Saturday, April 9, 2011

Away with my raggle-taggle gypsy-o

The seasons just creep up on me, I swear! Just when I get used to the idea of Winter it's suddenly Spring. Two weeks later (it's California, we don't have transition seasons here) it's Summer.
While it's a bit too cold out today to qualify as Summer, it was in the 80s when I started work on this little jammy set a week ago.
I designed these little numbers a while back, based on classical pinup girls and a bad belly dancing costume I ran across in a Halloween clearance section. I really wanted to make the first salable set in a cherry (or other fruit, if I couldn't find cherries) print. I had to make an expedition out of the fabric hunt, and ended up dragging my father out to the fabric shop with me a few weeks back to help me pick out prints. I ended up buying two different fabrics, this one and one with the same cherries on a black and white checkered background. I polled everyone I knew to see which one I should make first. The girls all said black and oddly enough the boys all said checkers. I decided to go ahead and do the black one because my sewing machines were already threaded with black thread!
Often, when I am really taken with a design, I can't stop coming up with ideas for fabric combinations and embellishments for them. This set is no different. I can already think of so many great ways to change it up! Tap pants instead of bloomers, eyelet and gingham, lace, beads and bows, silks... what I actually end up with in the long run may have nothing to do with all these ideas, but it's always great to have a good old standard design to go back to when you are in a rut and can't think of anything new and exciting to make.