I love working with seasonal flavours that are only available for very limited times, it helps me feel connected to the present. This recipe is inspired by the violets that grow wild all over my small property in mid-spring. The violet petals are plucked and steeped in hot water to extract their softly sweet, floral, and grassy flavour. It also turns the water a bold blue! I paired this flavour with a vanilla macaron shell for this recipe.
I want to live a more glamorous life. I want to slow down and lounge in luxurious nightgowns all day. I want to fill my house with flowers, freshly cut from my own garden. I want to read books, make art, drink tea and not always know what’s going on outside of my little community. I want to be hard to reach. I want to be mysterious.
Nightgown Sophster-Toaster
I wrote, earlier in the week, about my new design process. Basically, I’ve decided to no longer sacrifice anything for speed and efficiency, to keep the end cost down, and instead make all new clothing this year true to my vision. This means more sizes, more fabric, more interesting t-shirt inks, more everything. The second piece to come out of this year’s new philosophy is the new Margaret Dress and I’m absolutely in love with it.
I’ve also decided this year, to reduce my four seasons of annual new designs to two, alternating spring and fall one year with summer and winter the next, to spend more time focusing on each. I’ve been planning this spring season since Christmas but I just started sewing and making new print screens. I’ve felt so inspired, creative and charged with positive energy since I started bringing these new pieces to life a couple of weeks ago, that I feel like I’m blooming right along side the snowdrops in my front garden. I have one more skirt, one more dress, a t-shirt, a tank, and, for the first time, a children’s t-shirt in the works for spring, then it’s on to getting a jump-start on fall designs. I couldn’t be more excited for all the work the lies ahead of me.
Dress Sophster-Toaster
Shoes ModCloth
Ring old
Pepper’s Bandana Sophster-Toaster
All photos by me.
I’ll be doing things a little differently this year. Instead of trying to keep all of my new designs under a certain price point, and sacrificing exciting options and features to accomplish this, I’m going to make things the way I want and let them cost what they cost. With my first new skirt of the season, this meant doing things like using more fabric to make a fuller skirt, taking more time to line the skirt with lots of voluminous voile for a fuller, softer silhouette, and improving my patterns to include 2X and 3X as size options. In other years, I may have skipped the lining, or offered a more limited size range, to keep the cost of my materials and labour down when it came time to determine how much I need to charge for my work; this year, I’m doing things differently – and I’m so pleased with how this piece turned out!
Of course, all of my older designs will continue to be available at their original price points and I will still strive to make a variety of items that range from lovely, but labour intensive dresses to high quality, screen printed tees to the accessories that I make with fabric salvaged from the leftover scraps of those dresses. I hope that new and returning customers and admirers alike will see the benefits and the importance of this type of ethically minded, eco-friendly slow fashion and be there with me as I hope to make some of my best work yet!
T-shirt Sophster-Toaster
Skirt Sophster-Toaster
Shoes ModCloth
Necklace Craft Arts Market / Emery & Opal
Earrings old
All photos by me.
