Working on a small collection

What I’ve been working on:

Following Gertie’s tutorial, I’ve been making these felt roses over the past couple of weeks (in between working on the project below, anytime I feel I need to create something tangible). I want to make my own fascinator, like the ones she’s selling, when I have enough.

These are just a couple pages from my sketchbook. I feel a bit weird sharing all these sketches and inspiration pages, since I haven’t actually made any clothes yet, but I need to get back into blogging, and I guess sharing progress is motivating. Helps me keep track of how much I’ve done so far.

I spent a few weeks sorting through all of my inspiration folders on my computer (so many! ugh). I have about 1’900 images (some are duplicates though, say I have an image of a girl wearing a blouse and pants, I’ll put a copy of the image in each folder “blouses” and “pants”, and if there’s a special design feature, another copy in say “knots & bows”).

I’ve been trying to figure out what I want the theme of this small collection to be. Sorting through inspiration images is definitely good though, I feel like it’s a slightly frustrating (I feel like I’m not actually doing anything) but important step, and I don’t want to rush. I think the central, inspiring themes for this collection are: 1950s fashion/silhouette, insects/insect anatomy and art deco. I know at first they may seem relatively unconnected, but that’s what I’m working on figuring out :)

I got and altered some vintage dresses in may, but I don’t have photoshop to edit .RAW files at the moment, so it might be a while before I can share those unfortunately… but I made something else earlier this month (not a garment though) that I want to share later this week!

Collection – Color Scheme

I’ve been thinking about opening an etsy shop for a long time now (actually signed up and everything a year ago but didn’t really have time then…), and I want to sell a few things that will be part of a “collection” (if it can be called that), which to me means that the garments will have the same source of inspiration.

Well, I was watching TV yesterday (a documentary about American Culture) when this awesome sequence came on:

I have no idea what movie (commercial?) this is from but the ladies (operators!) were singing “tralalala, the bells are ringing, tralalala… hearts are singing, life is on the teee-lee-phoone” etc. You can watch it here (the sequence starts at 17.32 minutes) I think, not sure if it works outside of europe too.

And the moment I saw it, I though “hot damn, that is THE perfect color palette!”. I love the bright orange, red and teal with the softer, earthy pinks.

So this is now my inspiration as far as colors go. Maybe I’ll have to use a few pastel versions of these colors for summer clothes (because I think the colors are more fitting for fall/winter stuff, but I also want to make a few spring/summer things!). The garments, well, I’m planning on making things that are on my Mad Girls List for this mini-collection. Don’t expect anything too soon though! As of now I only have three patterns (pencil skirt, floral dress and the mint dress I’m working on), so first I need to work on drafting, then sewing, figuring out how to make labels, figuring out pricing, taking nice pictures etc. So yeah, this plan is still in it’s early stages, but I have to start somewhere!