friday feels

I've experimented with a few different ways to connect and communicate this year (Substack, Discord, IG broadcast channels..) but ultimately, what feels best right now is right here in front of me.

So here's a little dispatch with updates from all the different corners of my world...

production updates

I have been blessed with the world's absolute best customer's. The word customer doesn't even really feel appropriate, because I feel like it's so much more than that. You've been on this rollercoaster of a year with me, and I am happy to report that we have progress on a few fronts...

Midweight Linen preorders are shipping weekly. As soon as I get finished garments back from sewists, I get them pressed, trimmed, packed and shipped out. We're waiting on a few more boxes of sewn garments (primarily outerwear and a few straggling Clyde Pants/Linns/Harpers) and that will wrap up this run.

Lightweight Linen is well underway. All of the yardage has been washed and dried, cutting is almost finished, and sewing is happening as we speak and should be smooth sailing. This is the smallest of our outstanding preorders and the turnaround should be relatively swift now that nothing is on hold.

Silk Crepe fabric is ***finally, finally, finally*** in my possession (can you believe the fabric in those five boxes above cost over $40k? Makes me want to throw up. But it truly is the most divine material). It's here, and that's what matters. I'll immediately begin getting this yardage cut into short segments for washing and drying, and then it will get sent to our cutters.

New Midweight Linen orders are currently open. We are not ordering any new raw materials right now until we have more clarity on the tariff situation, so we are only selling garments we can make with the existing fabric I have on hand. Some colors have already sold out, but we still have Black, Indigo, Cedar, Flax, and Salt available. These orders will be cut *immediately* after silk crepe is finished cutting, and sewn right after. I still want to be cautious, so I’m just saying December for delivery.

We’ve also got a deposit option to pay just 30% to place your order so we can set aside the materials, but you don’t pay the remainder until your order ships. You can order most of our popular styles here—but if there is an item you've been hoping for that you don't see, email us and we'll see if it's something we can make custom for you!

sewing workshops

Fall live sewing workshops are in full-swing. The Clyde Jumpsuit was the first one of the season, and it's one of the more complicated patterns to adjust, but we are tackling it one step at a time—and now we've got some well-fitting muslins rolling!

This is actually a really fun process for me, because I have a handful of Clyde Jumpsuits in my closet from over the years, but all in standard sizes. I'm not the current fit-model for Elizabeth Suzann patterns (especially with my post-partum body), so creating a version fitted precisely to me has been a treat.

We had a fabric selection class for the Clyde Outerwear and Clyde Work Pant workshops earlier this month, and folks have chosen such fun fabrics. A few wool versions are in the mix, which I'm really excited to see come together.

There are still a few workshops that have seats remaining and haven't started yet, if you're feeling any FOMO! You can still squeeze into the Clyde Pant class for September, and the others are a bit farther out.

old tvs, trains, and history lessons

We made a kind of a spontaneous decision to take down our regular, smart TV a few weeks ago. We hid it upstairs in the guest bedroom and brought down this old CRT TV that can only play VHS tapes.

This was motivated by a desire to personally feel less tempted to watch TV in the evenings, but also to try and reduce screen time for our kids (particularly YouTube content). There are some kids channels that I adore on YouTube, but I really dislike how it feeds new content before a video ends (and the lack of control over what pops up) because it creates a cycle that's tough to disrupt, and I don't like essentially taunting my toddler with content that he sees but then telling him we can't watch it.

So far, we're loving it. I *love* having a smaller screen in our living space, I love the definitive end to the content when the video is over, and I love the simple, low-tech process that our toddler can control. He can pick a video, put it in, push play...and it gives him a feeling of autonomy, but I'm not concerned that he's going to watch something I'm not comfortable with him seeing.

For our kids, YouTube is out of sight, out of mind. They're kind of indifferent about the TV now. Our three-year old has instead started "performing" for us (he has an old Guitar Hero guitar and a set of moves that are hysterical, including pulling off his hat and throwing it into the "audience") and he is at the sweetest age where everything is absolutely earnest. I'm soaking it up with relish.

For my husband and I, we've honestly been going to sleep a lot earlier. I definitely fall prey to wanting to reward myself with some junk-TV after working long hours, which ultimately just means I get less sleep and not much real benefit. After the kids are in bed, we now find ourselves tidying up, hanging out on the couch chatting about our day, and both getting sleepy much earlier than we were when watching TV was part of our evening routine. Occasionally we'll put on a classic movie for some noise in the background, but rarely watch something all the way through.

As obvious as this might be, I think the blue light from a huge screen was artificially inhibiting my sleep drive and making me feel like I wasn't tired yet, but really my body is ready for bed around 10pm.

So we're leaning in, and building our VHS collection bit by bit. At a local thrift store, we found a VHS series called "World's Greatest Train Rides" with 4-5 videos following famous train lines in different countries. Our three year old LOVES trains and really likes to see real examples of things, so I figured it would be a fun thing for us to watch together.

One features the Trans-Siberian Express traveling through Russia. The video was filmed in the 90s, and touched on the politics at the time and the daily life of the conductor (in addition to the actual train ride and landscape). It was so fascinating, and we've watched it several times. The conductor and his wife have a discussion with the narrator at one point about perestroika and glasnost and what they think the long-term impact of those policies will be.

I wanted to understand exactly what they were talking about, but my memory of history failed me, so I found myself looking for more information about Russia in the 90s. Down the rabbit hole I went, and after finding an informative and simple explanation of Gorbachev's very different legacy in Russia vs the West, I started listening through more of Vlad Vexler's content while working this week. I have a hunger for history right now, and am fully embracing it while my mind is eager.

Vexler is a Soviet born philosopher and political analyst, and I really appreciate his approachable but non-superficial way of teaching. His recent videos on Trump and Putin provide such an interesting psychological perspective on present-day politics.

He also refers to the past thirty-ish years as a relative anomaly in terms of political stability, progressiveness, and idealism. I found this useful in terms of calibrating my understanding of how "out of control" things feel right now, and—while I don't like it—it's useful to understand that the world I grew up in was not necessarily "normal" in terms of world history.

But aside from that doozy of a perspective shift, another piece of insight from this video in particular stood out to me. He says:

"Our culture amplifies narcissism, sociopathy, and even psychotic thinking. Social media overwhelms us with tragedy, fueling both sociopathy and a psychology of moral disgust at the ghastliness of the world that makes us want to tune out from politics. Post-truth politics weakens our sense of reality and fuels psychotic patterns of thought when we find the world so unbearable that we destroy it in our mind in order to bear it.

This partly explains the Trump vote—consumerism twists our search for truth into self-obsession, amplifying narcissism. You search for the news that matches your identity...all this transforms our politics because societies that are sick elevate sick people into positions of power.

We rarely link personal psychology to large scale problems. Psychological professions focus on personal life and ignore politics, and professions studying politics largely ignore personal psychology...we enter a vicious cycle when our institutions get sick, corrupting mass psychology, which makes our institutions more sick, and so on.

Many of the daily messages we are exposed to are psychologically destructive to us—they leave us feeling unsafe, powerless, lost, and with a fractured sense of reality. This creates another vicious cycle—destructive communication begets destructive communication."

For me, this affirms my desire to limit what I consume, pursue a variety of sources for information, reduce my engagement with short-form content, and better monitor my own mental health so that I can engage with our political and cultural reality from a place of clarity and stability.

It kind of shifts my perspective on that feeling of overwhelm that I know so many of us are familiar with. Obviously, shutting down doesn't help anyone. But putting words to the after-effects of that shutdown—considering how it actively contributes to a larger scale, systemic breakdown of our values—makes me think about my personal responsibility for my own sense of self in a new way. After all, consuming information isn't an agent of change in and of itself. A desire to be informed can easily descend into a doomscrolling habit that only serves to erode our critical thinking, rather than strengthening it.

This got a lot more serious than I intended it to, but basically I want to remind you that we owe it to ourselves and our communities to protect our own psychological health. So put your phone down, un-install Instagram, put your bare feet in the grass. Or get rid of your smart TV and spend the weekend looking for VHS tapes :)

Be well,

Liz