Moodboard: Desert Sunset Collection

Good morning, mah dears!

I thought it'd be fun to show you the moodboard for the small collection of dresses I'm currently working on.  There are several stage to conceiving a piece, but it always starts with inspiration...a memory, a color, a beautiful nature scene. When I start sketching, I imagine the feelings I want a particular piece to evoke or how I want a woman to feel when she puts it on.  

I've been working at giving these dresses soft flow within structured silhouettes, using the graduated colors of a desert sunset or the stark contrasts in multi-toned rock layers.

Excuse my sketches.  I'm much better at sewing than drawing and obviously, my daughter's little pack of colored pencils is seriously lacking in sophisticated colors, but you get the idea.

None of these sketches are fully conceptualized, but they give me a springboard to jump off and provide some sort of reference when I'm actually manipulating the fabric and endless possibilities distract me from my original idea. Sometimes the fabric just doesn't manipulate as I'd like, so the dress design ends up looking different from the sketch. But that's really the awesome thing about design...there's no hard rule about how it must look--it's just pure creation.

Like everything, great design starts with an idea...but of course, the most inventive idea is nothing without execution.  I hope to introduce these fully-executed dresses to you by the end of the month!