Start Up Kids Line

I’m in this to play

A dear friend of mine has started blogging again and this morning, THIS showed up in my inbox:

What is play and why do I care?

Here’s a part that really struck a cord with me (direct quote):

I have a choice about the attitude that I bring to my art, and that is what determines whether it is play or not. It also is what determines whether I’m available to the flow of inspiration.

If I let my art be about the result, it isn’t play. When I’m focused on the outcome, I’m out of the moment and not available to the spontaneous flow of inspiration that, for me, is a big part of play.

Those two paragraphs hit me like a ton of bricks – I’ve been WAY to focused on the result. I’ve been ignoring my own natural creative process. I blame a lot of it learning!

When I was first discovering that I had a talent for this whole baby clothing design thing, I literally let the fabric speak to me. I would get my hands on it and jumble it around on the table into interesting shapes, until a picture of the perfect little design would emerge in my mind. Then I decided I had a talent for this, a passion for this, I loved it. So I set about learning the process of fashion design and that’s where I chinked my creative process a bit.

The need for technical illustrations and pattern makers has made me sketch first. I don’t think that this is the most natural for me. The lack of fabric availability and minimums hasn’t helped either. I used to just grab any fabric that spoke to me off the shelves, now I have to purchase from suppliers and wait until trade shows – or until samples come in the mail- to see the fabrics.

The post at Reinvention Revolution made me remember how much I love to sit and get lost in creative fun, get my hands on the fabric, let it speak to me, dance for me. I need to get back to that. Doing it my way.

Take a moment to read the whole post at ReinventionRevolution.com, you won’t be sorry. Gorgeous collage and inspiring thoughts…

          

Add comment February 18th, 2009

Pattern grading gone wrong

I feel like I’ve been taken to the cleaners by a used car mechanic, only it was a pattern grader. The fit for the original sample size is great, it’s as the pattern gets bigger that it has problems. Mainly in the sleeve length. Everything else seems to be graded ok, but by the time the pattern gets up to a size 6x, the sleeves are almost 5 inches short.

This guy has since gone out of business, and thank goodness I only tried him out with one pattern. But it’s still a waste of money and time. It might have been a waste of money and time anyways because of course I want to change the pattern. Just call me never satisfied.

So why didn’t I notice the grading issue sooner? Mainly because we only produced two small sizes for the first production run.  At that point, the original size was a good fit and the sleeve issue on the one size up was, I guess, imperceptible. Now I want to produce another run w/ the larger sizes too and just happened to make a sample in my daughter’s size. It was as if the sleeves had shrunk, and I was shocked. I’m happy we didn’t have them made, especially considering I pretty much just assumed the grading was right on.

This really drove home for me how important it is to double-check everything and also how important it is to gain enough knowledge to know what you are double-checking. If anyone knows any tricks for verifying that a pattern has been graded correctly, can you share??

          

Add comment February 4th, 2009