The story of how I came up with ShirtUP is also thanks to the "blank" hours of breastfeeding. I call it blank because one is sitting there, semi immobile. If you were lucky you grabbed the phone and kept it close by for when your baby went off crying for boobs without being able to wait a second. And if you have one hand left free, then you are guaranteed entertainment. But if that's not the case, and you end up breastfeeding there anywhere, without water, without phone and in the dark and the baby falls asleep, you don't dare move a bit, and you stay there in that position for eternity even if it's uncomfortable. And what you have left are hours of thoughts, ideas, mental songs and made-up conversations with people you haven't spoken to since 1992. The things we do for love :)
It was there in one of those long breastfeeding sessions - which in fact was last winter, because I remember I had a sweater that kept falling on my baby's face and I had to hold it with my chin - that I thought, omg! This is inhumane, holding the shirt with the chin, with the other hand the baby, with the other the phone, obviously the phone had to stay lol.
So right there I googled "something to hold the shirt while nursing", wish me luck. And nothing came up. I tried in english, in german and in spanish....nada. Down there in the search in english something appeared, a kind of clip but in the USA. After much searching I found something else. But there didn't seem to be anything else that looked funtional and pretty. Because hey, it is important that it looks good! One already feels half a mess with the breast out, unshowered, tired. If I'm going to buy an accessory to help me with my breastfeeding, please make it cute!
I spent a few months designing in my head, and making drawings of things that I could think of, but were either very complicated, or things that needed a technical level that only a high-tech manufacturer could do. In the meanwhile I entered a creative plateau where I couldn't think of anything, everything seemed very complicated or very baahh. And every time I nursed and held my shirt I thought grrrr, I need something! But it has to be practical and nice, and easy to use, and this and that.
In the end, one day I had finally some time to sew. I grabbed all the materials from other projects and started trying them out. And that's how I made the first prototype and I liked it! It always happens to me that way, I draw a lot of things, but the best designs come out of doing it without a plan. In the end the idea is really very simple.
There is something in a simple design that beats a complicated one. Sometimes it is true that less is more and that form follows function.