Last week's project

I finally finished a scarf I've been working on for my husband's birthday.  He loves to tease me that I'm a knitwear designer but I've never made him anything.  I did make him a hat once to wear when he goes running but it turned out to be a little small.  He actually agreed that he'd wear a scarf if I made one (we'll see).  The scarf is based on a design by Martin Storey in Rowan Magazine 48.  I was intrigued by this chain design and wanted to learn how to do the stitch so that I could incorporate it into my own designs.  While I love the crazy length of the original version, I knew there was no way hubby would EVER be caught dead in public with a scarf that long so I altered the size a little.

Here's the original design from Rowan Magazine 48:

I love hugely textured knits and this magazine has a whole collection of luscious knitwear that sent my brain spinning with ways I could incorporate the stitches into my own designs.

Here's my shorter version of the Rowan scarf.

I found a gorgeous alpaca/cotton blend yarn (coincidentally Rowan alpaca cotton) in a lovely shade of blue to complement hubby's eyes.  I think'll I'll make myself a cowl with the leftover yarn now that I've got the stitch pattern memorized.

It's a fairly simple rib stitch pattern but the face side knit ribs are knit through the back loop which helps the rib stand up more from the background purl stitches.  The reverse side of the pattern uses a purl through the back loop on those same ribs to keep the pattern consistent.  Whenever I want a clean straight edge on something like a scarf, I always slip the first stitch according to the pattern either knitwise or purlwise and begin knitting with the next stitch.  This always makes a neat professional edge.  If you were to knit or purl the edge stitch according to the pattern, you end up with a row of bumps along the edge that clearly define it as a "homemade" instead of hand-knit.

This is a great pattern for someone who has knit and purl stitches down, has done a few knitting projects and is ready for a little more challenge.  You'll need at least four stitch holders and a row counter is crucial!  For the chain sections, you knit a series of ten stitches back and forth up to a certain number of rows and then twist them around each other before knitting across the entire row again.  This can be confusing at first but eventually starts to make sense.  The worst part of the pattern is the absurd number of ends that have to be woven in.  This scarf took me at least an hour and a half to weave in all of the ends before I was done.

I felt that the Rowan pattern's chain sequence was too close together so the next time I use this stitch pattern, I'll play around with the pattern to make the chain links longer.  I also would love to see how this looks using metallic yarns for the chains to make them stand out even more from the background.  The punk inspirations are endless!

Chanel - Haute Couture Spring Summer 2011 Full Fashion Show - High Quali...

I'm not usually a big fan of Chanel,  at least not the past several years worth of collections.  It's extremely conservative and is clearly designed for an older/elderly clientele.  The Spring/Summer 2011 season, however, made me fall right back in love.  This collections used 10 million beads!!!   After watching the show, I have to say, I'm shocked it was only 10 million.

Every summer, the school where I studied fashion design, offers special topics classes that are usually focused on a single technique such as corsetry, couture hand knitting, or costume design.  My last two summers in school, I was incredibly lucky enough to study tambour beadwork and embroidery from Bob Haven who has his masters certification from L'Atelier Lesage in Paris.  Bob is a professor of costume design in the theater department at the University of Kentucky and truly one of the sweetest human beings I've ever met.

If you don't know about L'Atelier Lesage, it's a special couture house (owned by Chanel but used by all of the Haute Couture houses) that does the beadwork and embroidery for all the couture and high end designers.  Every single bead and sequin is individually stitched onto the background fabric by master embroiderers in the atelier.  As you watch this video, keep that in mind!

I immediately became obsessed with tambour embroidery which is done using a teeny, tiny crochet hook called a Luneville hook, or tambour hook.  The fabric is tightly stretched on a frame (like a tambour drum) which is then set onto a stand that allows the embroiderer to have both hands free to do the embroidery.  The technique is not difficult but definitely takes a lot of practice to get good at.  After two semesters of this technique, I'm not bad at it but am in no way as good as the master craftswomen who created this work.

I will eventually, post some pictures of work that I've done using the tambour technique.  My dream is to figure out a way to combine my two favorite techniques, knitting and tambour.  Difficult but I know I can figure out a way to make it cool.

My favorite source of inspiration and creative energy.

One thing that I look forward to most every year is the day of Christian Dior's couture show.  John Galliano (a genius) is one of my favorite designers and never fails to inspire me with the breathtaking beauty and sheer genius of his work.  I'm truly in awe, as I am of Botticelli, Monet or any other artist.  Make no mistake about it, couture is art.  It just happens to be wearable, unlike the aforementioned artistic geniuses.  Whereas, your taste in art may help to portray you to people who visit your home or office, clothing allows you to show the world your personality.  Whether that's lumberjack shirts and old Levi's or conservative business suit or a couture ball gown that took 800 hours to complete, what you choose to wear immediately conveys how you perceive the world around you and how you want that world to perceive you.

But back to my favorite fashion god...  I love how he takes the incredible DNA of the venerable house built by Christian Dior and makes it relevant to today.  Yes, I'll never be able to afford it in my lifetime, nor will 99% of people on the planet but then neither will I ever own a Rembrandt or Monet.  Every time Paris fashion week rolls around, the one show I literally schedule my world around is Christian Dior.  Every season, I'm just awed by the beauty and incredible artistic talent of the team of designers, seamstresses and embroiderers who make this show happen.  Today, I just want to share some of the pictures that make my heart go pitter patter and make me love fashion.  His inspiration for this collection came from the illustrations of the artist Rene Gruau.  Gruau was a famous fashion illustrator who worked for many fashion magazines including Vogue, Harper's Bazaar, Madame Figaro, Marie Claire, Elle and Flair.  He also did illustrations for advertisements and haute couture houses like Christian Dior, Balenciaga, Givenchy, Schiaparelli and Lanvin.  His work was very fluid and he used graphic jolts of color to bring drama to his work.  Gruau worked as artistic director at the house of Dior and John Galliano used Gruau's sketches as his inspiration for this collection.  The drapes on the gowns represent the graphic lines of the sketches.  The ombre shading in the magenta suit below references the shading in Gruau's illustrations and the hat looks like a little pencil scratch on a piece of paper.


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Even the dark shading of a dart or a pleat from Gruau's original sketch, translated graphically on this grey dress with embroidered skirt.  The dresses are shaded on one side just like an illustration where the light is coming from above the model's right shoulder.


This is another ombre dress which is inspired by the way Gruau used shading in his illustrations.

For the complete collection, visit Style.com here:  http://www.style.com/fashionshows/review/S2011CTR-CDIOR

Welcome to the world of Prete Designs

Prete Designs has been a dream of mine since I was a little girl.  As a child I did every crafty thing I could get my hands on, crocheting, sewing, needlepoint, embroidery and a few others that I've long since forgotten.  I made clothes and costumes in junior high and high school and devoured fashion magazines, dreaming of the day when I could call myself a fashion designer.  Somewhere along the way, that dream got sidetracked a little.  My father felt that fashion design wasn't a stable career so he enrolled me in business school.  Following college, I got the obligatory job that turned into a career where I sometimes made very good money (sometimes, not so much) but endured crazy hours, incredibly rude people and slowly lost the energy for and love of all things crafty. Enter my husband.  He'd been suggesting for years that I sign up for a class at a local art school but I'd never seriously considered it (difficult so squeeze in with an 80 hour a week job and a family).  Finally, I found myself between jobs, burned out and ready to make some changes.  He called me up one afternoon and told me he'd signed me up for a tour of our local art school the next day.  I went for the tour and decided on the spot to enroll.  That was on a Friday and classes started on Monday.  Looking back, that does seem a bit crazy....  If I'd known then how difficult it would be, I never would have done it.  

Five years later, I finally graduated as the oldest student in my program.  I learned during school, that the creative work that I'd loved as a child was more important to me than I'd realized.  It feeds my soul and makes me a much happier person.  I've been graduated for a few months now.  My senior thesis collection still makes me nauseous to look at, not only because of the incredible amount of work and time that went into it but also because my original ideas were changed so much that the final project doesn't really have any of my initial vision.  I learned a valuable lesson from that, though.  I learned that it is critical for any creative person to know when to accept ideas and constructive criticism from others, and when to stand firm and tell them to go to hell.  In the end, when your name is attached to a work, you need to be proud of it.

My thesis collection ended up traveling to New Zealand to be part of the World of Wearable Art show in Wellington.  I'd never heard of WOW until halfway through my senior year, the director of our fashion school asked me to consider submitting my collection.  WOW is a juried competition that attracts artists and designers from around the world every year.  Instead of a fashion show, the "garments" are shown in a theatrical performance that's a cross between a Broadway show and Cirque du Soleil.  Everything from acrobats and clowns to traditional Maori chants and dances are included.  43,000 people see the show over it's ten day run (far more than ever would have seen it at my university's senior fashion show).  Following the run of the show, my garments then went to the WOW museum in Nelson, New Zealand where another 100,000 people will probably see it over the next year.  Kind of cool for something that still makes me nauseous ; ).

My goal this year is to start my own business.  Seeing how much my work was changed by instructors, made me realize that I need to have control of my creative process.  I also realized that the last five years of 20 plus hour days of working, needs to stop.  I want a life outside of work and to spend time with my family who've been incredible supportive of all this nonsense.  I hope that someone else out there might be inspired to make a major life change to do what they've always dreamed of.  I'd love to hear from you.

Don't worry, the rest of my posts wont be so long.  I just wanted to introduce myself and welcome you.  Hopefully, you'll check back often and watch as my business grows.