I've been having myself some green dreams lately. The seed catalogues are starting to arrive in the mail, I saw Daisy's baby kick from inside her round belly, and I'm playing around with my spring collection sketches and beginning to work on some of the prototypes. The flavour I'm going for this year is 'Busy Backwoods Mama gets Gussied Up to go to Town'. Or something like that. The collection presents many layers to deal with the transition from spring to summer, practical pieces to stay comfortable and that girlish cute factor to feel presentable and authentic to your true stylish self.
I started off playing with the smock top. As you may already know about me; I love smocks! So practical yet flirty in a filthy kind of way. I got much inspiration from retro patterns from the fifties and will be contributing my own design features to them. To help me out on that front I scored me from Ebay this classic pattern making book:
Brand new from Amazon this book costs a pretty penny but it's apparently a must-have and the older edition seems to offer most of what's inside the new one for way less. One thing I bet the new one is lacking in:
These awesome eighties glamour girl sketches. The book is thick and super stuffed with this eighties vibe. Bonus! So I'm currently working on the smock and I'm using some less expensive material I found from a yard sale to act as a muslin.
That you see up there is a very rough beginning to get sizing and proportions figured out. The final garment is hopefully going to be constructed with hemp with maybe some floral cotton ala seventies pillow cases type fold up hem pockets. Us Backwood Mamas need us lots of them there pockets to pick up all them critters we come up across next to the moonshine jugs! At least we'll look cute doing such things.
