizes so picture our table almost 90 pattern pieces deep! We were digging around, stacking patterns, measuring, folding, slashing, taping, cutting, checking, taping again, checking again….. and it felt so good. 

It felt defiant and honest, like what I thought my life would be like when I was a dreamy and absent-minded teenager; before decades of adulthood ground me down, hardened my edges, sharpened my defenses. Our tableful of paper was a transient act of defiance against a rapacious technocracy with no room for play, individualism, personal ownership, autonomy. Just a few stolen days out of a busy month, but so powerful nonetheless to reconnect with our hands-on generation methods that are as far from artificial as you can get. Just two people, working in pencil and paper at the same table in the same room, talking quietly and making decisions together as they go. It’s far from the life I - and most of us - get every day. But it’s the life we want to make in the Bog, and it’s the life I work for.