Welcome to Fat Upcycling!

Hi. You can call me M.

I'm doing this for fun and as an experiment. I've been sewing for well over a decade. When I started, it was a means of accessing clothes I wasn't allowed to have--something I think a lot of early-blooming seamsters can relate to.

From the mid 2010s, it looked like things were getting a little bit better. Being able to make clothes that actually fit wasn't so important: I was older, had more choice in what I wore, but also, the body positivity movement was in full swing and lots of stores actually carried reasonable-ish clothing in a full set of sizes.

Stuff's worse again now. Fatphobia is in fashion again, and many companies are rolling back their sizing.

The internet is also really different now. The early 2010s were a brief moment when search engines actually worked, and how people engaged with content was really different (I don't think we even used the word "content"). Text content reigned supreme because most people didn't have the infrastructure to take, edit, or upload decent video. It felt like almost anything you wanted to do, you could find a site a lot like this one where some random person taught you how to do it with photos taken on a shitty digital point-and-shoot.

I don't mean to be all "kids these days" about it--that would be weird, I'm barely an """elder""" gen z. People still make cool stuff! TikTok just isn't for me.

Also, tons of those super cool how-to sites still exist! The marginalia search engine is fantastic for finding that kind of thing. The sense of putting stuff into the world for other people to appreciate is just gone, at least for me.

I thought I would try neocities for a minute and post some of my sewing projects and patterns, in the hope that other people might be interested. I've been thinking a lot lately about how I made my first corset--I found a website with an HTML calculator that let you plug in your measurements for step-by-step pattern drafting directions. It worked really well actually. I think an institution ran it, like a dress history museum or something. I'll try to find if it still exists to share.

Anyway, that calculator was a lot more magical when I was twelve than it is now--something that's actually nice, because I can definitely build something like it for my own patterns!