What's a blog if it isn't being used, right! So when Melanie from The Sewmelier mentioned that she had written this piece about honest feedback, but also about boundaries, kindness and lots of other thoughts and opinions, but that she worried it was a bit too long for Instagram, I offered up my blog. I don't have any ads on my blog, so I don't make any money on it (just in case you were wondering), but it's a subject that is also close to my heart, and I would love to help share her, in my opinion, great thoughts on this matter. Mie









Thanks for having me on the blog today, Mie, to share my thoughts on topics very dear to me: useful feedback without hurt feelings, how honesty can easily become painful, why I think making mistakes is actually wonderful and how I interact with designers and sewing businesses to give feedback - or simply #sewhonestfeedback ! So let’s jump right in with





HOW TO GIVE FEEDBACK.





Keeping things real and honest talk are both paramount to me. Honest feedback isn't always easy to take, and certainly not easy to give. But when it's done usefully and thoughtfully, it is just what we need to learn and grow as individuals (and amateur sewists). There's no reason at all to shy away from giving or receiving it!





However, with me constantly asking the Instagram sewing community to step over that invisible line of "if you have nothing nice to say, say nothing at all" by requesting your honest feedback and insight to me, I want to talk about how we can do so safely, without hesitation or hurt feelings. So here goes what works for me and might (hopefully) be helpful to you too.









Giving constructive feedback – my personal notes





Be invited to give your opinion. If a person is not asking for my feedback, I simply don't give any. (This obviously doesn't apply to professionals/businesses, when I pay for a product.)





Be honest. Only honest feedback is useful feedback.





Be constructive. If I have no solution/advice/reference to provide, I don't criticize at all. Encouragement is always welcome.





Be very specific on what they can / need to do.





Be empathic and polite. Keep in mind: a person is trying her/his best to create something. Likely a lot of thought, time and money went into this process and these efforts should be treated with respect.





Be positive. Whenever possible, I end on a positive note and try to say something encouraging. Learning can be hard and our encouragement might mean the world.





There is so much to be gained from also connecting and exchanging with other sewists during the process of creating and learning– and not only to share or comment on an already finished make. Asking for and receiving feedback and knowledge in the midst of making something is such a big chance to progress with our skills! However, there is a difference between being honest and being mean.









HONESTY. A FINE LINE.





What can we do to make sure our feedback is helpful and not hurtful? This, of course, is a very subjective line to draw. However, I have found some basic standards to be very helpful to avoid honest feedback from turning into something painful. Because it really would be a loss to have to opt out of giving feedback just to make sure we aren't crossing any borders, right?.









Over the past years I have constantly asked our Instagram sewing community for feedback. Trust me when I say that I've gotten all kinds of it! Like, ALL kinds. Mostly helpful and kind, sometimes not so much. (But ALWAYS a chance for personal growth! Even the painful experiences can turn out to be something beneficial, but that’s a story for another day. And I most definitely wouldn’t recommend on giving hurtful feedback on purpose...).





So what should we keep in mind, when giving honest feedback to our sewing friends or other creative persons?





What is “correct” or “true”? Often this is hard to say, when it comes to a hobby as creative as sewing. So, I try and share my opinions as opinions, my suggestions as suggestions, and not as facts or “how it has to be done”. My personal beliefs aren’t necessarily the ultimate truth.





The maker's opinion counts. In the end it's all about how the maker FEELS about her/his make and really not so much about whether or not I would technically consider it a success/fail.

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‘Every man to his taste.’ Each person has their own unique preferences, and all are (at the very least!) acceptable. I stay away from commenting negatively on someone’s taste or style.

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When is a fail a fail? As long as the maker hasn't officially declared his make a definite fail, I am extremely careful with stating I consider it one. This can be VERY hurtful. Even, when the maker wonders publicly if it might end up as a fail.

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Pointing out options and alternatives. Proposing to "try and save the fabric" or "chop up a make" to try and cut a new pattern from it etc. also implicitly suggests I consider the make a fail, at least in its current state. It is absolutely helpful and okay to point out alternative options, but I want to tread carefully here. Preferably, I start such suggestions along the lines of "IF you should decide it's not working out for you, you could try to do XYZ...".





Criticizing finished makes. Easy one: I never ever do it! This is NOT constructive feedback, especially not if someone is presenting it proudly to the community. If the person who made it is satisfied, that's all that counts. (Exception: if the person is not satisfied and asks for specific feedback on what she/he could have done differently or why it ended up the way it did, we might chime in.)

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Making fun of a make. Very simply: I don't ever. Unless I know the person extremely (!!!) well and I am absolutely sure she/he’ll get a good laugh out of it, too. (Even so, I usually won’t do it.) Chances are I'd step on someone's toes and ridiculing or belittling a make is definitely not useful feedback.

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Just a hobby? Yes, for most of us it is! And there is a significant difference between providing feedback to a professional/business as a customer and providing feedback to a fellow amateur sewist, who is doing this as a hobby and pastime.





Being more honest isn’t about saying things “just as they are”, because how we perceive things is very subjective. To me, being more honest is about being more clear, more specific, more empathic, more authentic and more generous in voicing my opinions. I always try to keep the observable facts about a make or problem in focus and share my perspective and opinion about those facts.









MAKING MISTAKES





Part of me is actually very fond of making mistakes. The other part, though, is afraid of making mistakes, tries to avoid making them or hides them when they happen. Simply because they can make me feel ashamed and like I’m failing. The truth is, setbacks and mistakes are inevitable and can be a tremendous gift, and the most productive and highly potent learning opportunities.









Sharing our mistakes and struggles





So why is it so hard to embrace the concept of making mistakes as a very natural part of the process? Why do I have to push myself to share and talk about them proudly? Well, in my opinion this is especially easy to answer for the social media world: when all these awesome, finished makes pop up in our feed, we are led to believe others magically create out of perfection. We don’t see the blood and tears that might have gone into the process of making something. We just see the shiny, glittery, successfully finished makes in these little squares and start to think, that whenever we ourselves make a mistake, THIS is a problem. A failure. Maybe even WE are a failure and that these mistakes set us apart from all the other successful sewists we (think we) see on Instagram on the daily.





But then, failure is human. EVERYONE, even the most impressively shiny and skillful and perfect sewing feeds are owned by people like you and me who make mistakes and struggle sometimes. And we should always keep in mind, that the majority of us are mostly self-taught. We love our hobby dearly, but making mistakes is basically our only chance to learn and make any progress at all. By connecting and sharing these mistakes and giving feedback on what happened or where we got stuck, we can grow and learn together. And possibly spare a fellow sewist from going down that same route.





Insta is brimming with all these successful makes and very little progress shots or fails. Probably very simply because we tend to kind of clench our teeth through all the blood and tears and proudly hit the “publish” button when we FINALLY arrive at a somewhat wearable make? At least that’s true for me. But I also try to step back and see the chance of learning in my mistakes. (And sometimes I just throw a hissy fit, haha.) But whichever, I love to share it with you and I highly appreciate others sharing their process of making something - INCLUDING all the struggles and mistakes. Especially the struggles and mistakes 😉 .









MISTAKES IN PATTERNS AND FEEDBACK TO DESIGNERS/PROFESSIONALS.





Also, making mistakes is not only ok for us hobby sewists. It is also very much okay for professionals and businesses! To me, the only thing that will ever count here, is how a mistake is handled, how a professional or business reacts to customers pointing out a (suspected) flaw. I am deeply convinced, that customers providing honest and thoughtful feedback to a business, is one of the most powerful assets you can strive for as a professional. And as a customer nothing makes me quite as happy as a business actively interacting with its buyers, taking an interest in their views and thoughts on their products. The gain is mutual here: the business gets ahold of information on what their customers really care for and expect from them. And the customers might just get the product they would love to have. Sounds very much like a win-win, don’t you think?





Often, we don’t want to “bitch around” whenever we come across a possible mistake in a pattern or its instructions, or the layout or design or drafting doesn’t make us a 100% happy. We see the person, the maker who is behind this, and we feel her/him and all the hard work that went into this pattern. And if you ask me: THIS is part of the beauty of our community! We care, we empathize, we usually don’t “bitch around”. But. To me, this is not about being a nag or pain in the ***. About making someone else feel bad or ruining his business. This is about expressing my honest opinion on a product I purchased and share with others, no matter if my experience was positive or negative. To simply be honest. To provide constructive feedback.





I feel like in our Insta sewing community the general threshold for giving any negative feedback AT ALL on a pattern or designer is incredibly high. It sometimes makes me wonder, if we would react the same way when buying something in a store and then discovering it’s broken or misses a couple of buttons or has gone stale. Speaking about my personal experience with a product on social media should be just as natural and ok as it is to return a faulty product to the real life store – as long as I stick to the basic principles of giving polite and constructive feedback!









*** Thank you so much for reading all this! (If you actually got this far, you’re a real champ!) I am forever grateful for our open-minded and generous online sewing community, where people can feel safe to share their thoughts. ❤️ I truly hope you found my words encouraging and inspiring to keep things real and honest, to actively take part in giving constructive feedback to amateurs and professionals and about patterns you purchased, and to never ever believe for one second in the big social media deception of “perfection everywhere else”. 😉 XXX Melanie @thesewmelier ***





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Thank you SO much Melanie. Lots of wise words, thoughts and opinions.



EDIT: Melanie had some technical problems leaving replies to your comments, so in the end she emailed them to me, and I copy/pasted them in. I know she's not the only one having problems leaving comments, and it's a general problem with Blogger. And unfurtunately not anything I can do anything about, except switch blogging platform and that would cause me a lot of other problems, that I'm not ready to deal with right now. Thank you for understanding!



