Update! All patterns are now available in our Etsy shop! Happy Mothers’ Day! Can I just be a little bit sentimental for a minute? This is my second “official” mothers’ day (not counting the one when I was pregnant for … Continue reading
Update! All patterns are now available in our Etsy shop.
After eight months of behind the scenes work designing, testing, re-designing, re-testing, grading, illustrating, writing, re-re-testing and sample sewing, we are very, very proud to announce that Snapdragon Studios’ first collection is almost here! We will be releasing PDF patterns in the next couple of weeks, with print patterns to follow in June.
We’ve kept the collection under pretty tight wraps so far, so we’ve decided to introduce the collection over the next week as a series of sneak peeks. First up: the Summer Jazz Dress!
We designed this dress with long summer days in mind. It is fitted with elastic at the bust, so it has a pretty little fan gather and nips in at the empire waist while still being super comfy. The Summer Jazz Dress has pockets because every dress should have pockets. Right??
We’ve included instructions for making the Summer Jazz as a top and as a maxi in both knit and woven fabrics.
We named the Summer Jazz with warm nights and concerts on the green in mind, but so far I’ve worn it as a breezy about-town shirt in cotton lawn, an Easter dress (the Amy Butler maxi modeled by my sister above) and a bridesmaid dress in deep purple shantung and it worked like a charm for every occasion. Even better: although the design looks gorgeous on my petite friends, it also accomodates my not-so-petite baby bump. If you’re attending Quilt Market you’ll see me sporting the Summer Jazz pretty much every day in one form or another. Tutorial coming soon for making it into a maternity tunic! 🙂
The photoshoot was a riot. Here are some behind-the-scenes pictures, just for fun. I think Erin may have just said something smart here, what do you think?
Taco Dan’s let us try their chorizo tacos while we were there. We were forced to break the classic “no eating in costume” rule. Here’s Ellenor trying one out.
Ellenor and Esther are sisters, can you tell? 🙂
My cousin Kelly was our very first model. This picture was taken at the end of the day, after she’d already frozen half to death on a cold, rainy porch and been asked to walk down a street in the pouring rain under a holey, vintage umbrella. Oh, and this was two weeks before her wedding. Good sport doesn’t even begin to cover it.
She even volunteered to sacrifice herself to the velociraptor at Wilson’s so that everyone else could run for their lives.
So there you have it. Snapdragon Studios’ Summer Jazz Dress: good for all the occasions in your life from flower-shopping, band rehearsal, and taco-eating to velociraptor attacks.
*Many, many thanks to the incomparable Amy Schweizer for the beautiful photos, and to our friends Esther, Ellenor, Erin and Kelly for modelling for us on what the weatherman called “the ugliest day of the year.” Thanks also to Wilson’s Garden Center and Footloose Vintage/ Taco Dan’s for allowing us to shoot at their locations and to Meredith Needham for opening her home to us and allowing us to use her beautiful piano in our photos.
As Kim mentioned in her last post, we’re busy sewing up samples for Snapdragon Studios’ spring photoshoot, which will be taking place this Saturday, so I’m here with a sneak peek at some of the gorgeous, gorgeous fabric that is making its way through my sewing machine.
First up is Cocca by Kokka “Amu-Amu”, a 100% brushed tencel challis that I am pretty much dying over. The drape is absolutely gorgeous. The colors are brighter than in my photograph above – unfortunately most of my sewing happens during artificial lighting hours these days – but here’s a link to a better image. Unfortunately I haven’t been able to find this for sale online (I bought mine at Sew to Speak), but if you do come across it I promise it’s worth every penny. Love, love, love. I can’t wait to share the finished product with you!
Switching colorways entirely, I’m also working with Amy Butler’s new Hapi line and it’s making me hapi happy.
Aren’t the colors gorgeous? Again, they’re more vibrant in person than my not-quite-up-to-speed photography is showing (note to self: learn photo editing), but I’m really excited for this project, too. This is a quilting-weight voile in the Tapestry Rose Sapphire colorway that I bought at Sew to Speak, but it looks like Hawthorne Threads has it in stock. It’s fun working with the two very different fabrics at once: the challis is slinky and decadent while the voile has tons of body and is as perky as can be. (Working with the two at once is like I imagine being a manager for both Katherine Hepburn and Shirley Temple at the same time would be.)
Other fabrics upcoming but not pictured: Amy Butler’s Lark in Ivory Souvenir, a lucious Robert Kaufman linen/rayon blend in “leather” (sort of a wheaty-gold color) and a brown Robert Kaufman 21 wale corduroy (all of which I found at Sew to Speak). So much goodness on my cutting table right now.
Jack, bless his little cotton socks off, has been really patient while I’ve been sewing up a storm.
He occupies himself by taking every single book off his shelves…
Chasing the dog around the living room…
And toddling over to “supervise” as soon as I get the camera out. (Notice the havoc in the background of that picture? That’s Jack’s price for entertaining himself while I sew. C’est la vie.)
Just two more days until we have lovely, professional photos of our spring collection! Back to the studio!
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*Ok, so “studio day” is a little bit of a joke at my house. While Kim has a spare bedroom she was fortunate enough to be able to convert into a sewing studio, my entire house measures in at 484 square feet (if you measure from the outside corners), so my “studio” is also the living room, dining room, and office, while my cutting table is the kitchen table and my ironing board hangs off the bedroom door. It’s comical. But when I’m sewing, it still counts as a studio, right? Even if I have to clean off my “studio table” in order to feed my family dinner?
You thought I was going to go all Stephen Hawking on you for a minute there, didn’t you?
Don’t worry – the extent of my physics knowledge is a hazy recollection of the time travel explanation in Michael Crichton’s Timeline.
The time and space on my mind these days is much more terrestrial: my time, my space.
See, this week has been crazy. Last week was kind of crazy. For that matter, last month was pretty crazy, too. And when things get crazy for me the thing that goes first is any kind of balance of time and space.
(This picture has nothing whatsoever to do with what I’m writing about, but I like it a lot, so here it is. It’s one of Amy’s shots from the Snapdragon photoshoot last fall.)
I’m sure this is true for pretty much everyone, but I struggle with striking a good balance in my life between all of the commitments I take on, spending quality time with my family, keeping our home halfway decent and respecting the fact that I also need time to follow my own interests. Sometimes it feels like it might be asking too much, but as long as we’re dreaming, sleep would be fancy, too.
Paul tells me that I do too much. For example: this semester I’m teaching a class two days a week; working part-time at our local library the other three days a week; keeping up with church commitments; going to pilates two days a week so that I’m not just sitting around all the time like a bump on a log; starting a business (which currently means sewing samples of our upcoming patterns, organizing our testers, finally getting our website in shape to go live, arranging the photoshoots for the cover/ promo photos, wrapping up our logo and coordinating with our graphic designer for additional promotional materials, sending changes to our pattern grader and finalizing our patterns, learning how to PDF our designs for instant download, deciding on printers for our print patterns, blogging… I don’t know how people do this by themselves. There’s no way I would be doing any of it if it weren’t for Kim.); plus attempting to spend a reasonable amount of quality time with Paul; not to mention parenting a 16 month old (… God help me) and nurturing new life and all that sort of thing. Oh, and trying to keep up with the pet hair that the dog and cat shed incessantly.
It feels like a handful sometimes.
I really don’t mean for this to be a whiny post – I totally get that a lot of people are in this position and I’m not the first by a long shot. This is more of a reminder to myself to be kind. I’m done teaching at the end of April and we’re officially launching Snapdragon at Quilt Market in May. Until then there are going to be weeks that the laundry backs up and the dust bunnies roll through my house like tumbleweeds. There are going to be times (like tonight) when I wake up and can’t get back to sleep because of all the things rolling around my brain. There will be projects on the list that don’t get done before the new baby comes in July. It’s ok. Breathe. Focus on the important stuff.
The rest will come in time.
A few people have asked us why we chose snapdragons for our company name instead of something more sewing- or design-related. As it happens, there’s a story there.
When I was little, my grandparents had a nice garden. My grandfather was one of those people who could spit out a watermelon seed and it would grow, so I’m sure they had more than two crops in their garden, but the ones I remember are tomatoes and snapdragons. I didn’t appreciate the glories of a homegrown tomato at the time (I’ve since come around, don’t worry), but I did totally get the snapdragons.
I usually rode to my grandparents’ house with them after church on Sunday morning. Grandma would start a roast in the electric skillet in the morning and I remember it being perfect every single time, no matter if church ran late or Grandpa stayed afterward talking to people. I don’t know how she did it. Grandma magic, I guess.
When we pulled into their garage, which was at the bottom of their yard, Grandma would hurry up the walk into the house to make sure everything was ready before my parents got there, and, when the weather was nice, Grandpa and I would take our time looking around the yard, finding ways to get dirty in his garage or carport, talking to Mrs. Icobellis, the next-door neighbor, or, most importantly, making the snapdragons that always grew along the kitchen steps snap.
You knew that, right? That when you squeeze the bottom of a snapdragon flower it opens and closes its mouth like a dragon? It’s tremendously satisfying when you’re twenty-nine five years old.
I don’t know for how many years my grandparents grew snapdragons, or whether they were as special to them as they were to me, but I never see a snapdragon that doesn’t remind me of Sunday afternoons at Grandma and Grandpa’s house.
When Kim and I started talking about a name for our pattern company, I knew I wanted it to be something that resonated with the sense of care and craftsmanship that I was aware of even as I was growing up. I learned to sew from my mom, who learned from her mom. (Unfortunately, neither of us mastered the perfect-roast-in-an-electric-skillet trick, but you can’t have everything.) I love to garden, and my very first garden was the one my grandfather left when he passed away in my early twenties while my brother, our cousin and I were renting his house. My grandparents worked hard not just to provide for their family but to make a happy home, and even now that they have gone on that culture of work and pride and love is still going strong in our family.
I’m looking forward to passing that tradition down to my kiddos, too. That’s what snapdragons represent to me.
Snapdragon Studios 