Custom Katastrophic Silk Chiffon Gown

I just finished an unusual project for myself- designing and sewing a formal gown for a client!  It's such a change from my normal design work of knitwear for every day, but it's interesting and exciting to get to use really rich and beautiful materials, like the silk chiffon and silk velvet I used in this project!  

Here are my sketches for the idea of the dress which I created after meeting with my client and looking at some pictures together of what she liked.  I first wanted to make sure I was a good fit for her as a designer.  Luckily I really liked her inspiration pics and it was easy for us to come up with something we both could get excited about.  You can see some variations, some of which I'd like to start as a jumping off point for other custom dresses:

I really love drawing and it's one of my strong points, so naturally in my design process I rely a lot on my drawings, which is where I make most of the design decisions.  This time since I haven't ever worked with this kind of fabric before I wasn't sure how the design would translate to the finish piece, so it was a bit of an experiment.

Mailing packages...

Mailing packages to Kitsch. Boutique!!  Contents: Black Mermaid Dresses, feather light mermaid tanks, and infinitely versatile summer wading skirts in black and moss! 

the wage and pricing dilemma...

There is a lot that goes into creating a selling clothing that most people don't see, and a lot of factors that I have really struggled with in trying to keep my brand affordable, but also ethically produced.  I wrote this post while going through the pricing process for my Autumn/Winter 2012 collection, and it brought up a lot of the fundamental ideas behind my business and why I am spending my life designing and selling clothing.
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This morning I'm trying to finish my sales packet to mail out to a few special boutiques I really love, and I'm having to finalize my pricing calculations. This is probably the most cringe-inducing part of the design and production process for me. I've kept track of how long it takes to cut and sew each design, and the yards of fabric and other notions for each, and I have to plug in the actual dollars into my formula to get the wholesale and retail prices. Here's the formula I use, and you get to have a special preview of my Fall 2012 collection because I'm going to use the numbers for my Charles dress in the picture above. It feels kind of revealing, but I have nothing to hide:

Why try?

I'm hitting the age where it's way too easy to kind of forget about the things you want to change in the world, and instead spend most of your energy just trying to keep things together: pay bills, buy nice clothes, rent movies so you don't get bored and sad at night, keep yourself and your belongings insured, think about buying a house, get new tires on the car, clean the house, cook good meals, maybe get a better paying job...

it's all crap. At least that's what I would have said 4 years ago when I was still in college.