Update - Samples & Cigarette Girls

It's been far too long since my last post so I wanted to check in and update you on what I've been up to since the awful day when I spilled water all over my laptop and killed the wi-fi (handy hint: don't do that).

In my last post I mentioned that I am taking Bell Street in a new direction, focusing on bridal and custom work rather than ready to wear collections. As a result most of my time lately has been spent on business planning, dreaming, designing and pattern making. I am currently working on some bridal samples and finished 'Maggie' (above) last week - she's very sweet.

As much as I want to focus on bridal, I also love doing costumes and will never say no to working with Rollergirl Promotions - those girls are too much fun! I made them these vintage style cigarette girl outfits for a corporate event and they looked amazing, as usual.

James and I recently went to Hong Kong for a quick break as it's less than two hours flight from Manila. We had a great time and loved the city, although we didn't get to see as much of it as we planned due to us both getting horrible sniffly colds. We didn't let it ruin our trip though, and hey - if you have to be sick in bed, better to be in a lovely hotel bed and have someone else clean your room each day!

I did manage to make it to Hong Kong's garment district, Sham Shui Po, and had a bit of a 'wahhh, why don't we live here?!' moment when I realised how easy it is to find and get everything you need. I got some beautiful ivory silk fabrics for bridal samples and stocked up on a whole lot of miscellaneous haberdashery (James' favourite word) that I haven't been able to find in Manila.

Manila is already in full Christmas mode, which I love! I'm in a very positive excited mood at the moment, because I have so many fun things to look forward to - and that's the key to happiness, according to my Mum (or a book that she read). In just over two weeks my awesome friend and bridesmaid extraordinaire, Jess, will be arriving in Manila with her sister and the three of us are going to an amazing beach resort called Secret Paradise. On the same day that they leave, my Mum and Dad are arriving! They're also keen to do some travel so we're heading back to Hong Kong (with a compulsory day at Disneyland) and then to Baguio which is a few hours north of Manila. It's safe to say I'm not going to get much work done in November. I'll be working furiously on a custom ball gown and more Rollergirl costumes in December, then it's back to Australia for Christmas and New Years - I can't wait!

New things

I've been really busy with custom jobs lately, and I'm absolutely loving it. I used to get really stressed about custom work being too time consuming and not leaving me any time to work on my collections. The solution should have been obvious, but it's taken me awhile to come around to it - why worry myself with producing seasonal collections when my income comes from a steady stream of custom work? Especially as I've been getting more and more bridal jobs, which I love doing.

So, things are going to change around here! I won't be designing regular collections anymore or producing ready-to-wear clothing. I'm dedicating myself completely to custom work - specifically to bridal. I love weddings and have a million ideas flying around my head for gorgeous vintage-style cocktail, bridesmaid and wedding dresses!

When I went shopping for my own dress (ok, we just went to play in the bridal shops - I was always going to make my own dress), there were really hardly any options with sleeves, nothing remotely 60s style, and when I mentioned the idea of a short dress I either got a condescending laugh or was shown mid-calf 'ballerina length' - cute, but mid calf is still long in my book! I want to fill that gap and make the dresses you can't find in the bridal stores. If you're dreaming about the perfect dress and it doesn't seem to exist in real life, I'll make it for you.

As you can see from these pictures, I don't just do bridal. I love variety and I'll make anything. But bridal is definitely the direction I'd like to move in and so that's what the website will be focused on. I'll still blog about cool sixties stuff and travel - because without those things I'd be posting even less than I do now - but the main website home page will be that of a bridal designer. Just wanted to explain everything so you don't turn up in a month's time and think you've ended up on the wrong page!

I'm SO excited about taking the business in a different direction and working towards a big goal. That black and pink notebook (above right) is my 'Bell Street Bridal' book and it is filling up fast with ideas, plans, sketches and scribbles. I'm having fun.

Abra & George's Sixties Wedding

I have had these photos on my portfolio page for awhile, but only just realised that I haven't blogged about them yet. I got an email from Abra at the end of last year asking about a dress in my shop. Turned out she was planning an amazing sixties mod wedding and needed some very colourful bridesmaid dresses. This was a project I was VERY interested in (sixties dresses? bright clashing colours? yes!) so I offered Abra a bunch of options and she gave me the job. Yay!

I love how the dresses look on the girls, and hey - doesn't this look like such a fun wedding? I mean, we had a bit of a sixties theme at our wedding, but it was mainly reflected in the music. Every detail of this wedding is just so mod and I'm so proud to have played a small part in the overall look. The day was captured perfectly by photographer Mary Elam.

I really like doing custom projects like this so if you're interested in getting something made, don't hesitate to contact me!

Studio space - Custom storage solutions

I love my studio space in Manila. Intended as the master bedroom, it's a lovely big room with lots of natural light, a balcony and plenty of storage space. I have everything I need to run my business set up so I'm ready to work every day. The only thing I didn't bring with me from my work room in Australia was the big cutting table that my dad and I made. Keeping in mind that we'll be moving again in two years, I bought a folding adjustable height table to serve as my cutting table while I'm here. It's the perfect height and it does the job fine, but it is a very limited space.

I found that a lot of the time, half the space on my table was taken up by whatever tools I was using - rulers, pencils, scissors etc. I needed somewhere to put all that stuff where it could still be within easy reach to use, but be off the table. I partly solved this problem by buying some small black shelves, which can be seen in the photo above. Those shelves hold small objects like pins, chalk, scissors, pattern notchers and other tools. To keep all of my pattern making rulers accessible but off the table, I made this custom shaped ruler-holder-thingy (good name huh?). It was a really quick easy project and you could make something similar to hold any sort of lightweight tools - kitchen stuff, art supplies, make up - anything you can think of.

If you want to make something like this, you'll need some clear plastic sheeting - the kind used to cover tables at outdoor cafes. I seem to always have some of this around because it was used so heavily in my grad collection, but it's really handy for other projects too! You can get it really cheaply at hardware shops or some of the bigger dollar stores/variety shops/whatever you want to call them. You'll also need a way to attach it to the wall. I ended up just stitching it to a wide coat hanger and hanging it from a jumbo sticky hook on the wall. Make sure the weight of your objects is evenly distributed or it'll hang on a wonky angle.

How to make it:

1. Arrange your objects how you'd like them and trace sections onto a piece of paper (or a bit of cheap fabric, if you don't have a large enough piece of paper handy). Think about how they'll fit into pockets and how you'll get them out - make sure at least 4-5cm of the object is sticking out the top of it's pocket so you can grab it easily.

2. Next, get two coloured pens - one for cutting lines, and one for sewing lines. Concentrate and think about which lines represent a pocket opening and which lines represent dividers or the bottom of a pocket.

3. Lay out two plastic sheets on top of each other - they'll kind of stick together, but that's ok. Make sure they're flat. Trace your cutting lines onto the top layer of plastic. If you use a whiteboard marker, you can just wipe it off after you've finished. Cut along the cutting lines (don't use fabric scissors!). Then trace the sewing lines. Put a few pins in to keep the layers in place, but not too many because they leave little holes in the plastic. The plastic actually sticks together so well that you don't need many pins at all.

4. Stitch along all of your sewing lines. Use big stitches and adjust the tension so they're not too loose. It can be a bit tricky to move around a big piece of plastic on a sewing machine, so this part will take some patience. Roll the plastic up and work one section at a time. Once you're finished, you can hang it up and move everything into it!

The Great Big Wedding Post

Our wedding was held three weeks ago at Victoria Park, Sydney. It's a beautiful big park just up the road from where we lived when we first met six years ago. We got engaged two months before moving to the Philippines, so I planned most of the wedding in that time. It was fun to plan and ended up being a fun, happy and relaxing day. All of the beautiful photos were taken by my brother, Mark. He's actually a pilot but he somehow finds time to also be a really great photographer. You can check out his flickr photos here.



I designed and printed our own invitations to look like old library books.



This is my bridesmaid, Jess, and I hanging out in a park (not the 'wedding park') before the wedding. I normally like being ready early and arrive places exactly on time, so this whole 'the bride is always late' thing was pretty frustrating to me. Of course she turns up last - she has to wait until everyone else is at the ceremony site and ready to go!



This little dog came to say hello while we were waiting. Note the pretty bouquets - Jess and I made our own. I love how they turned out! This is also a good point to mention my shoes. They were made by Golden Ponies, who I have raved about on here before - it is my absolute favourite brand of shoes to buy from. Thank you, Erandi, for making such cute, comfortable and affordable wedding shoes! Everyone was complimenting them.



...and we're off! Here's my dad and I walking down the aisle - well, across the park anyway.



Our gorgeous wedding spot. We 'planted' hundreds of fake flowers in the ground to create an 'aisle' and it looked amazing! The flowers, chairs and lots of other decorations all came from IKEA - I used to work there before I moved here.



We ended up with a perfect day, weather-wise, but there was just a bit of wind!



Discussing how to go about cutting the cake - this was deemed necessary after my brother's wedding last year. He and his wife tried to cut into the cake and discovered that the icing was very thick and completely solid, resulting in hilarious photos of him hacking into his wedding cake with a very determined look on his face!



A close up of our lovely book cake made by Glamour Cakes. It was so exciting when the cake arrived, the house just filled with the smell of sugar! It tasted amazing too. The chess piece cake toppers were partly inspired by our tradition of playing chess on holidays, and partly by me thinking 'hmmm, maybe we should have cake toppers... these will do!'
We had the cake and a champagne toast in the park after the wedding ceremony, like a nice afternoon picnic!



After mingling with our guests for awhile, we headed off to take photos around the park.



As I've mentioned before, I made my own dress. I'm so happy with how it turned out! My mum made my veil.





Jess and I were determined to play on the swing set in our pretty dresses. I love this photo with the boys holding our bouquets!



Walking down Glepe Point Rd to our reception at Sappho, a beautiful little second hand bookshop with a cafe & bar out the back. They serve tapas for dinner at night, and they created a delicious tapas menu for our reception that kept everyone very happy all night. I'm still thinking about all that good food!











Our 'guest book' was a library catalogue drawer with dividers that said things like 'Advice for a happy marriage', 'Good jokes', 'Things James should know about Ali'/'Things Ali should know about James' etc. People got really enthusiastic about filling out little index cards and filing them into categories, and they were hilarious to read the next day!



We did our dance to 'You Never Can Tell' by Chuck Berry, inspired of course by the twist scene with John Travolta and Uma Thurman in Pulp Fiction. This photo captures all the things I love about Sappho - books, plants, coloured lights, and crazy graffiti all over the walls.



Like any good party, everyone went home with a lolly bag. I may have taken two...

Portfolio update

Just wanted to let you know that in addition to redesigning the look of the blog (I hope you've noticed!), I've also updated and re-worked my portfolio page. I've still got some photos to add and edit, but at least it should all be a bit better organised now. All you need to do is select a category to look at some of my previous work!

     
                      Graduate Collection                                                      Custom Made

      
                      University Work                                                              Bell Street

I added a 'custom made' category to showcase some of the random jobs I do for customers, such as the Rollergirl costumes, custom raincoats, and a project I haven't really talked about much - Amy-Kate's wedding dress!

(photographer: Nick Li, Dreamlife Photography)

It was so much fun to work with that lovely lace and I'm really proud of how the dress turned out. She looked beautiful!

Rollergirl Promotions

I recently made four waitress costumes for Rollergirl Promotions - a great group of girls headed by Stacey Short who do roller waitressing and skating at corporate events. Stacey also runs Rollerfit classes and organises events like Roller Disco. Check out their website or their Facebook page to find out more! 

Stacey also does Artistic Rollerskating - here's a picture of her in the costume I made for her earlier in the year.