The reaction to this series by women of all ages via social media has been really amazing. When EcoSalon introduced it two weeks ago, launching with Americana Couture designer and author Natalie Chanin, fashion writer and textile artist Abigail Doan, Owyn Ruck of Brooklyn’s Textile Arts Center as well as occupational therapist and FiftyRX3 writer Jill Danyelle, many people either wrote to us at the site or commented via Twitter and Facebook. Among some of the reactions, the series is being used as reading material for knitting groups; while others have expressed that without the ability to sit quietly and use their hands, they’d need to jump back on anxiety medications.

Maybe there’s something to all this handiwork?

How it all began: When I came across this blog entry from sustainable designer and writer Natalie Chanin, it not only piqued my perception of the positive effects of “women’s work,” but it brought to light a real aspect of how using our hands to do meaningful tasks can benefit our overall health and well being.

Chanin cites neuroscientist Kelly Lambert, author of Lifting Depression:

“Lambert shows how when you knit a sweater or plant a garden, when you prepare a meal or simply repair a lamp, you are bathing your brain in feel-good chemicals and creating a kind of mental vitamin. Our grandparents and great grandparents, who had to work hard for basic resources, developed more resilience against depression; even those who suffered great hardships had much lower rates of this mood disorder. But with today’s overly-mechanized lifestyle, we have forgotten that our brains crave the well-being that comes from meaningful effort.”

With the sustainable stretching out of the fashion movement, there’s been a serious harking back to the glory of heritage and craft and designers with good ears are listening. And well they should with generations strong of everything from indigenous artisans to Depression Era stitchers coming out of the woodwork to teach, inspire and pass on before the knowledge is lost. Designers are listening and incorporating these aged techniques and making them fresh, new and revolutionary.

A designer with those aforementioned “good ears,” is the last member of our series. Titania Inglis designs a line of minimalist-inspired clothing made of experimental constructions and functional details. Her third collection “References vintage glamor via geometric forms created through bias cuts, origami pleating, and ingenious seaming. A sleeveless dress reverses from a prim suit dress to a low-backed mod frock, while diagonal-seamed dresses approach the ideal of zero waste.”

Titania Inglis in her studio

Inglis lives and designs and rides her vintage bicycle everywhere in Brooklyn, and chronicles her adventures and misadventures in the fashion world on her blog, Fade to Green.

Regarding the importance of using her own hands to design, to communicate and ultimately, to achieve sharp mental clarity, she has much to say.

“A lot of people outside the fashion industry don’t seem to realize that all clothes are made by hand, to varying degrees. Yet from the initial sketches, to selecting fabrics, to draping and cutting and sewing and fitting a garment, every step requires the human touch. Sewing machines don’t run themselves, as anyone who’s ever tried to use one can attest!

It was the hands-on nature of clothing design that drew me to it, for reasons I couldn’t fully articulate as a young woman. I set out to become a graphic designer, but within weeks of starting design school, I realized that I found infinitely more satisfaction in creating a physical object with my hands. Fabric, with its drape and heft and texture, and clothing, so intimately interacting with the human body, were perfectly tactile, and perfect for hands-on work.”

Swatches from dye tests for the Titania Inglis collection

The designer continues: “For me, design begins with the materials. I drape most of my pieces by hand as a way to explore what the fabric wants to do, what directions it wants to go and what shapes it can make. In my designs, every seam needs to justify its existence, every cut in the fabric serves a specific purpose, and I find my way there by hand, by draping and pinning and snipping and marking each pattern piece, one at a time until I have a complete garment.”

Inglis says there is rich satisfaction in every step of the process: “When I’ve successfully draped a piece so it sits just so, when a pattern is beautiful in and of itself, and finally in seeing the finished piece and how it moves on the body. I often go through three or four muslins per piece, pinning and re-fitting and sometimes re-draping an entire garment until I’m satisfied that everything is right with it: the fit, the proportion, the details.”

Titania Inglis’ Studio

One showroom rep commented recently told Inglis her line was “so simple and yet so complex.” Reflecting upon this, Inglis observes, “I think that’s a reflection of the work I put into refining each piece. My work process is almost meditative; I come into my studio, prepare myself a steaming mug of green tea, cut off a length of fresh muslin, and I’m ready to go, completely cut off from the world outside. When I really get going, I can work for hours on a piece, late into the night, snipping through the fabric and feeding lengths of fabric into the eager sewing machine to create a muslin, then fitting and pinning and re-working it until it’s perfect.

I love clothing design for its communicative and aesthetic possibilities, but also very much for the craft of it. Many designers prefer to simply hand off sketches to a pattern maker, but for me, the process is the design. It feels a bit pompous to talk about the integrity of the piece and purity of form, but those are qualities I strive for, and I really can only get there with my own two hands.”

Image: supersonicphotos

The post Using Your Hands to Soothe the Brain: Part 3 appeared first on EcoSalon.

Last week we gave you Part 1 of  “Using Your Hands to Soothe the Brain,” featuring designer and author Natalie Chanin, textile artist and Ecco Eco founder Abigail Doan, and Jill Danyelle, Occupational Therapist and founder of FiftyRX3.

When I came across this blog entry from sustainable designer and writer Natalie Chanin, it not only piqued my perception of the positive effects of “women’s work,” but it brought to light a real aspect of how using our hands to do meaningful tasks can benefit our overall health and well being.

Chanin cites neuroscientist Kelly Lambert, author of Lifting Depression:

“Lambert shows how when you knit a sweater or plant a garden, when you prepare a meal or simply repair a lamp, you are bathing your brain in feel-good chemicals and creating a kind of mental vitamin. Our grandparents and great grandparents, who had to work hard for basic resources, developed more resilience against depression; even those who suffered great hardships had much lower rates of this mood disorder. But with today’s overly-mechanized lifestyle, we have forgotten that our brains crave the well-being that comes from meaningful effort.”

Here in Part 2, Owyn Ruck, one of the founders of Brooklyn’s widely respected Textile Arts Center weighs in on how using our hands not only enhances our sense of well being, but how it also creates a sense of self-sufficiency.

I think it is inherently human to desire self-sufficiency. Behind it all, we are just trying to survive. It may be cheesy and a half-way joke when people talk about the “apocalypse” and being able to construct a house or make clothing, but knowing how to use your hands to create things that are useful, never mind beautiful, is vital to our self-worth and provides a feeling that we can survive anything. As kids, we want to shoo the adult away (“I can do it myself”, “let me do it!”) and that continues through our lives, though as technology advances, we become more and more dependent on machines, or others, doing things for us.

We are often so removed from the process of creating, that we miss out on knowing the basic satisfaction of taking the time, care, and knowledge that it requires. Everything is so fast-paced, we are able to skip so many steps, that we forget how simply even knowing how to fix something gives us power. The act of being able to fix something we love, even if we didn’t create it from scratch, gives us a glimpse into the knowledge behind an objects making. It takes the power and control out of the hands of someone else and gives it right back to us – we get to relate to an object, and ensure that it is built to last. It’s a great sense of freedom. Even in a sense of finances, we are taught to feel that money equals freedom, but what if you didn’t even to need to buy half the things you did, you could make them or simply make something last longer? That’s freedom.

When we first started Textile Arts Center, a lot of the trust we had in the whole venture was this gut feeling that there was a general stirring and change within people, that they’d want to take classes and have the meeting place. Maybe it’s the same as you, we are around a lot of creative people in New York City and Brooklyn in particular and have seen this DIY trend growing for years now.

Without a doubt, I think that it’s because we have distanced ourselves from creating. Not only the feeling of creating, but people are sick of the same machine-made objects. Technology has allowed us to become lazy. We’re told it makes life “simpler”, but I think all it’s done is left us yearning for more meaning from the things we own and the objects we surround ourselves with. We place so much importance on the object itself, when we could feel much more satisfaction from the process of creating. It seems life is actually much more emotionally difficult and sad as we constantly search for more stimulation, and make an empty monetary exchange for objects that actually mean nothing.

In our not so distant past, grandparents and great-grandparents (depending on your age) still made their clothing, or at least knew how to mend them. Handmade items were more the norm but they treated these objects lovingly. My grandfather likes to retell the story of when he lost one of his few button-down school shirts that had been hand made and how much trouble he was in! Or Isa often recounts the sheets and towels that she still has of her grandmothers, that are all hand embroidered. A once common practice by young women who were beginning to create items for their home and married life.

We’re so absent from these ideas now, that they are hyper-romantic to us. A desire to go back to these days, where things seemed more lovely, I think is very common for 20-40 somethings. I think his has been a growing trend, and spans a lot of age ranges depending on where you live, but I can definitely say that it seems people are more adamant about it. In recent years, we’ve seen some great changes in attitude toward independent designers and fully hand made clothing. A willingness to buy less, higher quality, classic pieces for our closets, as our appreciation for the work increases. We desire uniqueness and rely on fashion and the things we adorn our bodies with to express it. What better way than with “one of a kind” and hand made items?

What do you think of the idea that working with our hands and the idea of it being a “mental vitamin?’

What do I think? It’s amazing! And it’s such a great visual. Going to your fridge in the morning popping a giant, sunny pill of creative energy. The new year rolls around and we resolve to make sure we exercise enough, and eat right. While these are important aspects of our physical and mental health, creativity is sadly often forgotten from this equation.

I wish trades would come back, where it was expected that we decide at an early age what we want to learn to be really good at so that we can rely on it for our livelihood. Something that allows us to exercise our right brain, and makes us money? What is better than that? And isn’t that the dream?

I see sort of an epidemic among my peers/young adults my age, of discontent with jobs and a “career path.” The most common answer I feel I hear to the big question of “what do you want to do?” is to simply not work in an office, or to “work for myself”. And I can understand the annoyance with us from an older generation – it comes off as entitled, that we shouldn’t have to work hard, we have enough experience and intelligence to do exactly what we want when we want to.

But what I’m starting to feel is that maybe it is about greater desire to get back in touch with this idea of trades, and using our hands. Or maybe just getting our “hands dirty” in theory. Even if not within a technically creative business, allowing the creation of ideas to be the creative part. Maybe there can be more emphasis put on this as we search for jobs, and what to do with our lives, rather than climbing the ranks to higher salaries at jobs that we could care less about. The emphasis is on getting the “good job” rather than the job that feels good. I think there is a chance that we are deterred not by the idea and fight of “climbing the ladder”, but where the ladder ends up.

Of course this comes hand in hand with a full change to our society and giving up such a consumerist and materialistic mentality. But I think that’s where the desire to make things, even as a hobby, comes in. There has to be a way that as a society we can foster this “mental vitamin” idea and add it to the list of things you automatically associate with good health and force yourself to make time for.

Image: Mr T In DC

The post Using Your Hands to Soothe the Brain: Part 2 appeared first on EcoSalon.