How Nature inspires Fashion- a quick look at Birds

I love the the use of color in fashion. Colors make me happy and make me feel good and I have a lot of fun putting different colors and color combinations together. I am not professionally trained in design and everything I do or create is more or less an experiment and from self learning by reading, watching or simply by experimenting. The world has so many ways for us to learn!

The use of color in fashion has always been a source of pleasure for me and so has the idea that there are no new ideas is fashion and art, just re-interpretations on what has already been done. There may be new mediums and fresh and different ways of looking at things but rarely is their something that can actually be called new.

The other day I was in the Chicago Field Museum. I live fairly close by and I like to go in and just take my time and see a gallery or two. Really see them and try to think of them in a different way then when you are rushed or trying to see an entire museum in one day! I try to keep these visits low key and not go into overload. This is one of my great pleasures of living in downtown Chicago.

I decided to explore the Birds of the World exhibit. This is an old school exhibit with stuffed and mounted birds of every type, even ones that are now extinct. (Which is a whole different conversation!) As I was slowly making my way through the exhibit I was struck by the beauty of many of the birds. I like birds in general, especially song birds and birds or prey. However, I especially like the birds of many different colors! I was immediately struck with the notion that nature did it first! Long before we were able to produce so many amazingly colored textiles there were these strikingly beautiful birds. 

Here are some examples of a few birds and some corresponding colored fashions to go with them!

The bird photos were taken by me and the fashion images were taken off of google images. I blocked out faces on those images.

I hope you enjoy this little bit of inspiration from Nature to Fashion.

Through much of my design work with Sarah Veblen over the past several years , I have learned to let myself ‘see’ inspiration in the world around me! It was so much fun to explore, in my own little way, the relationship between beautiful bird plumage and the use of colors and color combinations in contemporary fashion. 

Happy Sewing!

Dior- From Paris to The World at the Dallas Museum of Art

Wendy of Couture Counsellor and I headed to Dallas for a weekend to go and see the Dior exhibit. It was well worth the time of getting on a plane and heading to Texas for the first weekend of August. It was so hot and humid but like I said, so worth it! This is the same exhibit that was held in Denver earlier this year and was a joint exhibition between the 2 museums.

The tickets are timed tickets and I purchased them the morning that they went on sale. Each month goes on sale the 15th of the prior month.  The exhibit was sold out for the weekend we were there, it is very popular!

The exhibit itself was done very thoughtfully and I really liked the use of mirrors in some areas that allowed you to have a birds eye view of garments and then some that allowed you to see 'up the skirts'! The most dramatic room of all also happened to be my least favorite, only because it gave me a sense of vertigo with all of the looking up, which in turn made me a bit nauseas. The idea was a superb one but the aisle that ran down the middle with the stadium effect on either side needed to be a bit wider to work better. Of course this is all just my opinion!! I'm sure they had space restraints to work with.

It was very interesting to see how the Dior line has changed as the creative directors/fashion designers have changed. 

This is a picture heavy post... I took almost 400 pictures! Don’t worry, they are not all in here. LOL!

I tired to include only my favorites or ones that I thought were very interesting. 

Enjoy!!

Wall of Toiles

Embroidery Samples done for Dior in the late 40's/ early 50's

Hand painted and beaded

The PINK room was my favorite!

I hope you enjoyed some of these amazing garments from the Dior line!
Lots of wonderful, interesting and inspiring garments.

Happy Sewing!

Summertime party outfit!

Last weekend I traveled to New Jersey to celebrate my nephews engagement! It was so much fun to get together with most of the family and lots of friends to celebrate such a wonderful occasion and to have a wonderful and beautiful new addition to our family!

The party was held at my older brothers home in NJ and I knew it was going to be a great weekend! My daughter and I got in the day before and helped with some of the decorating. We all had a lot of fun making it very special for the happy couple.

The lovely couple and some decorations

I, of course, had to make a new outfit to celebrate!
My brain went round and round with a plethora of ideas. I ended up with 2 contenders. 1 was for a dress and the other for a pants outfit. I decided to go for the pants outfit. The fabric that I picked for the top was one that my daughter brought home for me from her trip to Poland this spring. Lucky for me I had a pair of 4-ply silk cropped pants in a perfect color to match already in the closet. YAY!!

my ensemble with the silk pants

I used one of my self drafted designs to sew up this blouse. It was a bit of a puzzle to come up with the best pattern layout due to having only one length of the panel to work with. The panel was 60 " wide and about a meter long with it basically being a floral design that went from white to full color saturation. I played around with the fabric in front of the mirror to see which portion was best near my face. This was the full saturation (which I already knew but having confirmation always helps!) I could also play with the design ease and how full and floaty versus fitted I wanted the top to be.

My mom and I

If I made the top more fitted I could  have fit all of the bodice pieces on the high saturation area. However, it was not really the look I was going for. Plus, I knew there was a high chance of it being hot out for the party. It was 95 all day! I played around with using 2 different fabrics and in the end I sort of used all the fabric on the panel in a sort of color blocked way.

It worked out perfect, I love the end result and it wore wonderfully even in the hot and humid weather!

3 Generations! Plus my older brother photo bombing us!!

So, if you are very observant you may have noticed that my pants have changed part way through the photos... Well, it was a party and as sometimes happens there was a party foul that required me to remove my silk pants and wash them out immediately with club soda! Luckily I had a new pair of summer linen pants in a bright green that also went well with the top. Not quite as fancy but in a pinch they worked. More on those in another post.

All the details! bottom left is a close up of the fabric. A very spongy woven and was quite nice to wear!

Construction of this top was quite simple. I sewed all the vertical seams first on the sewing machine and then serged each seam allowance separately so they could be pressed open. I stabilized the shoulder seams with a small piece of fusible stabilizer tape, used a facing for the neckline with several small catch stitches to hold the facing in place. The sleeve and body hem were done with a tiny rolled hem technique that I like.

We always have a good time together!!

In The Sketchbook- June 2018 Sketching pants

Welcome to In the Sketchbook, a monthly look at fashion design sketches that we are working on for ourselves. Sketching garments on a personal croquis is a great way for the individual couture enthusiast to move beyond the use of commercial patterns and into a world of personalized design! It can be intimidating at first, but with a little bit of practice it becomes something you look forward to. Join us for a look of what we have going on In the Sketchbook! Brought to you by Wendy Grossman of Couture Counsellor and Steph King from Siouxzeegirl Designs.



oh dear...it seems that I missed posting my In The Sketchbook for the month of May! It was a very busy time and it just passed me by!

Lets just move onto June!

This month I have had pants on my mind. I finally seem to have a very good base pants pattern developed and I have been playing with different styles to build off of them. With that in mind, I spent several plane rides sketching out pants ideas and these were the best of them. I must admit that none of them are ground breaking ideas just more of testing silhouettes and some details that are good on me. I left out the ones that I would never wear, like paper bag waist or very high waisted with the intention to be seen. There are very few exceptions to where I will have the waist of my pants on public display. I am not a fan of the tucked in look for an everyday silhouette on me. The biggest exception is for work wear when I am wearing a suit then I may have a top or blouse tucked in if I have a jacket over it.

I digress! onto the sketches!
These nine looks/silhouettes are ones that I like. I either have something similar or want to try them out and see what I can come up with.

Wide/straight leg cropped- above ankle linen/cotton pants.

Pedal pushers or clam diggers with a split hem at the outer leg in linen/cotton or maybe a stretch woven.

These are quite boring but a necessity. Plain jane slacks in wool or wool blend and lined.

These are totally a throw back to the '80s! Full legged cuffed trousers!
they would need to be paired with a very modern and minimalist top to bring them into a more current trend.

Fun, chill out jeans with a flair and a color blocked hem.

Slightly cropped lantern hem pants out of a fabric with some body. a crisp cotton, taffeta or
 silk duipioni.
Not sure how I would like them but eager to find out!

Good ole Bermuda shorts! I only have 2 pairs of shorts that I wear at home or camping. I don't really have anything for normal hot summer day wear in the shorts category and these could fill that void.

These were inspired from old fashioned divided skirts that woman wore to ride horses way back in the day. When pants were down right scandalous! I like this idea as an alternate to a dress for a dressier occasion.

These are actually inspired from a ready to wear pair of pants that I own! they are great to wear in the summer made of dry -quick sporty fabric and have roll up convertible tabs. Great for the summer and taking the Princess around to the beach or park fountains. very comfortable with a knit waistband and drawstring closure.

What fun things have you been sketching?

Make sure to stop by Wendy Grossman of Couture Counsellor to see what lovely sketches and ideas she is working on. Please feel free to share your sketches and ideas with us.

Happy Sketching!!

Exploring Fashion Design II- a workshop with Sarah Veblen: Part Two

This is Part 2 of 2 on Exploring Fashion Design II, a workshop with Sarah Veblen
To read Part one go HERE.

Day 3 continued. 

Playing with the flowers sort of acted like a palette cleanser for my brain and got me ready to push on with more work!

In the afternoon we started out with an exercise with our croquis to deliberately play with hem lengths and figure out what we could wear for different types of skirts/dresses and then take that into asymmetrical work. When I took design I, I was initially skeptical about how the sketching on the croquis would translate into my designs. For instance, were the lengths or designs that I liked on the croquis going to work on my actual body. I spent several months after Design I playing with this and for the most part it is quite true. Things that I like on my croquis match to what works on me. Having almost 2 years to play with this between design I and design II have been very good for me to process many of the ideas.  What does that all boil down to? It means that I now trust the relationship of what I sketch on my croquis and how that translates directly to my garments and my body.

Everyone hard at work in the workroom! We each had a 4 foot table space to our own and boy did we need it... being creative really makes a big mess :)

The rest of the day was spent doing individual work and working with Sarah to discuss fabrics and trims that we may have brought with us. I brought a couple lengths of fabrics that I really like but was not sure what to do with. Sometimes it helps to get others opinions just to shake some ideas loose in your brain.

I had several good discussions with Sarah that afternoon. One was how to recreate this deconstructed Chanel look that has always captured my interest. We discussed and before I knew it she had a scrap of boucle in my hands for me to play with and test my idea out!

Top photos are of my Chanel inspiration
Bottom photos are of my test piece of fabric. I learned it is doable and I will just need to teat on different swatches of boucle before making a decision on the garment. It will certainly be a slow, slow, slow sewing project!

The other discussion was around one of the fabrics that I brought with me. It is a panel fabric of silk taffeta plaid and an area along each panel that has yarn woven across the grain. I decided to purchase the silver/grey cotton and purple wool crepe.

Sarah playing with the fabric to see what it would look like in the cross grain versus lengthwise grain. On the right are swatches of the companion fabrics that I purchased at A Fabric Place to go with it. A silver/grey cotton and a purple wool crepe.

Day 4: Trip to: A Fabric Place!!

A Fabric Place has become one of my favorite places to shop for fabrics!

Before we headed out to A Fabric Place Sarah gave each of us our assignments. We would spend the morning working on our exercises, have a well needed lunch break and discussion and then head back to A Fabric Place for additional assignments and of course fabric shopping.

The fabric exercises are comprised solely of gathering swatches. Sarah walks around armed with scissors to cut fabric swatches. There are also the employees at the shop who also will cut fabric swatches for you as needed. At the end of the day I ended up with something around 50 or more swatches.

Each attendee is given different assignments based on what you have been working on during the week and on what Sarah believes will help you to grow and discover.

My assignments were:

1. Develop a traditional palette of Navy and make sure to have some companion fabrics to spice it up. As you can see in the photo I ended up takin gmy navy palette and pushing it inot the realm of purples. Very nice exercise and one that I would not normally do. 

   

    

2.  Develop 2 palettes of Teal and Orange, one for work and one for non-work life! in the photo below the top portion is the work collection (i'm not mad about the print on the left but I left it in anyway...) The bottom half of the photo is a collection for non-work life, It was nice to see that there are a couple of overlaps between the two.

   

   
   

3.  Using a princess sheath dress that I sketched and called ‘Mix Princess Dress’ find the following combinations:
1. menswear and chiffon... this was super fun!! So much fun that I bought the left side swatches.
   
2. hard and edgy- picked a couple swatches but didn't get a photo
3. sweet and girly- this never even happened

I also had several of my own fabrics that I wanted to find companions for! So much to do and so much amazing fabric to choose from!

Had to grab a photo of Jonathan from A Fabric Place
Here I am with 2 of my fabrics that I shared with the group.

We wrapped up the day back at Sarah’s showing each other the fabrics that we purchased. Good thing I left lots of room in my suitcase! My suitcase ended up clocking in at 49 pounds! Whew!!

Wendy purchases a beautiful beaded navy fabric for sleeves, Mary is all smiles with her purchases, 3 of us all purchased the same brocade fabric! so beautiful!! Liz purchased a lovely silk chiffon.

Day 5 and our last day of the workshop
Hard to believe how quickly the days pass when you are so engrossed with learning and exploring! We started the morning off with sharing the results of our fabric exercises with each other. Always fun to show what you thought does and does not work and always someone else will whip out a swatch from their pile and go ohhh, what about this one? This process is fun and you learn so much about color and texture and how and why things work together and all of this is done in such a natural way. This is a great learning style for me and it exposes me to color pallets and combinations that I just don’t normally work with because they are not what I like for me.

We also had some very good discussion on how to take a sketch and move it into a pattern. This of course, can be quite subjective and you really need a very good master/base/block pattern to start with.

It also includes making muslins or making several or just a muslin of an area. For example, if you are just changing up a collar design or a sleeve design you can construct the body of the garment and then just make a muslin of the collar or sleeve and work with that.

I know many people don’t like to make muslins or may find them to be time consuming. However, I think they are an invaluable tool in finalizing a design and they give your hands time to play with the design before cutting into expensive fashion fabric.

Sarah showing us different was to manipulate patterns and how to move from sketch and design into pattern work.

The afternoon was spent doing whatever work that you wanted, along with some individual time with Sarah. I used this time to discuss several of my designs and to get some ideas on the trickier aspects of construction and pattern work. It is also very good to bounce ideas off of her, she has so much experience and I find that as my own experiences become stronger and stronger that sometimes I am just checking myself to see if my thought process is going in the right direction or if there are things that I never even thought of!

At the end of the day we took a few minutes to gather as a group and have a wrap up discussion before we packed up all our belongings.Sarah wanted to hear from each of us on one or two things that we learned or that we felt was an important part of the workshop.

I highly recommend this course to anyone who has gone to the Design I workshop and wants to take their design skills to the next level.

Happy Sewing!!