giving back

I was honored to be able to contribute several of my dresses to silent auctions for charity this past year. It is a very simple way for me to give back a little and I have found that it also allows me to meet many wonderful people that I would never have met otherwise!


My daughter's preschool held a silent auction for their scholarship fund in the fall and I recently made the dress for the winner.  With the winning bid, she was able to pick any style and size she wanted from my gallery. 


The dress started out as a classic oxford and I transformed it into the "Laura Ashley" dress on request. 

This dress was sized for a four year old (5T) and I literally used 95%+ of the shirt fabric to make this dress. (The shirt was only a men's medium.) It was certainly a challenge of means to make sure I had enough fabric to complete the dress and especially the long shoulder straps. Patterning each dress based on the specifics of each shirt is a true challenge and one of my favorite parts of the design process. 

little grey line and the tooth fairy

Although dress shirts are very common artifacts of clothing, there are still many components and variations with each shirt.  There are different types of collars, cuffs, pockets, button plackets, fabrics.... 

Each of these simple variations helps drive every design I create. They provide inspiration and, although they are subtle, they are critical to making each and every dress unique. 

Today I thought I would try to make something unique and new with one of the shirts in my stash and decided to transform this particular shirt into a pillow and celebrate the pocket. 

My daughter isn't quite ready for a visit from the Tooth Fairy (she's only three), but I think this will make a really cute "tooth fairy pillow" when the time comes!