GOOD SWEATER
An evening of fiber, fashion & friends

Friday, November 6 · 6:00 PM
Mrs. Emily · 907 Arrow Road, Champaign, IL
Behind Art Mart
$30 · Limited Seating

We’ll gather at the salon for a guided evening about fibers, with a special focus on sweaters and how to find the ones you’ll actually love wearing. We’ll look at real garments, feel different fibers, talk through what makes them work (or not work), and dig into the things I pay attention to when I’m shopping.

There will be plenty of time for questions, conversation, and getting your hands on things. We’ll sip something, talk clothes, and leave with a much better sense of what to look for the next time you’re standing in front of a rack of sweaters wondering, *Is this a good one?*

Afterward, the salon will stay open for shopping and general merriment if you’d like to stick around.

You cannot find what makes a “good sweater” in a book or a blog post.

You can learn about fibers and how they behave. But it is experience with each fiber - in different outfits, different seasons, different weather, and different situations - that gives you a real understanding of what makes a sweater work for you.

Cashmere isn’t always what I reach for. Polyester, surprisingly, is sometimes exactly the right choice.

When I’m shopping and I read the fiber content on a sweater, I can immediately put that sweater into the context of my own life. I know when and how I’ll wear it based on what it’s made of.

That’s different from rules like “only buy wool” or “never buy acrylic.” I know when I want wool, (and when merino versus virgin wool), and when acrylic is actually the better choice.

The goal isn’t to memorize a list of good and bad fibers. It’s to develop a working knowledge of how fibers wear - so you can look at a sweater and understand what it will do for you before you buy it.

The payoff is simple: I save money, I save time, and I buy pieces that are genuinely thrilling and effective because I know how they’ll work in my wardrobe.

And THIS is what I’m giddy to share with you.

I taught style classes at Parkland a few years ago, and I’ve broached this subject online, but there’s something about being in my own space that feels very much like the time to do it again.

I want my salon to be inspiring, but also educational. A place where we are equipped to get our hands into dressing.

Fiber knowledge is my jam—from being the textile lab assistant in college, to wandering the aisles of Mood when I started my brand in 2010, to working with silks and glorious textiles at Amsale, to diving head-deep into handmade and handwoven textiles over the last six years of my business.

Every shopping trip is made more exciting by the thrill of the hunt. And that, to me, is a lot of the fun of dressing.

Not just color, silhouette, and drape, but FIBER.

How does it feel? How does it live? How often do I reach for it? What does it feel like when I’m actually wearing it?

It’s the difference between 2D and 3D.

Dressing without fiber knowledge is life in 2D. Once you start to understand what fibers are doing for your experience of the clothing, things go 3D.

You pick the clothes based on their squashy, feel-good qualities or their wrinkle-resistant, travel-minded qualities.

You stand up to the fashion industry bully that says, “Fashion is how you LOOK.”

And you twirl and spin and say, “On contraire—it’s how you feeeeeel.”

$30 per person · Limited seating · Advance tickets required