in praise of the unscalable

You may not know this about me, in fact you probably don’t, I don’t talk a lot about it online, but I work in “product operations” from 9-5 m-f. The details of this are not particularly important, but suffice to say, I spend a fair amount of my day saying things like “this process doesn’t scale with the business”, and “how many hours do we spend on this every week? can we automate this?”.

Today I was tracing a pocket from a dress I own to try to make a pocket pattern piece for a dress I’m sewing out of linen. It occurred to me as I traced the pocket onto a piece of paper that I'd been here before. In fact, every time I sew a dress, I end up tracing a new pocket to sew into that dress. I had the sudden urge to make my process “scalable”. It seemed like a waste to trace a pocket every time I want to make another pocket. I realize this is literally why sewing patterns exist - I just don’t particularly like the rules I feel boxed in by when I follow patterns, so here we are.

But sewing my…