Sunday, April 27th, 2008
one button dress, UNIFORM Studio
I’ve been working on an order of one button dresses and tie front tops for the lovely Enfant Terrible shop. These will be offered in the light dove grey and also a warm dark grey w/ dark grey button and dark ties. I made this colorway special for Enfant Terrible and I have to say I like the combination as much as the original green. More photos here.
one button dress, UNIFORM Studio
tie front top, UNIFORM Studio
These will be available online at Enfant Terrible soon.
We are back to grey skies, cold and even some snow which means not much light for taking photographs. Photographing grey things in grey light makes me want to tear my hair out.
Tuesday, April 22nd, 2008
About a month ago I posted about designing a sunhat for a store client. This color block design is the one they ended up choosing, although in the final hat the brim is quite a bit shallower. The colors we used were a light blush pink for the crown, a light beige for the brim and a bright pink for the interior. I think they turned out pretty cute.
The hats come in sizes 3m, 6m, 1yr, 2yr and are available at Estella in NYC. (They are not yet on the website).
Here are a few other versions I proposed for the above hat:
I’m glad they chose the color block version, as that was my favorite.
Sunday, April 20th, 2008
This weekend:
I cleaned my desk, went to Barbette and we have sun today.
Hope your weekend was as good as mine.
Friday, April 18th, 2008
I was getting ready to change my inspiration board, and realized that I have never posted a picture of it before. It’s a piece of (2ft x 4ft) homasote that I usually just lean against a wall. Pretty simple.
I mainly use the board as a place to put images that I like to look at. My sketchbook is what I use to work out of. Here I can also pin up little things that don’t fit into my sketchbook, like this ringset of felt samples. I love the saturation of colors in these and like having them here, even though I don’t use bright color much.
I realized when I was taking the photos that I don’t ever put up fashion images. What inspires me doesn’t usually come from fashion. Most of what ends up here has to do with material and light, and there are many architectural images.
It’s also important to me (maybe most important) that the juxtaposition of all of the images works. Everything must work together as a whole visually, or I feel jittery.
There is an inspiration board group over at flickr. Some of my favorites are just taped to a wall: here, here and here.
Wednesday, April 16th, 2008
All of a sudden, spring has arrived. finally.
A few things that are going on here as well as some spring inspiration:
Still working on many many wholesale and special orders. Some bolts of flawed fabric through my schedule way off. ugh.<br/>
In between production sewing I’m trying to keep motivated by making a few fun things here and there. Right now I’m working on something with this fabric, and I’m working out this hat design.<br/>
Since I’m so behind, I’m going to have to postpone the next shop update. I will try to get to it as quick as I can, but realistically it will probably not happen for a month or so.
I’ve been trying out a lot of open source software lately. So far I’m extremely happy with open office (word processing and presentation (like powerpoint) software). GIMP, which is very similar to photoshop has been easy to use although I need to figure out their image resoulution/resizing tools.<br/>
I also upgraded to wordpress 2.5. YIKES. So glad that’s over. Much fiddling later I can now upload images. If you’re experiencing similar problems I would suggest throwing salt over your shoulder and spinning around three times, followed by a bottle of wine. Totally random what works to fix the bugs.<br/>
My spring uniform: White shirt, canvas shoes (black on black), high waist jeans.
The relationship between architects and fashion.
Monday, April 7th, 2008
Joyn by Ronan & Erwan Bouroullec for Vitra
The other night I took an hour to sort through fabrics and thread and put away some piles of papers and other misc. things that had been accumulating around my work area. I have been so busy sewing to fill orders lately that things have really gotten out of hand. I was feeling stressed out and like I didn’t have things under control. Once the clutter was put away I immediately felt like I had more done than than I had previously thought. I had a better idea of what needed to be done next and in what order.
It’s strange how just organizing makes everything appear simpler.
In his book, The Laws of Simplicity, John Maeda uses the example of tabbing in word processing to illustrate how organizing can make anything appear simpler. He takes a list of words that are separated by a single space and puts them into vertical rows that are tabbed in equal spacing. The words are all different lengths, so the spaces between words are different, but since they all start at the same point there is a sense of order with variation. Simple and maybe obvious, but seeing the words organized this way made me more aware of how powerful simple organization can be.
Organization makes a system of many appear fewer. John Maeda, The Laws of Simplicity
I continue to dream about the perfect, organized workspace. I haven’t made any real physical progress on this, but I’ve been thinking about how I work and how best to organize a space when I do have one. I like the idea of one large table to work on (you can see my dream table above). Having everything on one big surface with space in between seems like a nice way of organizing a space -similar to the tabbing in word processing idea. Visually pleasing and organized but not too rigid.
I also like to work on a table in the center of a room, moving around the edge. That way the room feels bigger -I’m looking out to the room across the table with my back to the wall rather than facing a wall with my back to a room. And this seems optimal if you are working with someone else -you can face each other rather than have your back to each other.
For materials I love this way of organizing fabric that MOOP has incorporated into their studio. A great way to visually organize materials and allow you to see everything you have all together.
We still don’t have spring here (it’s been snowing this morning), which is good for focusing on work indoors, but I’m dreaming of warmer days and sunshine on a big white table.
(ps -thank you so much for your kind comments and emails about my process and the weird skirt. I have to say it took some guts for me to put that one out there. It kind of felt like being in public in my underwear.)
Saturday, April 5th, 2008
Back in December I was experimenting with making a skirt with an integral pocket. It was an idea I had had based on this skirt I made a few years ago. In my head I imagined that the pocket would drape a lot more but I used the wrong type of fabric and it really didn’t drape -it kind of stuck out from the hip. So I rolled the pocket over. I sort of liked the oblong shape, but the rolled area is strange and the whole thing is just awkward. In fact, I thought I had actually thrown it away (and I can’t really believe I’m putting images of it up here…).
Yesterday I received a package in the mail from Jennifer. Inside was the Pattern Magic book I’ve been hearing so much about and a nice note about how she saw it and thought I would like it. Like it? It’s amazing. And inside were these two garments with fantastic integral pockets:
Both of these use a non-drapey fabric, but the pocket is much smaller so it doesn’t stick out as far as mine did. The overall volume is wonderful.
It’s truly humbling to me to see how an idea similar to the one I had about the pocket was executed so much more expertly and beautifully. I have so much to learn about pattern making and garment construction. So so much.
(note: if you noticed the wonky and slightly torn pages it’s because the package arrived sopping wet. Yes, my beautiful japanese sewing book (my first one -ever) was so wet I could have wrung it out. thank you USPS. I dried it overnight and then ironed each page to get them to separate. Can I say how frustrating it was to have the book in my hands and not even be able to get the pages apart to look at it!?!)