You may be surprised to know that the Selfish Seamstress’s job is neither seamstressing nor being selfish. Remarkably, she does not get paid for either, even though she spends a fair bit of her free time sewing and is selfish pretty much all the time. No, she has a day job that often bleeds well into the night, which severely limits her sewing time (but does not much affect her selfish time.)

As a scientist, one of the key measures of professional success is impact. Impact is fiendishly hairy to assess or quantify, though there are some indicators. To oversimplify things a bit, one common indicator of the impact of a scientific work is the frequency of its citation. That is to say, if I write a scholarly paper on a piece of research that I have conducted, the more times other scientists reference the paper in their scholarly papers, the higher the impact. It therefore stands to follow that if you are a scientist and you have a paper that many other people have used in their work, you should be quite proud of its impact and subsequently the success of your research.

According to Google Scholar, my most cited paper has been referenced 114 times by other scientific papers. For my particular field of research, this is not bad. It does not make me a luminary in my research community, but it’s certainly not a shameful number. It could be argued that the work has had some impact. Compare this, however, to my pattern for the Coffee Date Dress, which has been downloaded on the order of 50,000 times from my blog, BurdaStyle and perhaps a couple of other places as well. As a scientist, my little selfish heart thrills at the thought of the pattern having had some impact, of having produced something that might actually be useful. To think that someone whom I’ve never met, living thousands of miles away might be wearing a Coffee Date Dress right now just gives me the giddies.

So, with that long preamble, I’ve decided to add a Selfish Reader Gallery to my blog, to show off the impact of my patterns while gently patting my oversized ego give beloved readers the opportunity to display the fruits of their labor made with Selfish Seamstress patterns. Have you made a Coffee Date Dress, Minimalist Cowl, or other Selfish Seamstress pattern? (Yes, I know I still owe you the pattern for the Sugar Snow Dress – it’s coming, don’t worry!) Do you want to be featured in the Selfish Reader Gallery? If so, send me a photo of your creation at selfishseamstress [at] gmail [dot] com with the subject line “Gallery”, and if you want me to link to your [preferably sewing-related] blog or webpage, send a URL as well.

All you Selfish Readers, here’s another opportunity for glory!