My Costuming Dream Board 2020

Hello everyone 🙂 Today, I would like to share my Costuming Dream Board with you. I make dream boards for my personal goals and decided, that I would do one specifically for my blog and Youtube channel this year as well.

If you prefer watching a video, there’s one on my Youtube Channel 🙂

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What is a Dream Board

The one, who inspired me to start making dream boards, was Amber Scholl on Youtube. I love that lady, I love her positive attitude, I love how she is able to transfer so much kindness, love and happyness over a screen. She believes in the law of attraction, which is, what the dream board is based on, according to her. I leave it at that, go watch one of her videos, she explains better than me. Here are some links for your convenience

I don’t know, if I believe in things like the law of attraction, I am not informed enough 😉 But what I do believe in, is that I am working much more on my goals when I see them visualized every day. Which is, why I made this costuming dream board this year.

Last year, I did not get much for this blog or my Youtube channel done, that has various reasons, not getting into them, but this year, I would like to change that. I genuinely love the process of creating my costumes, I adore the conversations with you on Social Media, I love writing blog posts, I love making videos.

How did I Make this Thing

Well, this is pretty much self-explanatory, but anyways, I want to write about it, so here you go 😛

You will need:

Time, to figure out your goals and search pictures that remind you of them
the printed pictures
a center quote for the year
glue
a carton or something else, that you can stick the pictures on to
glitter, stickers, coloured pencils or whatever else you’d love to use to decorate it (or no deco at all ;))

I chose pictures, that are more symbolic than a depiction of what I want to be reminded of, you do you, whatever reminds you of your goals works!

Then I cut all the pictures out. I will link all sources of my pictures at the end of this post, btw. I opted for unsplash, which is a page, where photographers upload their art for you to use for free. I did not want to just take pictures from Google, where I would not be sure whether I was allowed to use them or not. This way, if you like a picture, send the artist some love 🙂

My Center Quote

My center quote is a Japanese proverb:

We are all fools, whether we dance or not, so we might as well dance.

I love this quote. It has various meanings for me, but the most important one is this: I will not let my own insecurity and my fear of potential reactions towards the things I create get in my way this year. Last year, I made many things, that I did not share, but far more weigh the things, I did not even start because I was overthinking what kind of reactions there could be. Eventhough, the reactions of people normally are very positive, I have absolutely no idea, where that insecurity or these ideas came from, but it’s time they go home! I don’t want this in 2020, I love sewing things, so I will 🙂

So, the first thing and right in the middle of the dream board, is my quote for 2020.

Arranging my Photos and Adding my Projects

I then started to arrange all my pictures around my center quote. I tried to group them a bit, but later rearranged them, so they fit better on the board and do not overlap. But here is my first draft:

Then, I wrote my project goals down on some pieces of paper and rearranged everything on my board.

After I was finally happy, I glued everything down. Unfortunately, eventhough it is my style, it did not really resonate with me, something was missing. I was thinking a bit about it outside of my office and then, I realised: It was missing colour, it was not colourful and happy enough. So I added some colour to my plain project cards 🙂

And that is my dream board 😀 It now lives on my desk and everytime I enter my office / sewing room, I see it 🙂

What are my Goals?

I’m not going to talk about all my goals and also not too much into detail, but here are some of the things, I would like to achieve (next to my project goals):

Balance: Very important one. That one embraces all of my other goals. I would like to find my balance between wanting to do my own designs and my costumes being historically accurate (in my definition of the term, which does i.e. not include using the fabrics or techniques that were used, I’m not going to spend money on silk and I have no time to hand-sew more than necessary). A balance between my insecurity and reality (as already stated when talking about my center quote). A balance between the time I spend sewing and the time I spend on everything going with it (find ways to edit videos and photos more efficiently etc.) A balance between my different hobbies and my job. etc. etc. There’s so much more I could add to that list 🙂

Contact: I would like to comment and share more things the people I follow create. I did not really do much in the last years, since I thought I do not have enough time for it. But I realised, that it is well worth the time spent on it, I enjoy talking to you and voicing instead of just thinking how much and what particularly I like about your projects. It makes me happy 🙂

Find Perfection in Imperfection: It does not matter, if my projects are perfect in sewing techniques, perfectly accurate, perfectly photographed, perfectly captured on video etc. If I go on considering all of these things, I’ll end up with close to zero projects like this year. What matters is doing it and learn along the way. I am not giving myself a free-pass to skip research before or to never try and improve my techniques, but I give myself the permission to say, that the time I have already spent is enough and that there are questions, that will be answered along the way or afterwards, for example by you 😉 I also don’t want to hide my projects, because I feel that they are ugly because of some folds or something like that. It happens, it is fine and it teaches me valuable lessons. And I don’t want to consider it “ugly” anymore.

Many Projects Ahead

As for my projects, I put some on there, but I really hope, I will be able to do more. The projects on my dream board are all projects, that I have planned since quite some time and that I have all the fabric already. Another goal this year is to spend less money on fabric and use, what I have in my stash 😉 The only fabric that I have to buy is some nice lace for my 1910’s dress. I have some, maybe I’ll dye that one, but I do not really like it for this project. But everything else I already have (at least fabric-wise, beads and pearls will not be in that buying ban).

I also recycled some older costumes last weekend, now I have some more nice cotton and cotton velvet that is sitting and waiting in my stash. I have more than enough and I do not want to buy a lot more this year and give myself a budget (for when I am abroad for example :)).

And that is it 🙂 I hope, you enjoyed this post, eventhough there was no sewing at all. I just wanted to share this dream board with you, dream boards help me a lot, maybe, they are also something for you.

Thanks a lot for reading, I wish you a nice evening, night, morning, afternoon, whatever time it is at your place.

Love,
Ella

PS: In my last post I showed you how I made (or attempted to make) my 1910 Chemise 🙂