Thanks everyone for your input. Great job, Mark.

As for the naysayers, perhaps a pep talk is in order. Everything is impossible until someone comes along and proves everyone else wrong. I'm not saying that I'm that person, but I'll never get there unless I try.

If I'd listened to my father, I'd never have gone to college. In the end, I graduated from law school, despite my undiagnosed ADHD (and I wasn't in the bottom of my class, despite having half my brain tied behind my back). No matter how well-intentioned my father might have been, had I listened to him, I'd have stayed in the middle of Kansas doing something that I hated.

Tailoring is an art, not rocket science. That means it will require practice and development of technique and skills. It is not impossible, it just takes dedication to learning how to do it reasonably well. I don't have to learn to do it to the professional level, just to the level that satisfies me.

Tailors might be able to tell what mistakes I've made, but I doubt that I'll be circulating my jackets in the tailor community. In my experience, most other people will never be able to tell my mistakes, unless I tell them.

I am an artist. I often do things that others have told me is impossible. But the fact is, all it takes is patience and practice. A little perseverence goes a long ways.

I often say that painting is 90% technique, which can be learned, and 10% inspiration. No artist starts out painting masterpieces. In fact, every masterpiece has mistakes in it.

X-rays of the master paintings almost always show where the artist made major mistakes and corrected it. Every artist continues learning and improving her techniques until they stop producing art.

There was an old master painting in the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City that I loved. It is a Caravaggio of John the Baptist. I decided to copy the painting to learn Caravaggio's technique with skin, which is unbelievable. I started it during my first year of law school, which is the hardest, most stressful year of law school.

People told me that I was crazy, that I wouldn't succeed. And the first attempt was not successful, but by making the mistakes on the first attempt, I learned how to do it successfully the second time.



I can tell where it isn't as good as Caravaggio's, but very few other people can, other than the deliberate changes I made to the composition and colors. Most only notice the addition of the Wayfarers (the dramatic shadows on the original looked like he should be wearing sunglasses to me, and it was an artistic comment).

Was it easy? No, old masters used glazes, which is a pigment with a high amount of oil to turpentine ratio, making some shades very transparent. The theory is that the light passes through the glazes, hits the white ground and reflects back the rich glaze colors.

It took each coat of glaze a week to dry, even in the Arizona desert. The red took at least 25 coats to get the rich color I desired. The second attempt took one and a half years to complete.

Was I successful? When I had it framed, the framer had to put a "sold" sign on it to get people to quit trying to buy it.

Is it the best Caravaggio copy ever made? No. Did I master the technique entirely? No, I still see room for improvement.

But it was successfully rendered to a point that others wanted the painting badly. They couldn't see the flaws that I see. They only saw something that in their opinion they could not do.

This is the way I look at it. Yes, the first attempt may not succeed in a good jacket. But my second attempt will be better. And it will improve with each subsequent attempt. Other than a tailor, no one will be able to see my mistakes, especially since the lining will cover them.

At the very worst, I'll have a pattern that fits my body that I can take to a tailor and have him do the construction to make a great jacket that fits like no other one has. At the best, I'll have learned a new set of skills that allow me to make custom jackets.

And I'm not doing this alone. The others who do this will enrich our knowledge with what they found worked or did not work. We will get to move faster across the learning curve because we are doing this as a group.

So choose carefully whose advice you take to heart. There may be many reasons why you don't succeed at something, but don't let the reason be that you believed someone who told you that you couldn't do it.