What a thrill to get to work with Juan Carlos of Magnolia to create an exclusive paper doll, and an even bigger thrill to blow up the doll 800% to create a window display!  We had an intimate little party last night, made a little smaller by torrential rain, and so I freely enhanced the picture above to give you a sense of how the window really looks… below is the non-enhanced version.

Its fun, you can get a peek under her Carrie dress as you walk towards the shop.

I spent the evening cutting out paper dolls and chatting with some of my favourite people – above this is Carrie Hayes, who designed the dress the doll wears in the window.  If you visit Magnolia, you will find books, giclee prints, and laser prints of the dolls for sale, so you too can cut out and play with designer paper dolls.  The exclusive Magnolia doll herself is a gift-with-purchase – and since her wardrobe is inspired by the spring merchandise, you can choose a matching item for yourself if you like.

Thank you to all our brave friends who didn’t let the rain stop them from coming to share the night with us.

Here I am, visiting Magnolia the doll in her window while my party is in full swing.  The window will be up for the month of June, if you are in Toronto you should go visit the shop and take a closer look!  These photos (except for the top two) are all by Raymund Galsim.  Thanks Raymund!

Big thank yous and hugs to Juan Carlos and Magnolia for such an amazing project!

So, in between many other things (Where is this week going? Ack!), I have been diligently diving into recycling boxes and picking up trash on the street, plus picking up donations from generous readers. And… washing each item, cutting them into hundreds of paillettes, punching holes in each paillette, and stitching each paillette one by one on to my entry for the Trash Fusion design contest. Curious?  You can see some previous updates here and here.

The main event, a fashion show, is happening in Barrie, a town on a lake north of Toronto.  My brother lives there, so I think it is a neat opportunity to show my family (and my 2 year old niece) some fashion.  I’ve decided to model my own dress to keep the logistics simple. I am getting a hair cut from Greg May Hair just for the occasion, my first haircut since I resolved to grow my hair long. I plan on enjoying the modeling experience, it might be the last time I ever do it.

If you are in Barrie on June 12, you can come and see me walk the runway – a rare event. Check out the Ecofest Barrie site for more info.

When it comes to fashion design projects, like this one for the Trash Fusion contest in Barrie, I tend to resist beginning them.  The usual ennui – fear of how long it will take, fear that my idea which looks so great in my head will end up looking ridiculous once executed.  Then, once I get started, and I get into it, the project becomes more about delight – delight with discovery, excitement to see how it will turn out.  Until the end of the project, when usually it begins to feel like an obligation, a job I must see through to the end if only to make all of the hours I’ve already put in worthwhile.

The little a-line dress, sewn from some leftover, slightly stained muslin, a cheap acetate lining, and of course an invisible zipper and one of the 1000 “Final Fashion” labels I had woven up for my grad collection in 2006 (of which I have used about 20 so far).  I didn’t have to go shopping for any of these things, everything was in my stash, so hopefully they won’t disqualify my entry as being composed of “trash”.  I drafted the pattern from scratch, cut and sewed it in just a few hours.  It is just a canvas for the really tricky bit…

Applying, one by one, by hand, small plastic paillettes.  The paillettes are made from a variety of objects that my scissors and hole punch can snip and punch, again, one by one.  Above you can see food containers, old library cards, student cards, and metrocards, pieces of red plastic beer cups, and so on.  I’m not applying these in any particular order or colour palette, letting the pattern create itself of its own accord  – however to realize my vision, I have to cover the entire dress, front and back, with these little bits of things.  So, I am on a mission.

If you would like to donate your pieces of useless plastic, please get in touch!  I am truly excited with how this project is turning out – the pictures don’t do the texture of the paillettes justice – in person they move and make noise, and from far away look dynamic and pixelated, completely unlike trash, and up close they display little pictures and brand names, small treasures of found objects.

I am making a paillette dress out of re-used objects, and I’ll need a lot more plastic for this before I finish.  Which is why I thought I would put a call out there for anyone who wants to donate their useless plastic objects for a fashion design project.  These objects will be cut up into small rectangular paillettes, so the plastic needs to be that fairly flexible, easy-to-snip with scissors kind.  I am particularly looking for coloured plastics, and not clear plastic unless it is coloured.  Laminated paper doesn’t work.  Here’s what works:

• larger plastic containers (especially coloured ones), for instance, ginger ale bottles, yoghurt containers, old shampoo bottles, etc. etc.
• flat plastic cards and objects – i.e. old library cards, event passes, those stupid plastic gift cards for plastic surgeons, those flexible rulers that Telus gives away, scraps of acetate from old art projects, bits of old film, stuff with holograms on it !! etc. etc.

Got old plastic you can part with – especially downtown Toronto people? Or stuff that could easily be sent by mail?  Send me an email and we can figure out a way to get it to the studio.  Thank you!

How are Dr. Martens like hobbits?  Well, for their fiftieth anniversary, they give the best gifts.  In my case, I gratefully received a pair of zippered, patent red leather 16-holers.  At first, I was a bit intimidated by them, they were so… shiny, slick, snazzy.  When worn with black, they bordered on goth-y.  My current obsession is a mission to embrace colour.  To help me, I enlisted the aid of Ashley Rowe.

Ashley Rowe is a fashion designer whose Fall 2010 collection included a line of original, one-of-a-kind splattered T-shirts.  Each lovingly shot one by one with a watergun full of paint, they are a steal starting at $75. Its fun and spontaneous.  I asked her if it was possible to do boots, and she went for it!  I wanted something preppy-punk, so I asked for blue…

… and white.  I was literally making squeaks and groans with pleasure as Ashley splattered my boots.  So good! Love love love!

These are epic.

I’m wearing

• shirt – Attitude by SEARS
• jeans – Paper Denim & Cloth
• boots – !!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Thank you Dr. Martens, thank you Ashley Rowe!

BONUS GIF: big thank you to rock-it promotions for inviting me out to the Precious Metal Gala, my first perfect opportunity to rock the boots.  It was a fun night of activities for ladies, sponsored by Harley-Davidson with proceeds going to support Rethink Breast Cancer.  I had so much fun, I mostly forgot to take pictures, but I did manage to get three of me, improbably lifting an extremely heavy motorcycle.

After showing my rather unimpressive first year fashion school project as a way of showing my inauspicious beginnings, it occurred to me that I have never posted my second year eveningwear project, circa 2004, on the internet before.  Once again, if you’re landing on this site for the first time I want to assure you I went on to create much greater things.

My concept was pretty classic for a fashion student – a cinchy corset and a big poofy skirt, with inspiration from nature and flowers and a fairy-ish illustration to go with it.  The illustration has some awkwardness with the proportions – though in a way, the lack of finesse in the line quality and colouring is something that I wish I could recapture in my current style.

I’m pretty proud of these technicals – they’re very detailed even if they didn’t accurately reflect the final dress.

This is the final dress – and I take full responsibility for the lackluster styling and modelling (um, yeah, that’s me).  The dress is in need of a great big crinoline (which I did a much better job with in the Snow Queen project).  The part that did work out as planned was the corset – which featured an elasticized system which allowed it to fit on different sizes of model – a tactic I used because we weren’t allowed to fit our models for the year-end fashion show.

Fellow fashion school alumni – do you recall your first over-the-top eveningwear project?  What was it like?

Okay, if you’re just landing on this site now for the first time, I want to assure you that since this project was made I went on to do much more impressive things.

This is more of a treat for all of the fashion students who email me with questions, and aspiring fashion entrepreneurs who are curious about how I got started.  I often say that no one (with the exception of exceptional geniuses) starts out as a fashion rock star, and perhaps the best way to prove this is by showing you something.

I present to you… my first ever major fashion school project, circa 2002:

Yes – this is a linen-look polyester printed striped shirt, with purple polyester ruffle trim, princess seams, a V neck and matching hemline.  On a design level, I have no idea why I would make such arbitrary choices when it comes to fabrics, trims and design details.  This shirt takes ugly to a whole new level, which is why I won’t show you what it looks like on a body.

One thing that I am impressed with for a first effort is the level of finishing.  Seems I was an unusually finicky first year fashion student, and the seam allowances, serging and seams are all remarkably even and assured looking (though I do recall much unpicking and restitching). I also managed to match almost all of the stripes on the side seams, though the stripes don’t quite match anywhere else.  I also quite like the shaping of the facings.

One area where I had trouble was where the collar meets the center front.  It had not occurred to me in the patternmaking stage how I would deal with such a narrow breakpoint when I sewed it, and I had to jury-rig the finishing here with a small snap and some stitches to make the collar lie correctly.

The other thing I valiantly struggled with was fitting the required 2″ sleeve cap ease (according to the patternmaking textbook) into the armholes.  That I managed to somehow compress the inflexible polyester without a single pucker is a testament to many tries, and maybe a little bit of “cheating” when it came to trimming the seam allowance.

The other thing that amuses me now about this shirt is the effort I put into transferring all of the curves of the princess seam into the side panels, so that the front and back panels seams were straight lines along the grain.  The unintended (and in retrospect, funny) effect of such painstaking patternmaking is that the stripes on the fabric appear to create a bulging effect at the waist.

Your turn – do you have any tales of first year fashion projects?  Major bonus points from me to any blogger gutsy enough to post evidence of such early efforts.

Since I posted about the process, I have received a small tantalizing taste of the Snow Queen production photos.  This is dynamo Jacqueline Lopez in the costume Ray and I made. She played the title character and also co-wrote and produced this premiere production.  The small boy Kay, below, was played by a tremendous young actress Skye Nadon.  The photography is by the multi-talented Dianne Eastman.

15 designers, 17 paper dolls, over 60 items of clothing and accessories to play with.  This is the result of a rather involved project I gave to myself to commemorate the Spring 2010 collections shown in Toronto this October.

The resulting dolls are available in a book from Blurb for $42.95 USD. It was supposed to be available for Christmas but… it’s not unless you’re willing to pay for premium shipping.  So buy it for yourself!  If you can’t afford it, I’ve put together a mini-PDF booklet you can download for free, print off yourself and play with.  Full-size PDF files are also available for just $17.95.

You can buy a book. Or, you can win a book.  How?  Using the JPGs available here, I want you to dress a doll; use Photoshop or another program to help you do it.  The challenge is to use a model from one designer and clothing and accessories from at least two other designers.  The best mashed-up outfit wins a book.

Something like this: Brandon R Dwyer’s model with Jessica Jensen’s clutch and VAWK’s dress. I am sure you can do even better than that.

But that’s not all; I’d like to see you have some fun with it.  So I’ll also give away a few full-size PDFs to entries I think are particularly funny, or wicked, or clever.  Bonus points for photoshopping in some backgrounds and speech bubbles.  Go for it.  To qualify, post your entry on your blog or facebook profile with a link to this post – entries are due December 21st.

A while back I mentioned I was entering the Hermes tie design competition – where one of the rules was not to reveal the work, but since I am not a finalist I think its OK to show what I did now.

I decided to make a physical tie because I wanted to experiment with a heritage craft technique called “drawn threadwork”.  This method uses a somewhat coarsely woven fabric (here I used a 2-tone linen where the warp and weft are different colours).

My Oma had made some table linens using this technique so I went to visit her to learn it and spent a pleasant afternoon testing ideas on swatches with her.

What you do is carefully pick out warp and weft threads in the pattern of your choice, and then you stitch it down in various subtle patterns.  I spent hours and hours taking small, precise stitches to secure the drawn threads, a task I found enjoyable.  Detail work like this demands that you to both concentrate and yet you can also allow your mind to drift somewhat… it creates a pleasant mental state – sort of like knitting, which I am not as good at.

Now I was not surprised I wasn’t a finalist.  Sometimes as a designer I can be inspired by a technique and sometimes I can get trapped by it – in this case the fabric selection I needed to do the threadwork was too thick to create a useable tie – the knot on this thing (if you can knot it) is about the size of a man’s fist and would be way too much for any collar.  I’ve made my fair share of unwearable garments over the years – I would have to say this one is among my most favourite aesthetically.

Thank you to Eleni Nikoletsos for taking such lovely photos with her macro lens and generously allowing me to post them!  And thanks to Lisa Canning for introducing me to Eleni.  Click the pictures for (slightly) bigger views.