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.

New site

I have a new website and I'm so happy with it! bell-street.com will now take you to my shiny new homepage, where you can shop online, look at my portfolio or click through to this blog here.  The address is still the same, and the content is very much the same at the moment, but everything is just so much prettier. This is the kind of website I have been wanting for years! It's clean, professional, and it makes everything in my portfolio look so much better.

I built the site with Virb, which made everything really easy and fun. I realise this is going to sound like an informercial, but this isn't a sponsored post. I'm just really excited about my site! They've got lots of existing themes and templates, so if you're totally new to the process you can just drop your text & photos in and you're ready to go, or you can customise the design to get it exactly how you like it, like I did. You also get a 10-day free trial! That's plenty of time to get your site up and running to see if you like it.

The selling point with Virb was that they have recently partnered with Etsy - meaning that I could import my entire Etsy inventory onto the website, but still maintain the store through Etsy. Have a look - it looks like a beautiful, cleanly designed independent online store, but it uses Etsy's checkout process. The store on Etsy is unaffected. So I get a pretty store, with all the convenience and benefits of being an Etsy seller. You would not BELIEVE how happy this makes me! Well, maybe you would, considering I've just written two long paragraphs about a website!

Anyway, I'll stop rambling and let you have a look around the website. There's some new work in the 'Custom Made' section of my portfolio, I'll post more about that next week. Please have a look around and let my know if you find any broken links or anything that isn't working!

Billie

I started work on the new collection this week and I've been sharing some of the progress on Instagram. The collection will be called Billie and should be finished by mid May. I like to write a little story about the namesake of each collection to sort of set the mood and work out the inspiration, so here's Billie's story.

Billie lived in a small town by a big lake. The weather was beautiful every day and the houses were painted in pastel colours. Billie loved when the fair came to town every summer. Her favourite ride was the ferris wheel where she could watch all the people from above. She dreamed of opening up an ice cream shop in the main street with a fairground theme - she'd sell fairy floss, popcorn and toffee apples, and play the Beach Boys all year round.

There'll be lots of soft, sweet colours and plenty of print with a bit of sparkle too. I've been working on fabrics this morning, and I accidentally spilled highly concentrated yellow dye all over the kitchen bench. Because I'm hilarious and love puns, I tweeted that it was a 'dyesaster'. Ha! Hmm. Anyway I now have bright yellow hands, my kitchen smells like bleach and I have learned that fabric dye won't permanently stain marble bench tops, but it will try it's best. 

Follow me on instagram to keep updated with the progress of the collection!

Angie collection - finished!

I'm back! and I'm married!

More about that later.

For now I'm excited to say that I have "finished" the Angie collection. I say "finished" because I didn't end up producing as many pieces as originally planned. As I said in the previous post, I ended up going back to Australia early to attend a funeral and so I was away longer than I thought I would be. I didn't want to drag out this collection forever and fall behind, so I finished off the items I was working on and called it a day. Time to move on to the next collection!

I'm just in the process of adding the last few items to the Etsy store, it will all be there by the end of the week. I'll also have lots of wedding photos to show you on Friday!

Tonight, in an effort to make working from home feel like a normal job, my husband (!) and I are going out for after work drinks to celebrate finishing the collection. I think it's better than celebrating things alone in the studio with my mannequin.

New in store: Angie & Ayumi T-shirts

Remember I mentioned maybe calling the new collection 'Angie'? Well, this is Angie. Angie arrived in Tokyo with nothing but a sewing machine. She knew no-one and got lost frequently. One day she stumbled upon a textile workshop, filled with happy chattering girls dipping scrunched up fabric into indigo dye. Angie introduced herself to Ayumi, who immediately said 'Angie? from the Rolling Stones song?' and Angie knew they would be best friends.

These t-shirts were made from quick illustrations I did while teaching a fashion design class. I liked how the girls turned out, so we made them into a screen print and coloured in their dresses by hand. Each one is slightly different and they are very limited edition.

This is Ayumi, in her favourite rainbow dress.

She also likes to wear her blue polka dot dress.

Angie has a blue polka dot dress to match.

Get the girls from the etsy store!

Hmm... what can I show you?

I haven't had much to post lately, because I've been working on making my wedding dress (!) and I don't want to show any photos of that process until after the wedding! I've also been working on some bridesmaid dresses for someone else's wedding, so that's another project I don't want to share until it's all done. So... what can I show you?

My March 2013 collection rack is starting to fill up... don't worry, it's not ALL tie-dye. I just haven't finished the other stuff yet. I'm a little bit behind my original schedule, because I made those plans before I got engaged so didn't factor in the wedding dress! I think this collection will be called Angie. I'll be starting to list items in the Etsy store over the next few weeks.

This is my favourite piece so far. I've called it the Countess top because the neckline and flutter sleeves were inspired by a dress worn by Cora on Downton Abbey. I love that show!

Speaking of collections, I've got a bit of a moodboard going for the next one. The map was painted by my mum for our storybook inspired wedding invitations. I had already decided on the colours for the collection before I realised that the map fits in perfectly!

A couple more things from around the apartment:

I'm very much liking this corner of the living room. The whole room needs more plants and more books.

This world map, with black dots for places visited, has been on my wall in four different apartments now. I thought I'd fancy it up with some fairy lights.

It's been nice and cool in Manila lately, and raining on and off all day today. I realised that I can get a bit of a panorama shot by taking photos from different windows! The area we lived in Sydney was very residential so I'm still getting used to seeing so many buildings in every direction. It's never boring.

Hand dyed fabrics for new collection

Before I left Australia, I visited my mum and we had a fun day hand-dyeing lots of fabrics with different shibori or tie-dyed techniques. Most of these techniques involve folding, scrunching or rolling fabrics up and then dyeing them - so you never really see what the final design looks like until it's completely dried and ironed. I never got to see all of them together, so one of the first things I did when I got into our new apartment was iron all the fabrics and stick them up all over the walls of my work room. I love how they all look together!

I'll be using a lot of the fabrics for the next collection - as you can see the pieces are really small, so anything I make from them will be completely one-of-a-kind!

Can you see that little girl on a t-shirt in the corner? You'll see more of her soon!

Which one is your favourite?

Minimum Waste. Maximum Use.

Made this mini poster for myself to keep my design work for Bell Street focused. Sometimes it's hard to create when you're in charge of your own work (as The Oatmeal brilliantly explained here) - it's always easier to work to a brief. So this is my self-imposed brief for what Bell Street should be.

 

What does it all mean?

Modern, fashion-forward clothes with a strong sixties mod influence. My most popular keywords for people finding my website or Etsy store are 'mod' and 'sixties fashion'. It's a niche market, but it's a market I love. I can't remember where I heard this advice (probably in a guest lecture at uni) but to successfully work for yourself, you need to be obsessed with your work. I'm totally obsessed with sixties fashion, so I tie it into my work.
 

 

 I love doing formal and bridal for custom work, but for the label I need to focus on one thing. Bell Street  is a daywear label.

I really enjoy doing original, handmade fabrics and I thought I should incorporate them more into the label. This includes dye techniques, screen printing, stamping... and anything else I come up with!

I've written about zero-waste pattern making before (the short version - designing clothes so there are absolutely no scraps of fabric leftover). I think I'm a long way off doing completely zero-waste designs, but I am aiming for minimum waste. When I design a garment, I re-work the pattern over and over until there is as little waste as possible. This also means designing collections with more versatile fabrics that would work for a few different pieces.

I want you to love and use your Bell Street clothes! Minimum waste only goes part of the way in making clothing more ethical. If you're only going to wear it once, it wasn't worth the effort. I want to make clothes that people will wear over and over again. This is why I love making things reversible - whether it's back-to-front reversible (like this tee) to offer a different neckline, or inside out reversible (like this skirt) to offer different colour options. When I get an idea I like to look at it and think about how to make it more adaptable somehow - what can the wearer change to make this garment more versatile? Maximum use also means adding elements that make a garment more practical - like pockets! I love pockets.

What makes a piece of clothing seem 'useful' to you? For me it needs to be easy to care for, go with lots of things in my wardrobe, and of course have pockets!

Moodboard for March 2013

Thought I'd share my moodboard for my next collection. It's inspired by busy cities like Tokyo and will feature hand-dyed textiles in moody indigo and grey, with touches of citrus yellow. Geometric shapes and sharp angles balance out the watery look of the fabrics. It'll be a small transeasonal collection - a couple of dresses, some tops,  light outerwear, a couple of skirts and a cute pair of shorts. I'm aiming to have it all finished and in the shop by early March. I've got a lot of other projects to work on at the moment with settling into our new apartment (yes! we moved in on Saturday!), making my wedding dress (!) and a bit of custom work, so I'm giving myself plenty of time to get it all done. Now I just need to wait for my sewing machines & other equipment to arrive so I can really get started!

I should mention that the photos used above & their original sources can be found on my March 2013 Pinterest board.

New(ish) items in the shop!

I've been adding some random items to the shop lately. Most of them are from a sample collection I made a couple of years ago when I was applying for my business grant. I didn't end up producing any of them because I wanted to focus on bags at first, but I sold a few of the garments at my market stall last year. Then when I was packing up our apartment in Sydney, I decided to photograph the rest of the collection and add it to the shop. The prices are really reasonable, most items are around $15-$25 as they are just one-off samples.

SHOP NOW!

As all of these samples were made for a presentation, they are all an Australian size 10 (to fit an 87cm bust, 69cm waist and 99cm hips). Most of the garments, due to their shape or stretch fabric, have a bit of room in them. Check each individual item's page for measurements.

On the subject of measurements, which do you prefer/expect to see - a full measurement (ie. tape measure round the body) or a half measurement (garment measured lying flat). I can never decide... I used to do measurements lying flat but it gets confusing for people when it comes to things like stretch waistbands and measuring lengths and sleeves. This time I've done full measurements but that has its problems too - I need to make it clear that it's the garment measurement, not the measurements of the body it is designed to fit! It's all very tricky and I know measurements are really important to online shoppers... so what do you think? I'd really like your input.

Oh, and yes, I know Americans prefer inches. I usually provide both but I've been listing so many items lately I haven't got around to doing the conversion yet. In the meantime, use this.

Reversible Skirt featured in WILD FIRE Magazine

Just a quick note to share these photos of Bell Street's blue & green reversible skirt featured in WILD FIRE magazine. WILD FIRE is a free online Vegan, Fair-Trade, Fashion, Food & Wellbeing magazine based in Melbourne, Australia. It can be downloaded from kohiilove.com or viewed on their Facebook page.

I love the location and styling of the sixties-influenced shoot.

 

Want the skirt? get it here!

Only three more days until I fly to Manila... and life has been crazy. Planning a wedding, finishing a master's degree and organising an international move is a lot to do in one month. I'm ready for a bit of a rest!

New sample in store - Embellished denim shorts

I was photographing a bunch of samples to put into the etsy store when I came across these denim shorts I 'made' (as in, I shortened some jeans). I had always intended to embellish them somehow but never got around to it.

I grabbed some masking tape and went crazy...

...mixed up some gold paint (acrylic paint works well on denim)...

...painted over the masking tape...

...and peeled the tape off!

As with most samples I make, I immediately fell in love with them and decided to keep them for myself.

I then remembered that I'm moving to the Philippines in three weeks (!!!) and already have too many clothes, so into the store they went.

Get 'em here! and keep an eye out for more samples going into the store over the next week or too. 

Remember, you can follow Bell Street on facebook or twitter if you're cool like that.